Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News

Astronomers have confirmed the youngest planet ever found - Elias 2-24 b, less than a million years old, sitting inside a gap it is carving in its own birth disc 450 light-years away. Plus: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter finds a 222-metre crater that was not there in 2024, a 178-year-old space weather record gets corrected by seven years, and Sakurai's Object - a star that came back from the dead - has become six times hotter in thirty years.

SOURCES Newfound 'Baby' Planet Smashes Record for Youngest Known World NASA Science, 16 September 2026  -  https://science.nasa.gov/universe/newfound-baby-planet-smashes-record-for-youngest-known-world/ Elias 2-24 b discovery paper Bernardi, Cieza et al., The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 16 September 2026, DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/ae9bb6  -  https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ae9bb6 ALMA Observations of Elias 2-24: A Protoplanetary Disk with Multiple Gaps (background) Cieza et al., ApJL 851 L23, 2017, DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/aa9b7b  -  https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/aa9b7b NASA's Moon Orbiter Spots New, 'Once-in-Century' Moon Crater NASA Science, 16 September 2026  -  https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-moon-orbiter-spots-new-once-in-century-moon-crater/ New 222-metre lunar crater - mission release W. M. Keck / Intuitive Machines / NASA LROC, 16 September 2026; two papers in Science Advances (Robinson et al., morphology and ejecta; Powell et al., Diviner thermal signature)  -  https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nasas-lunar-reconnaissance-orbiter-discovers-a-new-222-m-diameter-lunar-crater-302880555.html Mystery of one of the earliest recorded space weather impacts solved Lancaster University / RMIT University, 16 September 2026; Wild, Carter, Hapgood et al., Space Weather (AGU), DOI 10.1029/2026SW005239  -  https://doi.org/10.1029/2026SW005239 'Born-again' star offers rare chance to watch stellar evolution in real time The University of Manchester, 16 September 2026; Zijlstra, van Hoof et al., 'The emergence of a [WC] star in Sakurai's object', MNRAS, DOI 10.1093/mnras/stag1533  -  https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stag1533 Cargo Mission and Crew-13 Updates; Station Research, Maintenance Continue NASA Space Station Blog, 16 September 2026  -  https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2026/09/16/cargo-mission-and-crew-13-updates-station-research-maintenance-continue/ International Observe the Moon Night 2026 NASA, Saturday 19 September 2026  -  https://science.nasa.gov/moon/observe-the-moon-night/overview Skywatch ephemerides Computed in-session with PyEphem for Sydney, Los Angeles, New York and London, 17-18 September 2026

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An Australian-led team has rebuilt thirty years of supernova observations into one consistent catalogue — and it adds fresh weight to the idea that dark energy is not constant. We also ask whether the young Sun swallowed a super-Earth, find out why a quiet Sun is bad news at thirty-five thousand feet, and watch JWST run the most sensitive exomoon search ever attempted. Plus a Crew-13 update and a skywatch with a live aurora alert for both hemispheres. In this episode ·         Two thousand, eight hundred and eighty-four Type Ia supernovae, rebuilt from Pantheon+ and the Dark Energy Survey's full five-year sample into a single internally consistent catalogue by Ryan Camilleri and Professor Tamara Davis at the University of Queensland, with ANU, Swinburne and international colleagues. ·         On their own the supernovae give a matter density of 0.310 for flat ΛCDM. Combined with the CMB and baryon acoustic oscillations, a tension appears under constant dark energy — and eases when dark energy is allowed to evolve. Preference: 2.5–3.1 sigma. ·         Why that is interesting but not a discovery, and why a second independent line of evidence pointing the same way as DESI changes the shape of the argument. ·         Professor Mutlu Yildiz (Ege University) on whether the young Sun engulfed a planet of 5–10 Earth masses — and whether that single event explains both the solar sound-speed discrepancy and the Sun's missing lithium. ·         Yaniv, Yair and Price on six balloon flights to 35 km: cosmic radiation at cruising altitude runs 40–60% higher at solar minimum, with an anticorrelation of r = −0.71 against solar activity. ·         David Kipping stacks twelve JWST transits of LP 890-9c and excludes moons down to 0.1 Earth radii across the entire Hill region — the most sensitive exomoon search on record. ·         Crew-13 now targeting no earlier than late September after an oxidiser leak in Dragon's propulsion system. ·         Skywatch: a coronal-hole stream arriving today with aurora chances at both ends of the planet, Venus at greatest brilliancy on 18 September, Mars past Pollux, Saturn towards opposition, International Observe the Moon Night on the 19th, and the equinox on the 22nd. Sources ·         University of Queensland — 'Big supernova dataset challenges dark energy theory', 8 September 2026 ·         Camilleri, Lee, Davis, Rubin, Shah, Scolnic, Lidman et al., 'Supernovae Unite: Combining Pantheon+ and DES-SN5YR', Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia — arXiv:2609.05053; companion host-mass paper arXiv:2609.05321 ·         Royal Astronomical Society — ''Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet', 10 September 2026. Yildiz, MNRAS, DOI 10.1093/mnras/stag1527 ·         Yaniv, Yair & Price, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, September 2026 — cosmic radiation at aviation altitudes across the solar cycle ·         Kipping, 'JWST Excludes Exomoons Down to 0.1 Earth Radii Around a Rocky, Temperate Exoplanet', arXiv:2609.05301, 4 September 2026 ·         NASA Space Station blog — 'NASA, SpaceX Adjust Crew-13 Launch Date', 29 August 2026; Canadian Space Agency update, September 2026 ·         EarthSky sun news and NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center outlooks, 12–14 September 2026 ·         NASA Science — 'What's Up: September 2026 Skywatching Tips'

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Today's episode — S05E191, Friday September 11, 2026: Main story: A population-synthesis study published in Nature Astronomy on 10 September argues that magnetars make up roughly half of all neutron stars, not the one-in-a-hundred implied by the catalogues. Celsa Pardo-Araujo and Nanda Rea (Institute of Space Sciences, ICE-CSIC, Barcelona) with Michele Ronchi (ASTRON) and Vanessa Graber (Royal Holloway) modelled the whole isolated-neutron-star population as one family rather than four separate classes, evolving spin-down, magneto-thermal decay and Galactic dynamics together, then filtering the simulated population the way real surveys filter the sky. Of the 24 known neutron stars younger than 2,000 years, magnetars and central compact objects are about 59%; the derived birth fraction averages ~50% (40–70% or 30–50% depending on the assumed birth-field distribution, which peaks at 1–2.5 × 10^14 gauss). Two consequences: the Galactic core-collapse supernova rate has to be higher than assumed, around two per century, and magnetar central-engine models for superluminous supernovae, gamma-ray burst plateaus and fast radio bursts finally have the supply to work. Caveats: it is a model rather than a census, the anchor sample is 24 objects, and 'magnetar' is defined by a field threshold. Southern thread: the field began with SGR 0526−66 in the Large Magellanic Cloud on 5 March 1979, and the same Barcelona group modelled GLEAM-X J162759, found with the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia. The rest of the news: ·         Chariklo's rings: The first stellar occultation ever planned specifically for JWST — 18 October 2022 — has been published in Science Advances, led by Yücel Kılıç, Pablo Santos-Sanz and Celia Navas (IAA-CSIC) with Nicolas Rambaux, Bruno Sicardy and Josselin Desmars (LTE) and Damya Souami (LIRA). Against the 2017 ground-based occultations, the inner ring C1R is about 50% more opaque and the outer ring C2R about 60% less, with the ring positions unchanged. Chariklo is the largest known centaur at ~125 km radius; the rings sit at 390 and 405 km and are a few km wide. Candidate explanations: material loss from C2R, material arriving at or collisions grinding down C1R — or a wavelength effect, since infrared is being compared with visible light. The rings were discovered in 2013 by an occultation campaign across Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. ·         Mercury under bombardment: Kilpua et al. report in Nature Astronomy (8 September) that BepiColombo's fourth Mercury flyby in September 2024 — 165 km above the surface, closer than its eventual science orbit — coincided with a major solar particle eruption. The Finnish-built SIXS instrument watched energetic electrons and protons penetrate Mercury's magnetosphere and precipitate onto the surface over a wide area. That bombardment both sputters atoms off the surface and drives the X-ray fluorescence used to read its composition, and Mercury's small, weak magnetosphere makes it a stand-in for Earth during an extreme solar storm. The spacecraft separated its transfer module on 3 September; gravity capture is 21 November. ·         Europe buys a way home: ESA has awarded The Exploration Company a contract worth up to €760M under ALADDIN (Autonomous LEO Accelerated Demo Docking to ISS Node) — €310M for the demonstration mission, with ESA funding 60% and the company 40%, plus €450M in options for two further flights. The Nyx capsule flies on Ariane 6 and must dock with the ISS no later than Q2 2029, with up to €50M in additional incentive for using European launch vehicles. Europe has flown cargo up before, with the five ATVs, but has never returned anything from orbit. CEO Hélène Huby: 'It is the first time in Europe that a five-year-old space startup wins a contract worth hundreds of millions of euros.' The company's Mission Possible capsule survived reentry in June 2025 but was lost before splashdown — a partial success in its own words. Thales Alenia Space...

Today's episode — S05E190, Thursday September 10, 2026: Main story: 109 fast radio bursts have been used to measure how much galactic feedback has smoothed out the matter in the universe. A fast radio burst lasts about a millisecond, and on its way to us it is dispersed — low radio frequencies slowed more than high ones by free electrons along the path, exactly the way a prism separates white light. The size of that delay counts the ordinary matter the burst passed through. Writing in Nature Astronomy on 8 September, a team led by Kritti Sharma at Caltech, with Vikram Ravi, Liam Connor and Elisabeth Krause (University of Arizona), used 109 bursts localised to host galaxies out to redshift ~0.3 — most of them from Caltech's DSA-110 — to constrain the suppression of matter clustering by feedback, and the gas fractions of groups and clusters between 10^13 and 10^15 solar masses. They find more gas retained than the X-ray picture implies: gas fractions about 1.9σ above stacked eROSITA measurements, and slightly above the Atacama Cosmology Telescope's kSZ constraints, consistent with the bursts counting cool gas that X-rays miss. The constraint is already competitive with both of those far larger experiments, cutting the uncertainty on clustering at these scales by roughly a factor of eight. That matters because feedback is the confound sitting under the S8 tension — it mimics the signature of massive neutrinos and of some dark energy and dark matter models. The technique's foundation is Australian: the Macquart relation, established with ASKAP in Western Australia in 2020, is what found the universe's missing ordinary matter in the first place. The rest of the news: ·         Hypersoft X-ray sources: NASA and the Chandra X-ray Center announced a new class of object on 9 September — 84 sources across six galaxies (M31, M101 and four ellipticals) that emit more than eight times as many photons below 0.3 keV as just above it, exceeding 10^38 erg/s in that narrow band and more again in the extreme ultraviolet. Led by Mustafa Muhibullah (University of Alabama) with Jimmy Irwin and Rosanne Di Stefano (CfA), published in Nature Astronomy. They are likely compact objects accreting from companions, and may be both the long-sought progenitors of Type Ia supernovae and a significant unaccounted source of ionising radiation. ·         A rendezvous with Halley's Comet: a trajectory study circulated on 6 September by Roberto Flores and Elena Fantino (Khalifa University), Mauro Pontani (Sapienza), and Ivano Bertini and Cesare Barbieri (Padua) sets out the first Halley rendezvous achievable with proven hardware — unpowered Jupiter and Saturn gravity assists plus deep-space low-thrust arcs, a Hall-effect thruster on a standard RTG, ~2,000 kg launch mass with ~750 kg of instruments, launching August 2036 or September 2037 and arriving in 2060, about a year before Halley's 2061 perihelion. Months alongside the comet instead of Giotto's minutes at 68 km/s. ·         Apollo Maneuvers 2026: US Space Command announced on 8 September that it had completed the first live-fly orbital manoeuvre exercise of its kind, moving real operational satellites across low, medium and geosynchronous orbits with Operation Olympic Defender allies (Australia among them) and commercial operators via its Commercial Integration Cell. Named for the US Army's 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers. The practical consequence is more unpredictable objects in an already crowded region, and in-orbit refuelling becoming load-bearing. ·         Skywatch: New Moon on 11 September at 14:27 AEST (04:27 UTC) makes tonight and tomorrow the darkest nights of the month. Southern Hemisphere — the galactic core still high after dark, and Venus well placed low in the west-south-west, 7.4° from Spica and building to greatest brilliancy on 18 September at magnitude −4.8. Saturn rises about an hour after sunset for everyone, heading for its 4 October opposition with the rings about 7° from edge-on. North...

Everything beyond Neptune is a leftover. The icy bodies of the Kuiper Belt never got assembled into a planet, and out there — dark, cold and empty enough that things mostly leave each other alone — they are the closest thing we have to the original building blocks of the solar system, still sitting roughly where they were made. The trouble is that everything we know about them, we learned from the big ones. Ground-based telescopes stop at around twenty-five kilometres. In two papers published on 8 September in The Astronomical Journal, teams using Hubble and Webb simultaneously — one telescope in visible light, one in the infrared, on the same field at the same moment — report twenty-seven previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects, the faintest ever directly detected. The smallest is about five kilometres across. NASA's own description of the faintest of them: the equivalent of standing on Earth and picking out a small swarm of fireflies on the Moon. The surprise is the colours. Objects that small are assumed to be collision fragments, and a fragment should be showing us the fresh ice under the irradiated red rind — so the small population should look bluer and messier than the large one. It doesn't. Led by Anastasia Morgan at Northern Arizona University, the colour study finds the small objects carry the same colour relationship as their large counterparts, in both the dynamically cold population that formed in place and the dynamically hot population that was flung outward during the giant planets' migration. David Trilling: these hot objects 'retain a signature of where they were born, even though they've been orbitally scrambled since then.' The companion size-distribution study, led by Marielle Eduardo at the University of Victoria, finds the same size distribution in both populations despite their different birthplaces. Together the two results point away from small TNOs being rubble and towards planetesimals that formed quickly, at large sizes — the picture Arrokoth gave us up close in 2019. Then: Anak Krakatau. The Sunda Strait volcano went into a major explosive phase on 5 September that ran more than twenty-four hours, throwing ash to 15,000 metres — 50,000 feet — to the west. Eight airports closed across Java and Sumatra, 2,961 flights grounded, around 170,000 travellers stranded. NASA's Earth Observatory published Landsat 8 and Suomi NPP imagery on 9 September. The whole warning chain runs through orbit: geostationary Himawari-9 imaging the full disc every ten minutes, feeding the Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre run by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology — because ash doesn't show up on aircraft weather radar, and the only warning a crew gets comes up from the ground. ESA closed out the 26-year Cluster mission by flying its last two satellites, Samba and Tango, into the atmosphere over the South Pacific near Tonga on 31 August and 1 September — deliberately, and precisely enough that a chartered business jet carrying thirty instruments could be underneath them. The ROSIE campaign, led by Jiří Šilha of Astros Solutions, got about fifty seconds on each spacecraft, measuring not the light show but the chemistry: titanium, sodium, potassium and aluminium, and specifically aluminium oxide, whose effect on ozone at those altitudes is a genuinely open question as constellations scale. ESA's Draco mission in 2027 will record the same process from the inside. And a study from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics and released on 4 September, finds that Messier 74 — the Phantom Galaxy — is more than twice the size the catalogues give it. Deep imaging with a one-metre telescope, about ten times deeper than Sloan, traces a disc of young stars out to roughly 100,000 light years against a catalogued 45,000. Mean age in that outer region: 640 million years. The likely cause is a close pass by the neighbouring galaxy UGC 1176 about a billion years ago. Skywatch covers both...

For fifty years the story has been that the Moon assembled slowly out of a disc of debris. New simulations from Southwest Research Institute add one thing everybody left out — the strength of rock — and get an intact Moon in about five hours. Plus eight black holes that outgrew their galaxies, two massive stars that fell past each other and got caught, Dragonfly's Titan landing site gets a name, and today's daylight occultation of Jupiter.

Links & sources Southwest Research Institute — SwRI-led modeling identifies new scenarios for Moon formation — https://www.swri.org/newsroom/press-releases/swri-led-modeling-identifies-new-scenarios-moon-formation Denton, Canup, Asphaug et al. — The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI) — https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ae91e9 Space.com — Earth's moon could have formed in just 5 hours after giant impact — https://www.space.com/astronomy/moon/earths-moon-could-have-formed-in-just-5-hours-after-giant-impact Buchner et al. — A large population of overmassive black hole quasars at z=0.3–0.8 revealed by eROSITA, A&A 713, A11 — https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2026/09/aa59356-26/aa59356-26.html Astronomy & Astrophysics — 2026 press releases — https://www.aanda.org/2026-press-releases Zhang, Garay et al. — An eccentric massive protobinary assembled via a core-merger parabolic encounter, Nature Astronomy — https://www.nature.com/natastron/articles?year=2026 Universidad de Chile coverage of the IRAS 07299-1651 result — https://www.radiofestival.cl/la-danza-nupcial-de-estrellas-masivas-astronomo-de-la-universidad-de-chile-participa-de-historico-hallazgo/ NASA / APL — Dragonfly Gets Wired Up While Titan Landing Area Is Named — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/dragonfly/2026/09/02/nasas-dragonfly-gets-wired-up-while-titan-landing-area-is-named/ Sky & Telescope — Tuesday's daytime Jupiter occultation, a warm-up for the 'big one' — https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/tuesdays-daytime-jupiter-occultation-a-warm-up-for-the-big-one/ Universe Today — September's lunar occultations: circumstances and visibility — https://www.universetoday.com/articles/penultimate-lunar-occultations-inbound-for-jupiter-venus-and-more-in-september NASA — What's Up: September 2026 skywatching tips — https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/whats-up-september-2026-skywatching-tips-from-nasa/ EarthSky — Visible planets and night sky guide for September — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/visible-planets-tonight-mars-jupiter-venus-saturn-mercury/

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A German rocket lifted off from an Arctic island on Saturday and became the first vehicle ever to reach orbit from Western European soil. Plus: the gaps in stellar streams may not be dark matter after all, two white dwarfs circling every 374 seconds in the far southern sky, peptides that fold in concentrated sulfuric acid, and what Katalyst's LINK is actually doing next to Swift. Both-hemispheres skywatch, and a serious safety warning for tomorrow's daylight Jupiter occultation.

Links & sources ·         Isar Aerospace — mission updates — https://isaraerospace.com/mission-updates-overview ·         ESA — Spectrum launches to orbit (imagery) — https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2026/09/Spectrum_launches_to_orbit ·         NASASpaceflight — Isar 'Onward and Upward' — https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2026/09/isar-onward-and-upward/ ·         Space.com — Private German rocket makes history — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/isar-aerospace-second-launch-norway-andoya-spaceport-spectrum-rocket ·         Space.com — Gilmour Space eyes a second orbital attempt — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/australias-gilmour-space-not-going-to-give-up-as-it-eyes-2nd-orbital-launch-attempt-in-2026 ·         Sky & Telescope — Gaps in stellar streams may be common — https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/gaps-in-stellar-streams-common-not-sign-dark-matter/ ·         Arora et al. — Semianalytic modeling of subhalo encounters with thin stellar streams, ApJ — https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adf740 ·         Sharma et al. — Rapid orbital decay in eRASSU J060839.5−704014 (arXiv) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09341 ·         Maitra et al. — eRASSU J060839.5−704014 discovery paper, A&A (2024) — https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/ref/2024/03/aa47811-23/aa47811-23.html ·         MIT News — Peptides can form well-defined structures in Venus-like conditions — https://news.mit.edu/2026/study-peptides-can-form-well-defined-structures-harsh-venus-conditions-0831 ·         NASA Swift blog — Commercial spacecraft for Swift boost continues tech demo — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/2026/09/04/commercial-spacecraft-for-nasas-swift-boost-continues-tech-demo/ ·         NASA Swift blog — LINK spacecraft recovery progressing — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/2026/08/06/link-spacecraft-recovery-progressing-for-nasas-swift-boost/ ·         EarthSky — Saturn at opposition, 4 October 2026 — https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/saturn-at-opposition-closest-brightest-best/ ·         Star Walk — Astronomical events, September 2026 — https://starwalk.space/en/news/night-sky-tonight-september

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Anna and Avery open the Weekend Wrap with a genuine first: South Africa's MeerKAT has detected the 21-centimetre hydrogen signal from four to five billion light years away using radio data alone — no optical galaxy survey propping it up — proving out the technique the Square Kilometre Array will use to measure dark energy. Then the week in review: Roman's coronagraph wakes up, Starship Flight 14 gets a date, Mars turns out to be lopsided inside, BepiColombo lets go, LZ's one unexplained flash, and a centaur caught in the act of becoming a comet. Plus the sky for the week ahead, both hemispheres.

Links & sources ·         University of Manchester — Astronomers use MeerKAT to directly detect faint hydrogen signal from the distant Universe — https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/astronomers-use-meerkat-to-directly-detect-faint-hydrogen-signal-from-the-distant-universe ·         The Astrophysical Journal Letters — Paul, Wolz, Santos, Chen et al. (paper DOI) — https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ae808f ·         American Astronomical Society — release listing — https://aas.org/node/730547 ·         Phys.org — MeerKAT directly detects faint hydrogen signal from the distant universe — https://phys.org/news/2026-09-meerkat-faint-hydrogen-distant-universe.html ·         Space.com — Scientists detect signals of hydrogen from billions of years ago — https://www.space.com/astronomy/galaxies/scientists-detect-signals-of-hydrogen-from-billions-of-years-ago-could-this-help-us-map-out-the-universe ·         Xinhua — MeerKAT in South Africa directly detects faint hydrogen signal from distant universe — https://english.news.cn/africa/20260905/3f6c7164a4404b0a9b79f879b1d31a59/c.html ·         SKA Observatory — the construction journey (SKA-Mid, Karoo; SKA-Low, Murchison) — https://www.skao.int/en/explore/construction-journey ·         NASA Science — Roman's planet imager has powered on (1 September 2026) — https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman/2026/09/01/nasa-romans-planet-imager-has-powered-on/ ·         NASA — NASA's dark universe-seeking Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches — https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-dark-universe-seeking-nancy-grace-roman-space-telescope-launches/ ·         Next Spaceflight — Starship Flight 14 (NET 15 September 2026, Pad 2, Starbase) — https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/8346/ ·         Tesla Oracle — FCC filing points to Starship Flight 14 on 15 September; Booster 21 33-engine static fire — https://www.teslaoracle.com/2026/09/02/fcc-filing-reveals-starship-flight-14-launch-on-september-15-spacex-conducts-33-engine-static-fire-on-booster-21/ ·         Nature — Tidal tomography reveals a thermal anomaly beneath Mars's crustal dichotomy (27 August 2026) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10893-x ·         Phys.org — Thermal anomaly discovered below Mars' south pole — https://phys.org/news/2026-08-thermal-anomaly-mars-south-pole.html ·         ESA — Latest updates: BepiColombo's arrival at Mercury — https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiColombo/Latest_updates_BepiColombo_s_arrival_at_Mercury ·         ESA — BepiColombo's Mercury arrival begins (full replay) — https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2026/09/BepiColombo_s_Mercury_arrival_begins_-_full_replay ·         Brown University — LZ experiment sees surprising result in search for dark matter — https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-09-01/lz-dark-matter-results ·         The LZ Dark Matter Experiment — collaboration site — https://lz.lbl.gov/ ·         ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics — Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory — https://www.centredarkmatter.org/supl ·         University of Central Florida — UCF researchers study a centaur transforming into a comet — https://www.ucf.edu/news/ucf-researchers-study-a-centaur-transforming-into-a-comet/ ·         Phys.org — Saturn encounter may have set distant centaur on path to becoming a comet —...

Anna and Avery cover BepiColombo's arrival at Mercury beginning today, as the ESA/JAXA mission jettisons the transfer module that has carried it for nearly eight years and nine planetary flybys. Plus: NASA awards Blue Origin a $700 million contract to build a dedicated Mars communications orbiter, Hubble confirms a brand-new ten-sided cloud pattern at Saturn's south pole — first spotted by amateur astronomers, one of them in outback New South Wales — and China's Galactic Energy flies its reusable Pallas-1 rocket for the first time.

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Today's episode — S05E183, Wednesday September 2, 2026: Main story: A thermal anomaly beneath Mars's south pole. Writing in Nature on August 27, a team led by Alexander Berne (Caltech PhD '26, now University of Arizona) reports that the interior of Mars's southern hemisphere is 200–400 °C hotter than the northern hemisphere and partially molten. The team used tidal tomography — measuring how much the solid body of Mars flexes under the Sun's tidal pull by tracking minute velocity changes in three orbiters (Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) across roughly 25 years of radio tracking data. Hotter, softer rock deforms more, so the degree of flex reveals interior temperature. The result offers a deep-interior explanation for the Martian crustal dichotomy — the sharp division between the smooth low northern plains and the ancient, thickly crusted southern highlands, unexplained since the Viking era — and also accounts for the concentration of crustal magnetic anomalies in the south and the unexpectedly strong seismic-wave damping seen by InSight. The cause of the asymmetry remains open: a giant early impact, lopsided mantle convection, or a heat-trapping compositional layer. Co-authors span Brown University, NASA Goddard, the University of Arizona, Academia Sinica, the University of Rome, TU Delft, UCLA, UT Austin, CU Boulder and UC Santa Cruz. Crew-13 stands down. NASA and SpaceX announced on August 29 that an oxidizer leak had been found in the Dragon spacecraft's propulsion system during standard prelaunch processing, delaying the Crew-13 launch from its September 12 target. Teams are performing additional tests and data review and will complete any necessary rework before flight; a new target date will be announced once available. The crew is commander Jessica Watkins (NASA), pilot Luke Delaney (NASA), and mission specialists Joshua Kutryk (CSA) and Sergey Teteryatnikov (Roscosmos), flying an approximately seven-month increment with significant station maintenance and several spacewalks planned. Swift is observing again. NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory restarted science operations on August 26, with two of its three instruments back online and the third expected within weeks. Swift's telescopes had been powered down progressively — the ultraviolet/optical and X-ray telescopes in February, the Burst Alert Telescope in April — to reduce power draw and atmospheric drag while awaiting a boost from Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft, launched in July. NASA announced on August 19 that LINK would not attempt the capture after developing attitude-control problems. With no rescue coming, NASA has restarted the instruments to extract as much science as possible. NASA expects Swift to fall below roughly 300 km (185 miles) — where telescope operations become impractical — within the next one to two months. Katalyst will still fly proximity operations to demonstrate in-orbit servicing techniques. An 80,000-year mission to Alpha Centauri. The Seattle-area nonprofit Fermi Explorer Mission announced plans to launch a 100–200 kg probe toward Alpha Centauri (4.4 light-years away) at the end of 2029, most likely on a SpaceX rideshare. Solar electric propulsion plus repeated perihelion pumping manoeuvres would build a cruise speed of 24.2 km/s (about 54,000 mph) — faster than New Horizons at Pluto — for a journey of roughly 80,000 years: 12 years of active operations followed by around 79,500 years of coasting. Budget is under $15 million, with $10 million verbally pledged. Payload is at least 1 kg in a shielded 10 cm cube, including a digitised Voyager Golden Record, messages from children worldwide, and cosmic-ray detectors. Co-founders Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean are behind the space computing company Starcloud; the advisory board includes Rob Meyerson (former Blue Origin president) and Jeff Thornburg (former SpaceX propulsion lead). Johnston: "We'll be the first to leave, and the last...

Today's episode — S05E182, Tuesday September 1, 2026: Main story: SpaceX cleared Booster 21's static fire at Starbase's Pad 2 on August 30, the last major milestone before Starship Flight 14 — the third flight of the Starship V3 design. Ship 41 had already completed its own static fire campaign at Massey's Test Site. Flight 14 will attempt something no Starship flight has done before: catching the ship itself, not just the Super Heavy booster, with the launch tower's upgraded "chopstick" arms. Pad 2 received expanded propellant storage, additional pumps and faster-moving catch hardware ahead of the attempt. The flight follows directly on from Flight 13's Ship 40, which survived a dramatic, unplanned float in the Indian Ocean after splashdown before finally beginning its journey home to Starbase on August 30. A firm Flight 14 launch date is still pending FAA and range approvals, with current expectation pointing to sometime in September. Chang'e-7 slips to early 2027. China's four-vehicle lunar south pole mission — rolled back to the vehicle assembly building on August 24, hours before its scheduled launch — has now been retargeted to early 2027 (February–March windows), a far bigger delay than the "about a month" first reported. Chinese authorities have not disclosed a technical cause beyond an approaching storm; multiple outlets report a separate issue was likely found during final on-pad testing, with reviews continuing into whether the launch vehicle or the spacecraft itself is at fault. A very busy month at the space station. NASA's Jessica Meir (her 7th spacewalk) and ESA's Sophie Adenot (her 3rd, following her historic first-French-woman EVA a few weeks ago) began a roughly six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk at 7:30am EDT on September 1 — the ISS's 284th since 1998, and Expedition 75's fourth in a single month. Tasks include replacing a spacecraft navigational aid, prepping a cosmic particle detector for a future upgrade, and installing data-relay jumper cables. NASA's Anil Menon supported from inside on Canadarm2, with Jack Hathaway on safety watch. Planet formation is a "race against time." A team led by Naman Bajaj (University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, with the SETI Institute) published in The Astronomical Journal on August 27, using archival JWST MIRI data on 72 young, Sun-like stars to show protoplanetary disk dispersal happens in two distinct phases — magnetically driven jets and winds early on (roughly the first 1–10 million years), then photoevaporative winds taking over as the star matures. Gas giant planets must form before that gas is gone. Türkiye joins the Artemis Accords. Turkish Minister of Industry and Technology Mehmet Fatih Kacır signed on August 31 at NASA Headquarters, hosted by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman — Türkiye is the 71st country to sign. Türkiye sent its first astronaut to the ISS in 2024 and is preparing its first lunar mission, AYAP-1; it hosts the International Astronautical Congress in October. Tonight's sky: Venus is in a tight conjunction with Spica, under 2° apart, low in the west/west-southwest about 45 minutes after sunset (Sydney sunset ≈ 5:33pm AEST), setting roughly 90 minutes later. Saturn now rises near sunset and is up most of the night in Aquarius, building toward an October 4 opposition with rings tilted a photogenic angle. Jupiter has returned to the pre-dawn sky (best 4–6am), with Mars still visible nearby but fading. The Moon is a waning gibbous heading to last quarter on September 4. The weak Aurigid meteor shower peaked overnight but is Northern Hemisphere-favoured and moonlight-affected — not worth chasing from the Southern Hemisphere. Links & sources: KeepTrack — SpaceX Brief, Aug 30 2026: Super Heavy Static Fire Clears Starship Flight 14 Basenor — Starship Flight 14: 5 Details That Matter Right Now Space.com — SpaceX test-fires Starship Super Heavy booster ahead of critical Flight 14 Tesla Oracle — Starship 40 begins its journey from the...

🚀 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is safely away — Anna and Avery recap Sunday's clean Falcon Heavy launch, what happens next on the road to L2, and a surprise Australian link in the mission. Then: Elon Musk signals the eventual retirement of Falcon 9, two Nobel laureates defend an accelerating universe against a slowing-expansion claim, a single ancient asteroid strike solves two mysteries on Mars's moon Deimos, and everything worth looking up at tonight, wherever you are. Chapters / topics: Roman Space Telescope's clean launch • What happens next (L2 cruise & commissioning) • Roman's science mission explained • SpaceX signals Falcon 9's eventual retirement • The universe is still speeding up (dark energy rebuttal) • One asteroid strike solves two Deimos mysteries • Tonight's sky (both hemispheres) 🔔 Subscribe for daily space and astronomy news. Full show notes and links at astronomydaily.io. #AstronomyDaily 

Links & sources: Space.com — Liftoff! NASA's Roman Space Telescope soars to the stars on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in spectacular launch (video) NASA Science (Roman blog) — NASA's Roman Space Telescope Launches NASA Science (Roman blog) — NASA Concludes Roman Space Telescope Launch Coverage Space.com — What time will SpaceX launch NASA's Roman Space Telescope? (Full mission timeline) Space.com — Goodbye, Falcon 9: SpaceX planning to retire workhorse launcher when Starship is up and running Teslarati — Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it ScienceDaily — The universe is still speeding up, but nobody knows why University of Bern (media relations) — Asteroid impact shaped the appearance of Mars' moon Deimos Nature Astronomy — Raducan, Agrusa, Asphaug et al. (2026), DOI 10.1038/s41550-026-02956-w When The Curves Line Up — 2026, August 31: Venus Nears Spica TelescopeAdvisor — Night Sky in September 2026: Saturn Approaching Opposition Follow us: @AstroDailyPod

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Today's episode — S05E179, Friday August 28, 2026:   Feature story: US startup Reflect Orbital has FCC approval for Eärendil-1, a demonstration satellite carrying a 60-foot mirror, the first step toward a planned constellation of 50,000-plus orbital mirrors beaming reflected sunlight to Earth on demand. A new peer-reviewed study (Kocifaj, Bakos and Kundracik, accepted at The Astrophysical Journal Letters) finds a full-scale, 174-foot operational mirror would appear about 40 times brighter than the full Moon to anyone standing in its roughly 3.4-mile beam, with measurable sky-glow extending 20-34 km further — astronomer Gáspár Bakos says it would be "worse than big cities like London," warning "you would not see any stars if you were in the beam."   The rest of the news:   Starship update: Ship 40 — the Flight 13 upper stage that survived an intact splashdown on July 24 — has been loaded onto a heavy-lift transport vessel off Christmas Island and is now heading home to Starbase, Texas, a journey expected to take several months. Meanwhile Flight 14 has quietly slipped to no-earlier-than September 15, per internal SpaceX/FAA planning documents, with Booster 21's static fire testing now the pacing item.   A hot, watery world on borrowed time: astronomers led by Sylvain Breton (INAF) have characterised HD 176071 b, an exoplanet 335 light-years away that's roughly 50% water by mass, orbiting so close to its star (a 14-hour year) that it's expected to eventually be consumed by tidal forces. Found via a reflected-light technique applied to archival Kepler data.   Roman Space Telescope: two days from its Sunday, August 30 launch (7:26am ET, Falcon Heavy), with today's Launch Readiness Review still underway as we record. We trace the mission's near-cancellation in leaked 2025 budget documents proposing a 24% NASA funding cut — and how Roman's team responded to Congress restoring funding by pulling the launch forward eight months, finishing under budget.   Tonight's Sky: the G2 geomagnetic storm NOAA forecast for today is playing out now — aurora chances improve at northern latitudes, unlikely to reach much past Tasmania locally. Venus and Saturn remain the reliable local targets, under a near-full Moon.   Links & sources: Space.com — Massive space mirrors could be 40 times brighter than the full moon, astronomers warn arXiv — Atmospheric Light Pollution by Proposed Reflect Orbital Space Mirrors (Kocifaj, Bakos & Kundracik) Space.com — The FCC just gave Reflect Orbital permission to launch its 1st space mirror to orbit Space.com — Starship is coming home: SpaceX loads floating spacecraft onto huge ship in the Indian Ocean Space.com — Astronomers discover hot watery exoplanet destined to be swallowed by its star Space.com — Trump tried to scrap NASA's Roman Space Telescope last year. Now it's ready to launch Watchers.news — M6.9 solar flare produces Earth-directed CME, G2 geomagnetic storm watch issued for August 28   Follow us: @AstronomyDailyPod

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Anna and Avery cover China's Chang'e-7 mission — a four-vehicle lunar south pole expedition, including a leaping hopper robot, that a Brown University scientist calls the most ambitious robotic Moon mission any nation has ever attempted, with its launch window opening Monday. Then: this week's biggest hardware stories, catching up on Starship's Ship 40 (still marooned off Christmas Island), LandSpace's historic private rocket landing in China, NASA pinpointing exactly where a Falcon 9 hit the Moon, and the failed rescue mission for NASA's Swift telescope.   Full show notes:   Today's episode — S05E174, Saturday August 22, 2026, our second "Weekend Wrap":   Main story: China's Chang'e-7 targets the most ambitious lunar mission ever. China's Long March 5 Y14 rocket rolled out to the pad at Wenchang Space Launch Site on August 19, ahead of a launch window running August 24–31. Chang'e-7 comprises four vehicles — an orbiter, a lander built for up to eight years of surface operations, a rover, and a six-legged, thruster-powered hopper capable of 15km leaps — targeting the rim of Shackleton Crater at the lunar south pole, with landing expected near year's end. The mission's primary goal is the first landed, direct search for water ice in the Moon's permanently shadowed craters. Brown University planetary scientist James Head called it "the most ambitious, comprehensive, and complex robotic lunar mission ever attempted by any nation or entity." The mission carries international instruments from Russia, Italy, Thailand, Switzerland, Bahrain, Egypt, and a University of Hong Kong/International Lunar Observatory Association telescope. It precedes Chang'e-8 (~2028) and China's targeted crewed lunar landing by 2030.   The week in review:   -       Starship's Ship 40: After Tuesday's episode reported recovery as complete, fuller reporting showed the ship was towed further than first known, arriving August 18 off Christmas Island (not a mainland port) after 24 days adrift and 400+ km of drift. SpaceX has no announced plan yet for the final leg to Starbase, Texas — at its current tow pace that trip would take over a year. Separately, Elon Musk said August 20 that a Starship tower-catch attempt is now "probably... in a few months" rather than on Flight 14 as earlier hoped; Flight 14 is targeted no earlier than August 28 and will attempt Starship's first-ever full orbital flight. -       LandSpace / Zhuque-3: On August 19, Chinese commercial company LandSpace became the first private Chinese company to land an orbital-class rocket booster, recovering Zhuque-3's first stage in Gansu Province on the rocket's second flight (the first, in December 2025, reached orbit but failed its landing attempt). -       SpaceX Moon impact site: NASA and South Korea's Danuri orbiter pinpointed and imaged the crater left by a spent Falcon 9 upper stage that struck the Moon on August 5 — a 60-foot-wide, sub-10-foot-deep crater at 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E, with ejecta rays revealing space-weathering data. -       Swift telescope rescue fails: NASA confirmed on August 19 that the LINK rescue spacecraft's attitude-control failure (two of three reaction wheels down, plus a thruster malfunction) ended the rescue attempt for the aging Swift Observatory, which will now reenter uncontrolled later this year — not expected before October per early reporting, though NASA hasn't confirmed a date.   Links & sources:   -       Space.com — China's Chang'e 7 moon probe will launch this weekend on the most ambitious lunar mission in history -       Scientific American —...

Anna and Avery cover how NASA, working with South Korea's Danuri orbiter, pinpointed and imaged the exact crater left by a SpaceX Falcon 9 stage that struck the Moon on August 5th. Plus: the private rescue mission for NASA's ailing Swift telescope has officially failed, astronomers may have caught dark matter bending a black hole's jet, and Rocket Lab launches its ninth radar satellite for Japan's iQPS.   Full show notes:   Today's episode — S05E173, Friday August 21, 2026:   Main story: NASA finds the crater a SpaceX rocket left on the Moon. A spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage struck the Moon's surface on August 5, 2026, at 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E. South Korea's Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (Danuri) imaged the impact site within hours using its LUTI camera, confirming the predicted location to within 0.6 miles and passing refined coordinates to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team. LRO's Narrow-Angle Camera imaged the site on August 11–12, revealing a crater roughly 60 feet wide and less than 10 feet deep, with dark rays of space-weathered material excavated from about 1.5 feet down and brighter rays of fresh, unweathered material from deeper still. NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (Planetary Defense program) refined the original impact prediction using data from independent astronomers.   Swift telescope rescue mission fails. NASA's Swift Observatory, losing altitude faster than expected due to heightened solar activity, was the target of a $30 million rescue attempt by Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies. Their LINK spacecraft launched July 3 on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket but suffered an attitude-control failure roughly three weeks later, spinning uncontrollably before it could dock with and boost Swift. NASA confirmed the mission's failure on August 19; Swift is now expected to reenter the atmosphere uncontrolled before the end of 2026. LINK will still attempt a proximity flyby to gather data for future servicing missions. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman: "This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting."   Dark matter may be magnifying a black hole's jet. A team led by Silke Britzen at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, combining data from the VLBA, the Fermi gamma-ray telescope, and NASA's Swift X-ray instrument, found that the plasma jet from blazar PKS 2233-148 shows an unexpected deviation consistent with gravitational lensing by an unseen dark matter clump — a potential first detection of dark matter substructure lensing a blazar jet. The result could also help confirm blazars as sources of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, July 31.   Rocket Lab launches a new radar satellite for Japan. Rocket Lab launched SUSANOO-II, a synthetic aperture radar Earth-observation satellite, for Tokyo-based iQPS on an Electron rocket from New Zealand (mission: "The Lightning God Defends"). It's Rocket Lab's ninth launch for iQPS, part of a planned 36-satellite constellation, and marks the company's 14th flight of 2026 and 93rd Electron mission overall.   Tonight's sky: the Moon is a waxing gibbous, about 63% illuminated. With a telescope, find the Ring Nebula (M57) in Lyra — look for bright star Vega overhead, then the small parallelogram of stars just below it. Mark your calendars for a 96%-partial lunar eclipse on August 27–28, nearly total — full viewing details to come.   Links & sources:   -       NASA Science — NASA's LRO Images Falcon 9 Crater on Moon, Learns New Details -       Universe Today — NASA's Lunar...

Anna and Avery cover LandSpace becoming the first Chinese commercial company to land an orbital-class rocket booster — a big step for the country's private space sector. Plus: astronomers find a "mega-Earth" 23 times more massive than our planet that shouldn't be able to exist, a star weaving impossibly close to our galaxy's supermassive black hole that could reveal its spin within a decade, and new JWST data showing the early universe's galaxies were hiding roughly four times more mass than we thought.   Full show notes:   Today's episode — S05E172, Thursday August 20, 2026:   Main story: China's private spaceflight sector sticks the landing. On August 19, Chinese commercial launch company LandSpace successfully recovered the first stage of its Zhuque-3 (ZQ-3) rocket after liftoff from the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Pilot Zone in northwestern China — the first time any Chinese commercial company has landed an orbital-class booster. The 76.6-metre, stainless-steel, methane-fueled rocket (taller than a Falcon 9) touched down on four legs roughly 390km downrange in Gansu Province about eight minutes after liftoff, running on a single Tianque-12 engine. It's ZQ-3's second flight — the first, in December 2025, reached orbit but couldn't stick the recovery. The landing puts LandSpace among a very small club of companies with proven booster-reuse technology and marks, in the company's words, a shift "toward the engineering application phase of reusability."   A "mega-Earth" that shouldn't be this dense. Astronomers led by Max Kroft (University of Wisconsin–Madison) have identified GJ 523b, a rocky exoplanet 23.5 times more massive than Earth but only 2.5 times its width — extraordinarily dense for its size. Standard planet-formation models say a planet this massive, orbiting its star every 17.75 days in a system just 170 million years old, should have pulled in a thick hydrogen-helium envelope; instead it's stayed almost entirely rocky. Found by TESS and confirmed with the WIYN 3.5-metre telescope at Kitt Peak; submitted to The Astronomical Journal, not yet peer-reviewed.   The star that could reveal a black hole's spin. A newly identified star, S301, is orbiting our galaxy's central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, closer and faster than any star found before it — passing within 12 astronomical units at roughly 25,000 kilometres per second and completing a full orbit in just 8.7 years. Led by K. Abd El Dayem (Paris Observatory) with Nobel laureate Reinhard Genzel's group, researchers expect to use S301's orbit to directly measure the black hole's spin within a decade — a first for any supermassive black hole, and a real-world test of Einstein's general relativity.   JWST finds the early universe's galaxies were hiding their mass. A team led by Chloe Cheng (Leiden University), using JWST's NIRSpec instrument alongside data from the VLT's LEGA-C survey, found that ancient "quiescent" galaxies contain far more faint, low-mass stars than previously accounted for — potentially raising their true mass estimates by a factor of four. The hidden stars had simply been outshone by brighter ones in the same galaxies. Published in Nature Astronomy; the finding deepens existing tension with current galaxy-formation models.   Tonight's sky: the Moon is about 56% illuminated and well-placed for lunar observing — look along the sunrise terminator for the crater Theophilus and its dramatic, shadowed walls. Venus is still blazing at magnitude -4.1 low in the western sky after sunset, and Saturn continues its predawn "moon parade" in the south-southeast for early risers.   Links & sources:   -       Spaceflight Now — LandSpace becomes first commercial Chinese company to land an orbital-class booster -      

Anna and Avery cover NASA's newly funded concept for spherical, propeller-free "aerobots" that could one day explore the methane-carved cave systems of Saturn's moon Titan. Plus: SpaceX breaks its own launch-turnaround record with two Falcon 9 missions 38 minutes apart, Rocket Lab lands its biggest-ever defense contract to build "Flatellites" for the U.S. Space Force, and a geomagnetic storm arriving today could bring aurora to high latitudes tonight.
**Full show notes:**
Today's episode — S05E169, Monday August 17, 2026:
**Main story: NASA funds spherical "Aerobots" to explore Titan's caves.** A NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase 1 grant is backing SPARK (Solid-state Propulsion for Autonomous Reconnaissance of Karst) — small, propeller-free spherical robots using electrohydrodynamic (EHD) thrusters, led by Daniel Drew (University of Hawaii) with JPL's Ethan Schaler and Jacob Izraelevitz and Michael Malaska (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science). The concept targets Titan's karst terrain — sinkholes and caves carved by liquid methane and ethane rather than water — as a candidate site for astrobiology research. Phase 1 covers nine months; a Phase 2 award could follow. No confirmed mission link yet, though NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft is headed to Titan around 2028.
**SpaceX sets a new launch-turnaround record.** Two Falcon 9 missions launched 38 minutes apart on August 15 — a Globalstar satellite mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 9:12 p.m. ET, and the classified USSF-366 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 9:50 p.m. ET — beating SpaceX's previous 65-minute record from August 2024. Both boosters landed successfully (14th and 18th flights respectively). 2026 tally: 96 Falcon 9 launches so far.
**Rocket Lab wins $397 million Space Force contract for "Flatellites."** The flat-panel satellites will support the SB-AMTI (Space-Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator) program and launch stacked aboard Rocket Lab's still-undebuted Neutron rocket. It's Rocket Lab's largest defense contract to date, bringing 2026 government contract funding to $943 million.
**Geomagnetic storm expected today.** A double CME plus a high-speed solar wind stream is forecast to bring G1–G2 level geomagnetic storming, with the main impact expected later today. Aurora is possible at high latitudes — potentially Scotland, northern England, Northern Ireland, Alaska, Canada, and the northern US, plus southern New Zealand and Tasmania in the Southern Hemisphere. Comes amid an active stretch for the Sun, including 14 C-class flares from sunspot region AR4507 over August 15–16.
**Links & sources:**
  - [Space.com — NASA funds spherical 'Aerobots' for Titan's caves](https://www.space.com/technology/nasa-funds-spherical-aerobots-that-could-explore-the-caves-of-saturns-moon-titan)
  - [JPL Robotics — Titan Aerobots](https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/research-tasks/titan-aerobots/)
  - [JPL — Shapeshifter concept for Saturn's moons (background)](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-designing-shapeshifting-robots-for-saturns-moons/)
  - [Space.com — SpaceX breaks launch doubleheader record](https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/spacex-breaks-record-launch-doubleheader-ussf-366-globalstar-2r)
  - [Spaceflight Now — Globalstar/USSF-366 launch coverage](https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/08/15/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-satellite-replenishment-mission-for-globalstar-from-cape-canaveral/)
  - [Space.com — Rocket Lab's $397M Flatellites contract](https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/us-space-force-gives-rocket-lab-usd397-million-to-build-threat-tracking-flatellites)
  - [Rocket Lab — Flatellites contract announcement](https://rocketlabcorp.com/updates/rocket-lab-awarded-397-million-contract-to-build-and-launch-flatellites-for-u-s-space-forces-space-based-airborne-moving-target-indicator-program/)
  - [ummid.com —...

Today's episode — S05E168, Saturday August 15, 2026, our "Weekend Wrap":
**Main story: a magnetar confirms 90-year-old vacuum birefringence prediction.** A team led by Rachael Stewart (George Washington University), using NASA's IXPE spacecraft, found the strongest evidence yet that extreme magnetic fields polarize light passing through empty space — confirming a 1936 prediction by Werner Heisenberg and Hans Euler. The team studied magnetar 1E 1547-5408 and found X-rays nearly 3x more polarized than expected, in a direction matching the star's magnetic field. Published August 5 in *Nature*.
**The week in review:**
- **Starship:** Ship 40 (Flight 13, splashed down July 24) remains adrift in the Indian Ocean after recovery efforts stalled in rough seas; Elon Musk said August 7 that recovery is "not looking good right now." Still unresolved as of this weekend — roughly 18% recovery odds per prediction markets. SpaceX has moved on to Flight 14 prep (Ship 41, targeting ~August 20).
- **Eclipse:** The August 12 total solar eclipse swept a 182-mile shadow from the Arctic through Greenland, Iceland (2m18s max totality at Látrabjarg) and northern Spain. Next Spanish total eclipse: August 2, 2027.
- **Black hole star:** JWST's "Mirage or Miracle" survey identified MoM-BH*-1, a gas-shrouded black hole glowing from just 660 million years after the Big Bang — a candidate explanation for how supermassive black holes grow so fast.
- **Virgin Galactic:** Commercial flights delayed again, from Q4 2026 to February 2027; Q2 earnings (revenue $1.54M, net loss ~$55.9M) sent shares down further, with heavy cash burn guided for Q3/Q4 and a new shelf filing for capital flexibility.
**Links & sources:**
- [Space.com — Is empty space really empty? This magnetic star may finally solve a 90-year-old mystery](https://www.space.com/astronomy/stars/is-empty-space-really-empty-this-magnetic-star-may-finally-solve-a-90-year-old-mystery)
- [Space.com — 'Not looking good right now': Starship likely to be lost at sea](https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/not-looking-good-right-now-starship-likely-to-be-lost-at-sea-2-weeks-after-epic-13th-test-flight-elon-musk-says)
- [NASASpaceFlight.com — While SpaceX recovers Ship 40, Ship 41 prepares for testing ahead of Flight 14](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2026/08/spacex-recovers-ship-40-ship-41-flight-14/)
- [Manifold Markets — Will Starship Ship 40 be recovered to shore?](https://manifold.markets/Mqrius/will-starship-ship-40-be-recovered)
- [Space.com — Total solar eclipse 2026 thrills millions](https://www.space.com/stargazing/solar-eclipses/total-solar-eclipse-2026-thrills-millions-with-a-stunning-cosmic-spectacle-photos-video)
- [Wikipedia — Solar eclipse of August 12, 2026](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_12,_2026)
- [EurekAlert — Mirage or miracle? JWST finds earliest known 'black hole star' at cosmic dawn](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139484)
- [SpaceNews — Virgin Galactic delays resumption of commercial flights to 2027](https://spacenews.com/virgin-galactic-delays-resumption-of-commercial-flights-to-2027/)
- [Virgin Galactic — Q2 2026 financial results and business update](https://www.virgingalactic.com/news/virgin-galactic-announces-second-quarter-2026-financial-results-and-provides-business-update)
- [StocksToTrade — Virgin Galactic (SPCE) news, Aug 13 2026](https://stockstotrade.com/news/virgin-galactic-holdings-inc-spce-news-2026_08_13/)
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Anna and Avery break down JWST's discovery of MoM-BH*-1, the earliest known "black hole star" — a black hole shrouded in dense gas, glowing from just 660 million years after the Big Bang, that might explain how supermassive black holes grow so fast. Plus: the Perseid meteor shower's spectacular overnight peak, a new satellite built to watch other satellites in geostationary orbit, and veteran NASA astronaut Mike Fincke's retirement after 30 years and four spacecraft.
**Full show notes:**
Today's episode — S05E167, Friday August 14, 2026:
**Main story: JWST finds the earliest known "black hole star."** Astronomers led by Rohan Naidu (University of Hawai'i) and Jorryt Matthee (ISTA) identified MoM-BH*-1 — a young black hole wrapped in a dense gas envelope so thick it radiates almost like a star, appearing over 100,000 times the Sun's radius. Light from the object left it roughly 13 billion years ago, just 660 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery, from the "Mirage or Miracle" JWST survey, may explain how supermassive black holes grow fast enough to match observations of the early universe, and may be linked to the population of mysterious "little red dots" Webb has found since 2024.
**The Perseid meteor shower's spectacular peak.** The Perseids peaked overnight on August 12–13, just hours after this week's total solar eclipse, with dark, moonless skies delivering hundreds of visible meteors per hour at the best sites. Debris from comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle remains active through roughly August 24.
**Astranis unveils Perceptor.** A new satellite line built to monitor activity in geostationary orbit, using electric propulsion for repeated multi-angle flybys of other spacecraft. Astranis CEO John Gedmark cited past close approaches by Russian and Chinese spacecraft near U.S. satellites as motivation. No launch date announced yet.
**Astronaut Mike Fincke retires after 30 years.** Fincke flew four missions across four spacecraft types — Soyuz (twice), Space Shuttle Endeavour, and SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour — commanded the ISS twice, and capped his career with Crew-11, a mission cut short in January after a frightening in-orbit medical incident.
**Links & sources:**
  - [EurekAlert — Mirage or miracle? JWST finds earliest known 'black hole star' at cosmic dawn](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139484)
  - [phys.org — Mirage or miracle? JWST finds earliest known black hole star](https://phys.org/news/2026-08-mirage-miracle-jwst-earliest-black.html)
  - [Scientific American — JWST images illuminate 'black hole stars' at cosmic dawn](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwst-images-illuminate-black-hole-stars-at-cosmic-dawn/)
  - [ERC — Earliest known black hole star found at cosmic dawn](https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/earliest-known-black-hole-star-found-cosmic-dawn)
  - [Space.com — Perseid meteor shower peak photos](https://www.space.com/stargazing/meteor-showers/the-perseid-meteor-shower-peak-was-spectacular-here-are-our-favorite-photos-aug-2026)
  - [Space.com — Astranis Perceptor satellites for geostationary orbit awareness](https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/astranis-perceptor-satellites-geostationary-orbit-space-situational-awareness)
  - [Spaceflight Now — Mike Fincke, a 30-year astronaut, retires from NASA](https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/08/12/mike-fincke-a-30-year-astronaut-with-experience-across-four-human-rated-spacecraft-retires-from-nasa/)
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Anna and Avery break down yesterday's total solar eclipse — a 182-mile-wide shadow that swept from the Arctic through Greenland and Iceland to northern Spain, giving millions of people up to 2 minutes 18 seconds of totality. Plus: astronomers find three supermassive black holes sharing one distant galaxy (two are about to merge), Virgin Galactic pushes commercial spaceflight back to February 2027, and Rocket Lab signs a new launch customer for Neutron even as the rocket's debut slips further.
**Full show notes:**
Today's episode — S05E166, Thursday August 13, 2026:
**Main story: The August 12 total solar eclipse.** The Moon's shadow crossed the Arctic Ocean, eastern Greenland, western Iceland, northern Spain, the Balearic Islands and out into the Mediterranean. Longest totality on land: 2 minutes 18 seconds at Látrabjarg, Iceland. Millions gathered across northern Spain, with the path also crossing A Coruña, Bilbao, Zaragoza, Valencia and Palma (Madrid and Barcelona were just outside the path). Observers reported seeing the solar corona, a prominence, and Jupiter, Mercury and Venus during totality. Spain gets another total eclipse on August 2, 2027.
**Three supermassive black holes, one galaxy.** Astronomers led by Hannah Übler (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics) used JWST to confirm three actively feeding supermassive black holes in galaxy J0148-4214, 12.5 billion light-years away — the first such triple system ever confirmed. Two of the three are on course to merge.
**Virgin Galactic delays commercial flights to 2027.** The company's upgraded Delta-class spaceplane will now begin commercial service in February 2027, pushed back from Q4 2026, to complete avionics and systems installation. Shares fell 12% after-hours. $750,000 seat packages were oversubscribed.
**Rocket Lab's Neutron: delay and deal.** Rocket Lab is hedging on a 2026 debut for its Neutron rocket, with the window potentially slipping into 2027 — even as the company signs a new five-launch deal with Kepler Communications.
**Links & sources:**
- [Space.com — Total solar eclipse live updates](https://www.space.com/news/live/total-solar-eclipse-today-aug-12-2026-live-updates)
- [Space.com — Total solar eclipse 2026 thrills millions (photos, video)](https://www.space.com/stargazing/solar-eclipses/total-solar-eclipse-2026-thrills-millions-with-a-stunning-cosmic-spectacle-photos-video)
- [CNN — Photos: Total solar eclipse 2026](https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/12/science/gallery/photos-total-solar-eclipse)
- [Wikipedia — Solar eclipse of August 12, 2026](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_12,_2026)
- [Max Planck Institute — Three supermassive black holes discovered in a single galaxy](https://www.mpg.de/26904239/three-black-holes-discovered-in-a-young-galaxy)
- [SpaceNews — Virgin Galactic delays resumption of commercial flights to 2027](https://spacenews.com/virgin-galactic-delays-resumption-of-commercial-flights-to-2027/)
- [Spaceflight Now — Window for 2026 Neutron debut is narrowing](https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/08/10/window-for-2026-launch-debut-of-rocket-labs-neutron-rocket-is-narrowing-as-development-continues/)
- [Rocket Lab — Neutron launch deal with Kepler Communications](https://rocketlabcorp.com/updates/rocket-lab-inks-neutron-launch-deal-with-kepler-communications/)
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Astronomy Daily · S05E163 · “The Long Way Home” · Monday 10 August 2026. Sources verified against primary / institutional outlets. Starship “lost at sea” (Flight 13) •    Flight 13 launched 24 July 2026 from Starbase, South Texas; the upper stage (“Ship,” Ship 40, ~52 m) made the softest Starship water landing yet in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia — and, in a program first, survived intact and afloat. •    SpaceX had not planned to recover it. Musk confirmed the salvage attempt on 28 July (“We’re sending a ship out to recover Starship”); recovery ship Go Australis was joined by Norwegian tugs Normand Ranger and Skimmer Tide, with a tow line to the nose. •    On 7 August, Musk said recovery is “not looking good right now” in rough seas — but the team had already obtained close-up photos of critical heat-shield and engine regions for future upgrades. A saltwater-soaked Ship was never going to be reflown. •    Heat shield: on SpaceX’s first quarterly earnings call (4 August) Musk said he’d “consider the heat-shield problem solved,” long the biggest hurdle to full reuse. •    The flight also deployed 20 next-gen Starlink V3 satellites; the Super Heavy booster had engine trouble and was lost in the Gulf of Mexico. Stacked, Starship stands ~124 m. Flight 14 is targeted for late August — its first attempt at operational orbit with production Starlink. •    Sources: SpaceX / @elonmusk on X (7 Aug); Space.com (Mike Wall, 7 Aug); CNN (3 Aug). Landspace Zhuque-3, second landing attempt •    Landspace (private, Beijing, founded 2015) targets liftoff ~7:45 p.m. EDT Mon 10 Aug (23:45 UTC / ≈9:45 a.m. AEST Tue 11 Aug) from Jiuquan, aiming for a propulsive first-stage recovery on legs (Falcon 9-style), landing downrange in Gansu. •    The methalox, stainless-steel Zhuque-3 (~66 m) is broadly a Falcon 9 rival. Its Dec 2025 maiden flight reached orbit but the first stage failed its landing burn and crashed. •    Accuracy note: this is China’s fourth orbital-class recovery attempt. A Long March 10B already landed via net-capture on 10 July (China became the 2nd nation to land an orbital booster) — so tonight would make Landspace the first Chinese company to attempt a propulsive/landing-legs recovery, not “China’s first.” •    Sources: Space.com (7 Aug); Yahoo/Space (7 Aug); launch trackers (NOTAM-based). Uranus’s “breathing” bow shock •    New multifluid-MHD modelling shows Uranus’s bow shock expands and contracts over a single ~17-hour Uranian day — driven by the planet’s own extreme rotation and tilted, offset magnetic field, not by changes in the solar wind. •    The model is constrained by Voyager 2’s 1986 flyby — still the only direct measurements ever taken inside the Uranian system (a nice callback to E159’s Voyager 2 “Big Bang” lead). •    Implications for future ice-giant missions and for the many ice-giant exoplanets now being found. Cao et al., AGU Advances; surfaced via an Eos research spotlight this week. (Framed as newly-spotlighted rather than newly-published.) •    Sources: AGU Advances (Cao et al.); Eos research spotlight; phys.org (7 Aug). Total solar eclipse — 12 August 2026 •    The only total solar eclipse of 2026. Unusual over-the-pole path: Arctic Siberia → eastern Greenland → western Iceland → northern Spain (clipping NE Portugal) → the Balearics at sunset. •    Greatest eclipse ≈17:46 UTC; max totality 2 min 18 s just off Iceland’s west coast, with the Sun only ~26° high. Iceland’s first total eclipse since 1954 (Reykjavik’s first in 593 years); Spain’s first since 1905. •    North America sees a partial across the northern tier (Alaska to North Carolina) and most of Canada — deepest in the far north, a shallow bite (<10%) from the US Northeast, late morning to early afternoon local. NASA livestream from 1:15 p.m. EDT at nasa.gov/live. •    Not visible from the Southern Hemisphere. Sources: NASA eclipse pages; national eclipse guides. Skywatch — both hemispheres •    Perseids peak the night of 12–13 August...

This weekend on Astronomy Daily: the Inouye Solar Telescope reveals whirlpools on the Sun’s surface for the first time, a Falcon 9 upper stage carves a fresh crater on the Moon, Voyager 2 pulls off a daring "Big Bang" power swap 21 billion kilometres away, and the LINK spacecraft wins its de-spin battle in the race to save NASA’s Swift. Plus your both-hemispheres guide to the 12 August total solar eclipse and the moonless Perseid peak. In this episode ●        (01:20) LEAD — First-ever sighting of Kelvin–Helmholtz vortices on the Sun (Nature, 5 Aug; Inouye Solar Telescope / NSO / MPS) ●        (09:00) Falcon 9 upper stage 2025-010D impacts the Moon near Einstein Crater ●        (12:15) Voyager 2’s "Big Bang" power swap buys another year of interstellar science ●        (15:30) LINK spins down from 9°/s to 1.47°/s — software update next in the Swift rescue ●        (18:45) Skywatch: 12 Aug total solar eclipse + Perseid peak — both hemispheres, with eye-safety Links & sources ●        Nature: Kuridze et al., "Ubiquitous Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities driving plasma mixing on the Sun" (5 Aug 2026) ●        NSO / NSF and Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research press releases (5 Aug 2026) ●        NASA/JPL Voyager blog: "NASA Engineers Help Prolong Voyager 2’s Science Mission" (4 Aug 2026) ●        NASA Science Swift blog: LINK stabilisation update; ESA & NASA eclipse pages for 12 Aug 2026

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Astronomy Daily · S05E161 · “The Colour of Empty Space” · Friday 7 August 2026. Hosts: Anna & Avery. astronomydaily.io · @AstroDailyPod ① Vacuum birefringence: reading a magnetar ●        NASA’s IXPE, with NICER and the Parkes/Murriyang radio telescope (NSW), measured the polarised X-rays of magnetar 1E 1547.0−5408. ●        Result: soft X-ray polarisation ~65% at 2 keV, rising to nearly 80% at some rotation phases — the strongest signal yet of vacuum birefringence, a QED effect predicted by Heisenberg in 1936. ●        The team calls it the “most definitive signal to date,” not a confirmed detection; an April 2026 analysis disputes it under different geometry. Co-leads: Rachael Stewart; Hoa Dinh Thi (Rice); with Marcus Lower (Swinburne). ●        Source:Stewart et al., Nature, 5 Aug 2026 (DOI 10.1038/s41586-026-10859-z); NASA IXPE release. ② Gateway HALO hardware → Lunar Infrastructure Demos ●        NASA and Northrop Grumman are repurposing the HALO module’s power, data and avionics into three surface missions — LID-1, LID-2, LID-3. ●        Goal: “survive-the-night” power and thermal tech for the lunar South Pole, where night lasts ~14 Earth days and temperatures plunge below −200 °C. ●        Part of a wider Moon-base update in which four commercial landers reached final qualification testing at once. ●        Source:NASA & Northrop Grumman releases, 4 Aug 2026; Spaceflight Now. ③ New Glenn: the cause is a valve ●        Blue Origin traced the 28 May New Glenn booster explosion (during a pad hot-fire at Cape Canaveral) to the main oxygen valve on one of the seven BE-4 engines. ●        Fix: small, retrofittable valve modifications; return to flight still targeted by year’s end. The BE-4 also powers ULA’s Vulcan. ●        Source:Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, 5 Aug 2026; SpaceNews. ④ LINK’s de-spin: the fight to save Swift ●        Katalyst Space’s LINK robot — tasked with boosting NASA’s ageing Swift observatory before re-entry — hit a multi-axis tumble when two of three reaction wheels failed. ●        Using gimballed electric-propulsion thrusters, the team cut the spin from ~9°/s to ~1.47°/s on under 100 g of propellant. A flight-software update is next; rendezvous slips to ~end of August. ●        Source:NASA Swift blog, 6 Aug 2026; Katalyst mission updates. ⑤ Skywatch: eclipse + Perseids ●        12 Aug total solar eclipse — totality across Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain; afternoon partial for eastern Canada and the NE United States (>10% only NE of the NYC–Rochester line; ~50% in Atlantic Canada). NASA live from 1:15 pm EDT. ●        Perseid peak the night of 12–13 Aug under a New Moon — up to ~100/hr from dark rural sites. ●        Southern Hemisphere: eclipse not visible; Perseids barely clear the horizon. Sydney: pre-dawn planet line-up + Venus + winter Milky Way. ●        EYE SAFETY:use only ISO 12312-2 eclipse glasses for every partial phase; never combine them with a camera, telescope or binoculars.
 

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Astronomy Daily · S05E160 · 6 August 2026. In this episode: a Falcon 9 upper stage confirmed to have struck the Moon; a live ISS spacewalk; supernova SN 2026gzf caught at first light; SpaceX Crew-13 previewed; and a both-hemispheres guide to the 12 August eclipse and Perseids. FALCON 9 LUNAR IMPACT (LEAD) ●        Spent upper stage 2025-010D struck near Einstein Crater (~19.4°N, 93.3°W) at ~06:35 UTC, 5 Aug 2026 — matching Bill Gray / Project Pluto predictions. ●        ESO’s Very Large Telescope (Paranal) detected sodium and lithium in the impact plume for ~5–10 minutes — sodium from lunar soil, lithium likely from the rocket. ●        NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter holds a pre-impact baseline and will image the fresh crater, giving a rare before-and-after dataset to validate hollow-body impact models for future landers. ●        Origin: Falcon 9 launched 15 Jan 2025 with Firefly Blue Ghost 1 and ispace Resilience; the stage was left adrift and returned unplanned via solar activity and gravity. ●        Sources: NASA; ESO / VLT; CNN; Project Pluto (projectpluto.com); Fernando et al., arXiv:2607.14625. ISS SPACEWALK — U.S. EVA 96 ●        NASA’s Jessica Meir (Expedition 75 commander) and Anil Menon; ~6.5 h EVA beginning ~08:35 EDT, 6 Aug; live on NASA+. ●        Task: reconfigure the 3B power channel to accept a seventh roll-out solar array later in 2026 — part of station upkeep ahead of the planned 2030 deorbit. ●        Menon’s first spacewalk; two further EVAs scheduled 13 and 25 Aug. ●        Sources: NASA / NASA+ ; NASA ISS blog. SUPERNOVA SN 2026GZF ●        X-ray “shock breakout” (EP260321a) detected by China’s Einstein Probe on 21 Mar 2026 from a galaxy ~500 million light-years away; follow-up revealed a broad-lined Type Ic supernova. ●        Unusually, no gamma-ray burst and no lasting relativistic jet — and the faintest shock breakout yet linked to this class; a possible missing link between ordinary and GRB-producing supernovae. ●        Follow-up used NSF NOIRLab facilities including DECam and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Two teams: O’Connor et al. (CMU) and Rastinejad et al. (UMD), in ApJL. ●        Sources: NSF NOIRLab; Carnegie Mellon University; The Astrophysical Journal Letters. SPACEX CREW-13 ●        Targeting NET 12 Sep 2026 aboard Crew Dragon Grace from SLC-40, Cape Canaveral. ●        Crew: Jessica Watkins (NASA, cmdr — first NASA astronaut to fly Dragon twice), Luke Delaney (NASA, pilot), Joshua Kutryk (CSA), Sergey Teteryatnikov (Roscosmos). 180-day stay; moved up from November. ●        Sources: NASA; SpaceX; Houston Public Media. SKYWATCH — 12 AUGUST & BEYOND ●        Total solar eclipse 12 Aug: totality across E Greenland, W Iceland, N Spain and NE Portugal (max 2m18s). Partial across northern US (Alaska–N Carolina), most of Canada, much of Europe and NW Africa. NASA livestream from 1:15 pm EDT. ●        US partial highlights: Presque Isle ME ~29% (contiguous-US max); NYC ~9% from ~1:07 pm EDT; Boston ~16%; Toronto ~8%; Montreal ~18%; St John’s ~53%. ●        Perseids peak 12–13 Aug under a new Moon (northern-favoured, up to ~100/hr from dark northern sites). ●        Southern Hemisphere: pre-dawn planet parade (Saturn best, near opposition; Mars, Mercury, Uranus, Neptune), brilliant Venus in the evening west, and the winter Milky Way high overhead. ●        Look-ahead: deep partial lunar eclipse 28 Aug (96% umbral), favouring the Americas. ●        SAFETY: use only ISO 12312-2 certified eclipse glasses / solar filters during any partial phase. ●        Sources: NASA; ESA; Sky & Telescope; BBC Sky at Night; EarthSky; timeanddate.com; The Planetary Society.

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Astronomy Daily S05E159 — Wednesday, 5 August 2026. In this episode: a power-saving “Big Bang” keeps Voyager 2 doing science, direct-to-phone satellites reach orbit, Curiosity finds a vast honeycomb field on its 14th Martian anniversary, and NASA’s Aspera prepares to hunt the universe’s missing gas. ① Voyager 2’s “Big Bang” power save •   JPL engineers freed up power by simultaneously switching off certain devices and substituting lower-power alternatives, while keeping the spacecraft warm enough to operate. •   The Voyagers run on radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) and lose ~4 watts per year as their plutonium decays; after nearly 50 years, power margins are razor-thin. •   The move keeps three instruments — magnetometer, plasma wave subsystem and cosmic ray subsystem — running at least a year longer; the same swap is planned for Voyager 1. •   Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause in Nov 2018 and is now >13 billion miles (21 billion km) from Earth; its southerly path means it is commanded via the Canberra Deep Space Network dish. Source:NASA/JPL Voyager blog, 4 Aug 2026 · science.nasa.gov/blogs/voyager ② AST SpaceMobile BlueBird 11–13 •   Three next-generation direct-to-smartphone satellites launched on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral (liftoff targeted 3:42 a.m. EDT, 5 Aug; backup 5:10 a.m.). •   Their phased-array antennas span ~2,400 sq ft — the largest commercial arrays ever deployed in low Earth orbit — and connect to standard, unmodified phones. •   They deliver nearly double the peak download speed of the first-generation BlueBirds (which hit ~98.9 Mbps to a phone); the company targets beta service later in 2026. Source:AST SpaceMobile / Space.com, Aug 2026 · confirm deployment before publish ③ Curiosity’s “sea of polygons” + 14 years •   Curiosity found its largest-ever field of honeycomb-like polygonal fractures (each ~4–8 cm across) in a valley nicknamed “Valle Grande” on Mount Sharp. •   The 360° panorama was captured on 19–20 June from 340 images; the polygons wrap around a ~6 m butte nicknamed “Miraflores.” •   Such patterns point to ancient water — drying mud, wet–dry cycles, or compaction — consistent with lakes and streams once present on Mount Sharp’s foothills. •   Today, 5 August, is Curiosity’s 14th landing anniversary (landed 5 Aug 2012). Source:NASA/JPL, announced ~29 Jul 2026 · jpl.nasa.gov ④ NASA’s Aspera (mission preview) •   Aspera is a shoebox-sized NASA Pioneers smallsat launching NET 15 Aug on a Rocket Lab Electron from Mahia, New Zealand. •   It is the first NASA astrophysics mission to map the circumgalactic medium — hot gas around galaxies — in ultraviolet light, tracing the “missing baryons.” •   Led by Carlos Vargas at the University of Arizona, one of the youngest principal investigators in NASA history. Source:NASA Pioneers / Rocket Lab, 2026 · rocketlabcorp.com ⑤ Skywatch •   Tonight (5 Aug): Last Quarter Moon; Mars forms a triangle with Elnath and cluster M35 (binoculars help). •   12 Aug: total solar eclipse (Arctic–Greenland–Iceland–northern Spain; partial for parts of the US) — not visible from Australia; use ISO 12312-2 eclipse glasses. •   12–13 Aug: Perseid peak under a New Moon (NH-favoured); plus a six-planet pre-dawn alignment. •   SH targets: eta-Eridanids peak 7 Aug; Sagittarius star fields; deep partial lunar eclipse 27–28 Aug (Americas + parts of Europe/Africa). Source:NASA Skywatching “What’s Up” Aug 2026; Sky & Telescope; timeanddate.com

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Astronomy Daily S05E154 — “The Reach of a Giant.” Thursday, 30 July 2026. Hosted by Anna and Avery. In this episode •    A supermassive black hole caught heating and stirring an entire galaxy cluster — turbulence reaching ~300,000 light-years, about 100× more energetic than expected (XRISM / quasar H1821+643). •    Why some “clean” white dwarfs are secretly feasting: magnetic fields funnel shredded planetary debris to the poles, aurora-style, hiding the meal. •    NASA’s Psyche used its Mars flyby as a dress rehearsal — spotting Phobos and Deimos from afar to practise for its 2029 moonlet hunt at asteroid 16 Psyche. •    A new study on keeping the road to the Moon clear: modelling how debris disperses in Distant Retrograde Orbits as cislunar traffic climbs. •    Skywatch: tonight’s double meteor shower — the Southern Delta Aquariids and Alpha Capricornids — with both-hemispheres viewing details and local times. Sources •    Yamada, S. et al., “Vigorous turbulence driven by quasar-mode feedback in a cluster core,” Nature Astronomy, 28 July 2026 (DOI 10.1038/s41550-026-02939-x; arXiv 2607.24911). Tohoku University release. •    “White Dwarfs Eat More Planetary Debris Than Thought, But Magnetic Fields Hide It,” Universe Today, 29 July 2026 (Pham et al., arXiv 2607.20747). •    “NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft Aces Mars Flyby,” NASA JPL / ScienceDaily, 28 July 2026. •    “The Risks of Debris Between the Earth and the Moon for Future Exploration,” Universe Today, 29 July 2026 (Chinese Academy of Sciences DRO study). •    Double meteor shower peak: American Meteor Society; NASA; Scientific American; CNN; National Geographic, 28–30 July 2026. Correction / caveat desk •    Skywatch numbers assume the ~98% waning Buck Moon (full 29 Jul). Faint Delta Aquariids will be washed out; the Alpha Capricornid fireballs are the reliable catch tonight.

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Astronomy Daily S05E152 — “Reading the Heat” · Tuesday 28 July 2026. Hosts Anna & Avery. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has taken the first-ever temperature reading beneath the surface of Io, Jupiter’s volcanic moon — and the technique behind it could reshape how we study icy ocean moons and even volcanoes on Earth. We also look at why JWST’s “Little Red Dots” might be globular clusters being born, the first SETI search built from archived ALMA data (and its six-million-star surprise), and a live burst of space weather feeding into a meteor-filled — if Moon-washed — skywatch. In this episode ●        Juno reads Io’s subsurface temperature for the first time — >20°C rise within a few metres, heat flow up to ~30× Earth’s average, and a remarkably smooth, low-density surface. ●        Why the method matters: a multi-depth microwave thermometer that works from orbit — promising for Europa, Enceladus, and terrestrial volcanology. ●        JWST’s “Little Red Dots” may be globular clusters in formation, powered by a short-lived supermassive star — linking two long-standing mysteries. ●        The first SETI survey of archived ALMA data opens the millimetre band — and reveals “stellar bycatch” of 6.1 million background stars. ●        Live space weather: an M3.2 flare from region AR4494 and a glancing CME, with G1–G2 storms and possible aurorae, north and south. ●        Skywatch: meteor week under the full Buck Moon (29 July), the Alpha Capricornid fireball tip, evening Venus, pre-dawn Saturn/Mars/Mercury — and Jupiter vanishing behind the Sun. Sources ●        NASA/JPL — “NASA’s Juno Takes Temperature of Jupiter’s Fiery Moon Io” (22 July 2026); Brown et al., J. Geophys. Res.: Planets, DOI 10.1029/2025JE009622. ●        Chisholm et al., “Little Red Dots as Globular Clusters in Formation,” Astrophysical Journal Letters (press cycle 20 July 2026; UT Austin / McDonald Observatory). ●        L. Mason (University of Manchester), first ALMA-archive SETI survey, RAS National Astronomy Meeting 2026. ●        Space-weather status: EarthSky Sun news / NOAA SWPC (M3.2 flare AR4494, 26 July; 24 July CME; G1–G2 outlook, 27–28 July). ●        Skywatch data: EarthSky, Star Walk, American Meteor Society, NASA — Southern Delta Aquariids (peak ~30 July), Alpha Capricornids (30–31 July), full Buck Moon 29 July, Jupiter solar conjunction 29 July.
 

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Astronomy Daily · S05E151 · “The Faint Little World Has Its Day” · Monday 27 July 2026 · Hosts Anna & Avery. Pluto has its brightest night of the year — so we go deep on the world nobody can agree how to label. Then a crew comes home after 241 days, the galaxy’s most common planet turns out to maybe hide oceans of molten rock, and the first black hole ever photographed gets a sharper, two-colour read. In this episode LEAD — PLUTO AT OPPOSITION •    Tonight Pluto sits opposite the Sun in Capricornus, near its closest point to Earth (~34.5 AU) and at its brightest for the year — yet still only magnitude ~15. •    The full arc: Percival Lowell’s “Planet X,” Clyde Tombaugh’s 1930 discovery by blink comparator, and the name suggested by 11-year-old Venetia Burney. •    The 2006 IAU reclassification to “dwarf planet” (the “clearing the neighbourhood” rule) — and the still-live debate between dynamical and geophysical definitions of a planet. •    What New Horizons found in 2015: the nitrogen-ice plain of Sputnik Planitia, the famous “heart,” water-ice mountains, a hazy atmosphere, and a possible subsurface ocean. STORY 2 — HOME AFTER 241 DAYS •    Soyuz MS-28 lands in Kazakhstan with NASA’s Chris Williams and cosmonauts Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev; ~3,856 orbits, 102M+ miles; Expedition 74→75 handover to Jessica Meir. STORY 3 — SUB-NEPTUNES •    New ASU modelling: deep clouds of vaporised rock and salt can act as a thermal blanket, potentially sustaining a hidden magma ocean and reshaping how we read JWST spectra. STORY 4 — M87 IN TWO COLOURS •    A Shanghai Astronomical Observatory-led team builds the first spatially-resolved dual-frequency spectral map of M87* (1.3 mm + 3.5 mm, EHT + GMVA), linking the famous ring to the real physics of plasma at the event horizon. SKYWATCH — BOTH HEMISPHERES •    South: Southern Delta Aquariids peaking (ZHR ~25) + Comet 10P/Tempel improving into August. North: Mu Cephei, Herschel’s Garnet Star, high in Cepheus. Both: Pluto at opposition, Saturn after midnight in Pisces. Caveat: a ~95% Moon washes out faint targets this week. Sources •    NASA — “Astronaut Chris Williams, Crewmates Return from Space Station.” •    ASU News / The Astrophysical Journal Letters — Mukherjee et al., clouds and the interiors of sub-Neptunes. •    The Astrophysical Journal Letters — Zhao et al., “Spatially Resolved Spectral Properties of M87* on Event Horizon Scales” (DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/ae84ca). •    Explore Scientific / Star Walk / astronomy.com — July 2026 observing notes (Pluto opposition, Southern Delta Aquariids, Comet 10P/Tempel, Mu Cephei).

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Astronomy Daily · S05E150 · “Lucky Thirteen” · Saturday 25 July 2026. Your Weekend Wrap: Starship Flight 13 finally flies and floats, the strongest exomoon candidate yet, a robotic satellite-servicer on its way to GEO, and what the Moon’s far side reveals about Earth — plus a both-hemispheres skywatch. In this episode Chapter Segment 00:00 Cold open & headlines 01:30 LEAD: Starship Flight 13 flies — softest splashdown yet, first real Starlink V3 deploy 09:00 Exo-satellite at CD-35 2722 — strongest exomoon candidate yet (Nature) 11:45 Northrop Grumman MRV-MEP — a mechanic for the geostationary belt 14:30 Chang’e-6 — the Moon’s far side records Earth’s magnetosphere (Nature Geoscience) 17:15 Skywatch — Buck Moon, Delta Aquariids, the 12 Aug Perseids + total solar eclipse 20:45 Sign-off Sources & further reading STARSHIP FLIGHT 13 •     Space.com — Starship’s “softest splashdown” yet after Flight 13 — https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/spacexs-starship-megarocket-makes-the-softest-splashdown-ever-after-launching-next-gen-starlink-satellites-in-flight-13-test-video •     UPI — Starship successful flight test, splashes down in Indian Ocean — https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/07/24/Starship-has-successful-flight-test-splash-down-in-Indian-Ocean/3791784840519/ •     CNN — Starship hits key milestones in “Lucky 13” test flight — https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/24/science/live-news/spacex-starship-flight-13-launch EXO-SATELLITE CD-35 2722 •     ESO — New “exomoon” detection challenges cosmic labels — https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2610/ •     Nature (paper) — Planetary-mass exosatellite around a substellar companion — https://www.nature.com/ •     Phys.org — Jupiter-mass “exomoon” orbiting a brown dwarf — https://phys.org/news/2026-07-jupiter-mass-exomoon-orbiting-brown.html MRV-MEP SATELLITE SERVICING •     Northrop Grumman — MRV launches, ushering in a new era of in-space servicing — https://news.northropgrumman.com/launch/northrop-grummans-mission-robotic-vehicle-launches-ushering-in-a-new-era-of-in-space-servicing •     Spaceflight Now — Novel geosynchronous robotic servicing satellite launch — https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/07/21/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-novel-geosynchronous-robotic-servicing-satellite-on-decade-long-mission/ CHANG’E-6 FAR-SIDE SOLAR WIND •     Nature Geoscience — Deeper solar wind penetration on the Moon’s far side — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-026-02042-w •     EurekAlert! / CAS — Chang’e-6 samples reveal how Earth...

Astronomers have confirmed the first moon-like object beyond our solar system — and immediately discovered our vocabulary cannot handle it. A Jupiter-mass world orbits a brown dwarf, which orbits a red dwarf, seventy light-years away. Is it a moon? A planet? Something we have not named yet? Also on today’s show: the Milky Way’s most powerful particle accelerator is confirmed in the direction of Altair, out-punching the Large Hadron Collider by a factor of a hundred. Chandra catches a black hole starving a galaxy it does not even live in. China flies the world’s largest solid rocket from the open ocean for the first time. Starship Flight 13 gets another window. And the Moon meets the heart of the Scorpion. Chapters Time Chapter 00:00 Cold open — what is a moon, exactly? 00:35 Welcome and headlines 01:15 The first exo-satellite — CD-35 2722 05:55 The galaxy’s most powerful particle accelerator 10:00 The Red Potato galaxy and its hostile neighbour 13:35 Gravity-1 launches from the open sea 16:55 Starship Flight 13 — when and where to watch 19:10 Skywatch — the Moon and Antares 22:30 Sign-off Story sources 1. First confirmed exo-satellite •      Hoy, K., Zurlo, A., Peña R, P.A. et al. “Planetary-mass exosatellite detected around the substellar companion of a star.” Nature 655, 865–869 (2026). •      European Southern Observatory release eso2610a, 23 July 2026. •      Observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope, Cerro Paranal, Chile. 2. Proton PeVatron confirmed •      Mizuno, T., Sano, H., Murase, T., Oka, T., Suzuki, H., Nakahara, N. “Hadronic Scenario for Galactic PeVatron LHAASO J1912+1014u Supported by Fermi-LAT Gamma-Ray Data and FUGIN CO Data.” The Astrophysical Journal, 16 July 2026. •      Hiroshima University news release; instruments: Fermi-LAT, Nobeyama 45 m / FUGIN survey, Chandra X-ray Observatory. 3. The Red Potato galaxy •      NASA / Chandra X-ray Observatory news release, July 2026. Wang, W., Cantalupo, S., Travascio, A. et al., University of Milano-Bicocca. •      Galaxy designation MQN01 J004131.9-493704, redshift approximately 3.25. Original JWST identification announced January 2026; the Chandra jet result is the new element. 4. Gravity-1 open-sea launch •      Orienspace Gravity-1 Y4, third flight. Liftoff 0254 UTC, 22 July 2026, from a launch service ship approximately 170 km east of Shanghai. •      Reporting via SpaceNews, CGTN and Space.com. Nine payloads including six Huantian constellation satellites. 5. Starship Flight 13 •      SpaceX; live coverage via Spaceflight Now and Space.com. Booster 20 / Ship 40, second flight of Starship V3. •      Launch window opens 24 July 2026 at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 UTC). Payload: 20 Starlink V3 satellites. 6. Skywatch •      Astronomy.com Sky This Week; timeanddate.com Moon guide; EarthSky visible planets guide. •      Moon 0.6° south of Antares, 6:00 p.m. EDT 24 July. Full Buck Moon 29 July, 14:36 UTC, in Capricornus. 
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Astronomy Daily S05E145 — “Arrival” — Monday, 20 July 2026. On the 57th anniversary of Apollo 11, we cover a first-of-its-kind launch, a Mars flyby science haul, a four-billion-year-old Martian record, a habitable-zone world with a likely atmosphere, shrimp feeding in simulated microgravity, and the new science of listening to black holes ring. In This Episode (01:30) India goes private in orbit — Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 aces its debut “Mission Aagaman,” making India the third nation with a private orbital launch capability. Plus a Starship Flight 13 update (NET 23–24 July). (05:30) Psyche’s Mars gift — NASA/JPL releases the science haul from Psyche’s 15 May Mars gravity assist, including the magnetometer’s first measurement of another body. (08:30) Mars keeps the receipts — Perseverance examines the “Broom Point member” on Jezero’s rim — some of the oldest terrain any rover has studied, recording ~4 billion years of impacts. (11:30) A world holding its breath — A Science paper detects escaping helium at LHS 1140b, pointing to a replenished, substantial atmosphere on a habitable-zone super-Earth. (A different planet from Friday’s story!) (15:00) Space shrimp — Okayama University of Science shows crustaceans can feed under simulated microgravity — a step toward closed-loop space food systems. (17:30) The bells of spacetime — A major review shows black-hole “spectroscopy” — reading ringdown gravitational waves — is becoming a real test of Einstein, ahead of the Einstein Telescope, Cosmic Explorer and LISA. (20:30) Skywatch — A coronal-hole solar wind stream brings a chance of minor aurora australis for far-southern latitudes around 21–22 July. Story Sources ●        Vikram-1 / Mission Aagaman — Space.com; Skyroot Aerospace; ESA/Manorama coverage (18 July 2026). ●        Psyche Mars flyby data — NASA/JPL release (17 July 2026). ●        Perseverance “Broom Point member” — Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, Imperial College London-led. ●        LHS 1140b helium escape — Science, Harvard-led (16 July 2026); Magellan Clay telescope. ●        Space shrimp — Microgravity Science and Technology; Okayama University of Science Space Aquaculture Project. ●        Black-hole spectroscopy — Classical and Quantum Gravity review (Birmingham / Johns Hopkins / Lisbon). ●        Skywatch — EarthSky Sun news; UK Met Office & Australian BOM space weather (19 July 2026). Astronomy Daily is part of the Bitesz.com Podcast Network. Web: astronomydaily.io — Social: @AstroDailyPod

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Anna and Avery kick off with a decade-long game of cosmic hide-and-seek that has finally ended: Beta Pictoris d, the faintest exoplanet ever directly imaged from Earth, found lurking in more than ten years of archival images — and orbiting a star in the southern constellation Pictor. Then it's the completion of VLASS, the sharpest radio map of the whole sky ever made, arriving just as the Rubin Observatory's optical survey switches on. The James Webb Space Telescope has caught a supermassive black hole feeding itself in the Centaurus Cluster — the missing link in a decades-old mystery. A Pluto system double bill follows: the first landslides ever identified on Pluto, and evidence written in Charon's mountains that the big moon once spun more than ten times faster than it does today — both delivered by New Horizons data from 2015. Finally, SpaceX's latest FCC filing reveals Starlink satellites made over 355,000 collision-avoidance manoeuvres in the past year — nearly one dodge per satellite per week — and experts are warning about where the trend leads. Plus dark-sky Southern Hemisphere stargazing and a Starship Flight 13 launch reminder. Chapters •       00:00 — Intro & billboard •       01:30 — Beta Pictoris d: the faintest exoplanet ever imaged from Earth •       05:30 — VLASS complete: the sharpest radio map of the sky •       08:45 — JWST reveals how supermassive black holes feed •       12:15 — Pluto has landslides (Pluto double, part 1) •       15:00 — Charon's slowing spin (Pluto double, part 2) •       17:45 — Starlink's 355,000 collision dodges in a year •       20:45 — Southern Hemisphere skywatch + Starship Flight 13 reminder •       22:30 — Outro Story sources •       Beta Pictoris d: ESO release eso2609 (eso.org) · The Astrophysical Journal Letters · space.com · phys.org •       VLASS completion: NRAO release (public.nrao.edu/news/vlass-observations-complete) · phys.org •       JWST / NGC 4696: Université de Montréal · The Astrophysical Journal Letters · phys.org / EurekAlert •       Pluto landslides: Icarus (Discenza et al. 2026) · phys.org · Discover Magazine · Science News •       Charon despinning: Nature Communications (Chen et al. 2026, DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-75069-7) · phys.org · Gizmodo •       Starlink manoeuvres: SpaceX semiannual FCC constellation status report, via space.com Boilerplate Astronomy Daily is part of the Bitesz.com Podcast Network. Show notes, links and the full back catalogue at astronomydaily.io. Follow @AstroDailyPod on X, Instagram, TikTok and Tumblr. New episodes every day.

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Astronomy Daily — S05E140 | Tuesday 14 July 2026 | Hosts: Anna & Avery Space mirrors are officially cleared for launch — and astronomers are sounding the alarm. In today's episode, Anna and Avery unpack the FCC's approval of Reflect Orbital's Eärendil-1, the first of a proposed constellation of sunlight-reflecting satellites, and what tens of thousands of orbital mirrors could mean for the night sky. Then it's off to the geostationary belt, where astronomers using clever image-stacking — with help from Siding Spring Observatory and the ANU — have revealed a minefield of invisible debris, most of it in no public catalogue. Also on the show: physicists in New York recreate black hole energy extraction on a benchtop, validating a 50-year-old Penrose prediction with 'synthetic rotation'; the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile turns on its axis for the very first time — 3,500 tonnes floating on 80 microns of oil; and University of Sydney's Dr Manisha Caleb and colleagues lay out how the Square Kilometre Array will turn fast radio bursts into a survey tool for the invisible universe. Plus a quick Starship Flight 13 update (now NET Thursday 16 July after a full 33-engine static fire), the story of Avi Loeb's appointment to chair the White House UAP Science Advisory Council, and a skywatch built around tonight's super new Moon. Stories & sources •       01. FCC approves Reflect Orbital Eärendil-1 space mirror — SpaceNews / Space.com / Engadget •       02. Faint debris "minefield" in geosynchronous orbit (DebrisWatch II, Journal of the Astronautical Sciences) — University of Warwick / Phys.org / Space.com •       03. Penrose superradiance via synthetic rotation (Nature) — CUNY ASRC / EurekAlert / Phys.org •       04. ELT completes first full rotation of its 3,500-tonne structure — ESO Picture of the Week / Space.com •       05. Fast radio bursts as cosmological probes with the SKA (Caleb et al.) — Universe Today / arXiv •       06. Starship Flight 13 slips to NET 16 July; full 33-engine static fire complete — Space.com •       07. Avi Loeb appointed chair of White House UAP Science Advisory Council — Space.com / AP coverage Skywatch highlights •       Tonight (14 July): super new Moon — darkest skies of the month; Milky Way core overhead for southern observers •       Evenings: Venus blazing in the west in Leo; crescent Moon joins Regulus & Venus on 16–17 July •       Pre-dawn: Saturn high with rings tilted ~9°; Mars passes 5° north of Aldebaran on 14 July Visit astronomydaily.io for all episodes and the free newsletter. Follow @AstroDailyPod. Astronomy Daily is part of the Bitesz.com Podcast Network.

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S05E137: Euclid uncovers 31 ancient quasars including the two most distant ever observed, Roman Space Telescope reaches a major pre-launch milestone at Kennedy Space Center, China details its plans for a sunward asteroid early-warning network, Hayabusa2 reveals asteroid Torifune is a two-lobed “snowman” contact binary, NASA's GRITSS CubeSat launches to sharpen global positioning precision, and we close with tonight's Moon-free skywatching window. Sources •          Euclid Consortium / ESA — “Euclid discovers the most ancient quasars in the Universe,” Astronomy & Astrophysics, July 6, 2026 •          NASA Science — “NASA's Roman Launch Preparations Proceed,” science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman, July 9, 2026 •          Space.com — “China announces plan to build early-warning system for dangerous asteroids,” July 9, 2026 •          JAXA — “Hayabusa2 captures images of asteroid Torifune,” global.jaxa.jp, July 6, 2026 •          NASA / SatNews — “NASA and ISISPACE Deploy GRITSS CubeSat to Advance Orbital Reference Frame Precision,” July 9, 2026 •          Astronomy.com — “The Sky This Week, July 10–17, 2026”

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Today on Astronomy Daily: Japan's Hayabusa2 pulls off a nail-biting high-speed asteroid flyby, James Webb finds the same unexplained chemical mystery on Titan AND Pluto, a neutrino detector may have caught the universe's oldest supernova echo, a wild new theory tries to solve the black hole information paradox, we wrap up the weekend's aurora action, and we look at when NASA's New Horizons might finally cross into interstellar space.
Monday, July 6, 2026 1. Hayabusa2's Flyby of Asteroid Torifune •        JAXA's Hayabusa2 spacecraft flew within ~800 metres of near-Earth asteroid (98943) Torifune on July 5, 2026, at a relative speed of about 5.25 km/s (~18,000 km/h). •        This is an extended-mission flyby, not a sample return — Hayabusa2 already delivered Ryugu samples to Earth in December 2020. •        Purpose: engineering demonstration of high-precision navigation relevant to planetary defense (asteroid deflection technology). •        Torifune is roughly 450 metres across. Next stop for Hayabusa2: rendezvous with asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031. •        Source: JAXA/ISAS, Nikkei Asia, phys.org (July 5, 2026). 2. Mystery Molecule Found on Both Titan and Pluto •        James Webb Space Telescope data reveals an unexplained absorption feature at ~5.11 micrometres on the surfaces of Titan (Saturn's largest moon) and Pluto. •        Evidence points to a surface origin rather than atmospheric origin, based on limb-vs-disc-center comparison on Titan. •        Candidate compounds include allenes, but no confirmed identification yet. •        Pluto's absorption line is roughly three times broader than Titan's at the same central wavelength. •        Study led by Dr. Bruno Bézard's team (Paris Observatory); posted to arXiv June 11, 2026 — not yet peer-reviewed. 3. Super-Kamiokande's Hint of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background •        Super-Kamiokande collaboration presented results at Neutrino 2026 (UC Irvine) after analyzing ~5,000 days of data. •        Found a statistically significant excess of events between 13.3–81.3 MeV — consistent with the long-predicted Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background (DSNB). •        Significance: 2.6-sigma (~99.5% confidence) — below the 5-sigma discovery threshold, so described as an 'indication,' not a confirmed detection. •        If confirmed, DSNB would offer a new way to study the cosmic history of core-collapse supernovae via neutrinos rather than light. 4. A Theoretical Fix for the Black Hole Information Paradox •        New theoretical study proposes black holes stop evaporating just before vanishing completely, leaving a stable Planck-scale remnant (~9×10⁻⁴¹ kg). •        Mechanism: a repulsive force from spacetime torsion in a 7-dimensional Einstein-Cartan model, active at extreme (Planckian) densities. •        Proposal: quantum information is preserved via long-lived 'vibrations' in the remnant's internal torsion field. •        This is a theoretical/mathematical proposal, not an observational result. Researchers: Pinčák, Pigazzini, Pudlák, Bartoš. 5. Weekend Geomagnetic Storm / Aurora Wrap-Up •        X1.1 solar flare (June 30) and associated CME triggered a G3 (strong) geomagnetic storm around July 3–4, 2026. •        Aurora borealis visible as far south as Utah, Colorado, and Nevada in the continental US. •        NOAA SWPC reports conditions easing to unsettled/G1 levels through July 6 as CME effects wane. 6. Forecasting New Horizons' Crossing Into Interstellar Space •        SwRI researchers (lead: Dr. Jonathan Gasser) combined solar wind forecasting with heliosphere models to predict New Horizons' termination shock crossing. •        Forecast window: 2029–2040, with possible multiple crossings as the heliosphere expands/contracts with the solar cycle. •        New Horizons is currently ~66 AU from the Sun. Voyager 2 crossed its termination shock at 84 AU in 2007, with a 46% solar wind speed drop. •        New Horizons...

A landmark day in space news: the Vera Rubin Observatory officially begins its ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, NASA reveals it may send a spare nuclear-powered Mars rover to the Moon's south pole, Blue Origin shows off its rebuilt launch pad a month after the New Glenn explosion, Rocket Lab strikes an $8 billion deal to acquire Iridium, a brief Swift/LINK scrub update, and scientists hold the first-ever summit on sending humans to Titan. 1. Rubin Observatory Begins Its Ten-Year Cosmic Movie The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory officially began the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on June 30, 2026, following a months-long commissioning process after handover from construction to operations last October. Rubin's 8.4-metre Simonyi Survey Telescope, fitted with the largest digital camera ever built (3,200 megapixels), will scan the entire southern sky every few nights for the next decade, producing a new image roughly every 40 seconds. Each area of sky will be revisited around 800 times over the survey's ten years, generating up to 7 million nightly alerts and around 10 terabytes of data per night. The final dataset is expected to contain billions of objects. Source: NOIRLab / SLAC / Rubin Observatory press release, June 30, 2026   2. Swift/LINK: Scrubbed, Retargeted for Tonight The launch of Katalyst Space's LINK servicing spacecraft — riding the final Pegasus XL rocket to rendezvous with NASA's Swift Observatory — was scrubbed Tuesday, June 30, due to unfavourable weather over Kwajalein Atoll. The next attempt is targeted for July 1 at 9:43 p.m. local Kwajalein time (5:43 a.m. EDT). Source: NASA Science blog, June 30, 2026   3. NASA's Moon Base Update: PROMISE Rover & New Lander Contracts NASA awarded roughly $590 million across Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines for four new CLPS lander missions targeted for late 2028, delivering science and technology demonstration payloads to the Moon. NASA is also considering repurposing an engineering development unit of its Mars Perseverance/Curiosity rovers as a new lunar rover named PROMISE (Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration), powered by a radioisotope generator for operation in permanently shadowed polar craters. Source: NASA news release and briefing, June 30, 2026   4. Blue Origin Reveals Its Rebuilt Launch Pad One month after a New Glenn rocket exploded during a static-fire test at Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 36A on May 28, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp announced the company will rebuild the pad in a new 'horizontal/vertical hybrid' configuration rather than recreating the original. Reconstruction has begun, with Blue Origin targeting a return to flight before the end of 2026. Early analysis points to the aft section of the first stage as the source of the anomaly, though the investigation continues. Source: Blue Origin company statement / SpaceNews / CNBC, June 30, 2026   5. Rocket Lab's $8 Billion Bid for Iridium Rocket Lab announced a definitive agreement to acquire satellite communications operator Iridium Communications in a cash-and-stock deal valued at approximately $8 billion — $54 per share, a 24.1% premium. The deal combines Rocket Lab's launch and satellite manufacturing business with Iridium's 66-satellite L-band constellation and 2.5 million-plus subscriber base, aiming to create a vertically integrated space company. The transaction is expected to close in mid-2027. Source: Rocket Lab / Iridium joint announcement, June 29, 2026   6. Mapping Humanity's Next Giant Leap — to Titan The first-ever Humans to Titan Summit was held June 11–12 in Boulder, Colorado, gathering planetary scientists and engineers to explore the concept of a future crewed mission to Saturn's largest moon. Organised by Amanda Hendrix of the Planetary Science Institute and hosted by the Southwest Research Institute, the summit addressed spacesuits, habitats, transportation and Titan's...

In this episode of Astronomy Daily (S05E125), hosts Anna and Avery cover six major stories from the frontiers of space science and astronomy, including the most detailed image ever taken of the Milky Way's core, a Hubble discovery that solves a decades-old cosmological mystery, the oldest confirmed asteroid impact crater on Earth, a pair of impossibly light exoplanets, an impending lunar impact from a SpaceX rocket stage, and a live solar weather alert for Southern Hemisphere aurora watchers.   Stories Covered Story 1 —Euclid's Record Milky Way Galactic Bulge Image: ESA's Euclid telescope releases the largest, highest-resolution visible-light image ever made of the Milky Way's central bulge, containing more than 60 million stars. The image serves as a baseline for NASA's upcoming Roman Space Telescope's microlensing survey. (ESA / NASA, June 24–25 2026) Story 2 —Hubble Catches Galaxy Clearing the Cosmic Fog: Galaxy MXDFz4.4, observed 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, has been caught emitting ionising ultraviolet light — direct evidence of how the early universe's hydrogen fog was cleared. Published in The Astrophysical Journal, June 23 2026. Story 3 —Earth's Oldest Asteroid Crater Dated to 3 Billion Years: Curtin University researchers precisely date the North Pole Dome impact structure in Western Australia's Pilbara region to 3.024 billion years ago — the oldest known impact crater on Earth, beating the next oldest by ~800 million years. Published in Geology, June 23 2026. Story 4 —Super-Puff Planets Lighter Than Cotton Candy: An Oxford-led international team confirms TOI-791 b and c — two Jupiter-sized exoplanets with densities lower than cotton candy (0.038 and 0.047 g/cm³), making them the lowest-density giant planets ever found. Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, June 26 2026. Story 5 —SpaceX Falcon 9 Upper Stage to Impact Moon on August 5: A spent Falcon 9 upper stage from the January 2025 Blue Ghost / Hakuto-R launch is on course to strike the Moon near Einstein Crater on August 5 2026. Visibility from Earth is uncertain, but NASA's LRO will image the resulting crater. NASA SSERVI, June 2026. Skywatching —A G1 geomagnetic storm struck overnight June 25, with further unsettled conditions expected June 26–27 as coronal hole streams strengthen and new sunspot region AR4478 rotates into Earth view. Aurora possible for Tasmania, New Zealand's South Island and southern Australia tonight.

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In this episode of Astronomy Daily, Anna and Avery explore six remarkable stories from the frontiers of space science. JWST has determined that interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS likely formed 10–12 billion years ago — before our Sun existed — making it the oldest object ever chemically characterised. NASA's Perseverance rover has delivered its most robust organic detection yet in Mars's Jezero Crater. ESA's Euclid telescope has released the largest and most detailed visible-light image ever taken of the Milky Way's galactic bulge. NASA's plan to deorbit the ISS into the Pacific Ocean faces new legal and environmental scrutiny. Research from the University of Glasgow reveals the Chicxulub impact crater hosted an underground hydrothermal system for eight million years — four times longer than previously estimated. And astronomers have discovered the first-ever pair of sibling supernova remnants, hiding in the glow of the famous Jellyfish Nebula.   Story 1 — JWST & 3I/ATLAS Origin • Cordiner et al. (2026). 'Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS.' Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10771-6 • Opitom et al. (2026). 'High nitrogen and carbon isotopic ratios in the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.' Nature (in press). arXiv: 2603.07187 • NASA Science: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-finds-clues-to-ancient-distant-origin-of-comet-3i-atlas/ • Science Magazine: https://www.science.org/content/article/interstellar-comet-unlike-anything-seen-our-solar-system   Story 2 — Perseverance Organic Detection • Murphy et al. (2026). 'Spatially distributed complex organic matter detected in an ancient river valley in Jezero crater, Mars.' Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adx0047 • Space.com: https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/did-nasa-just-find-evidence-of-ancient-life-on-mars-perseverance-rover-spots-complex-carbon-in-red-planet-rocks • ScienceAlert: https://www.sciencealert.com/perseverance-finds-complex-organic-compounds-in-strange-mars-rocks   Story 3 — Euclid Milky Way Image • ESA Euclid Mission Press Release, 24 June 2026 • NASA JPL: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/roman-space-telescope/euclid-view-of-milky-way-heart-previews-core-survey-by-nasas-roman/ • Space.com: https://www.space.com/astronomy/galaxies/this-is-the-largest-and-most-detailed-image-of-our-milky-way-with-over-60-million-stars-and-50-exoplanet-systems • CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/euclid-telescope-most-detailed-image-milky-way-stars/   Story 4 — ISS Deorbit Environmental Concerns • US Government Accountability Office report on ISS deorbit, June 2026 • Space.com: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/international-space-station/nasa-wants-to-dump-the-iss-in-the-sea-experts-say-the-plan-raises-serious-concerns-for-ocean-health • The Ocean Foundation statement, June 2026   Story 5 — Chicxulub Hydrothermal System • Pickersgill et al. (2026). 'Hydrothermal activity persisted for at least 8 Myr at Chicxulub.' Communications Earth & Environment. DOI: 10.1038/s43247-026-03618-5 • Phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2026-06-dino-asteroid-fueled-underground-life.html • EarthSky: https://earthsky.org/earth/dinosaur-killing-asteroid-underground-hydrothermal-habitat/   Story 6 — Jellyfish Nebula Sibling Remnant • Astrophysicists' paper on IC 443 sibling supernova remnant, Universe Today, June 23 2026 • Universe Today: https://www.universetoday.com/

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This weekend's Astronomy Daily wraps up the biggest stories from across the cosmos, starting with two completely fresh discoveries — a 1976 ocean rock that's turned out to hold atomic-scale proof of an ancient neutron star collision, and a record-breaking rocket launch from Europe's Ariane 6. Then we wind back through the week for our four biggest headlines: a new crew for Artemis III, JWST's salty 'Pink Planet' discovery, an update on the daring Swift Observatory rescue mission, and China's Tianwen-2 closing in on its target asteroid.   Story 1: A Kilonova's Fingerprint, Found in a 1976 Ocean Rock •       A rock sample dredged from the Pacific seafloor in 1976 has been found to contain a few hundred atoms of plutonium radioisotopes. •       The plutonium originated from a kilonova — a collision between two neutron stars — that occurred over 100 million years ago. •       Stellar debris from the merger settled to Earth and was slowly incorporated into a ferromanganese crust on the ocean floor. •       Isotope ratios provide the strongest physical clues yet to what created the elements and roughly when the merger occurred. •       Study published 18 June 2026.   Story 2: Ariane 6 Smashes Its Own Heaviest-Payload Record •       On 17 June 2026, an Ariane 64 rocket launched 36 Amazon Leo satellites from French Guiana (mission VA269 / LE-03). •       First flight of new P160C solid boosters — about a metre longer than the previous P120C, holding up to 156 tonnes of propellant each. •       Boosters deliver roughly a 10% performance increase, raising Ariane 64's LEO capacity to approximately 22 tonnes. •       The mission broke the 13-year record for heaviest payload ever launched by an Ariane rocket, previously held by the 2013 ATV 'Albert Einstein' resupply flight. •       Eighth Ariane 6 launch overall; 100th Amazon Leo satellite deployed by Arianespace.   Story 3: Artemis III Crew Revealed •       NASA announced the Artemis III crew on 9 June 2026 at Johnson Space Center: Commander Randy Bresnik, Pilot Luca Parmitano (ESA), and Mission Specialists Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas, with Bob Hines as backup. •       The Artemis II crew (Wiseman, Glover, Koch, Hansen) symbolically passed their lunar baton to the new crew. •       Artemis III is a two-week test flight in low Earth orbit to test docking procedures between Orion and commercial landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin. •       Targeted for launch as early as late 2027, ahead of a planned lunar surface landing in 2028. •       Will be Andre Douglas's first spaceflight.   Story 4: JWST Cracks the 'Pink Planet' Mystery •       JWST has confirmed salt clouds in the atmosphere of GJ504b, the 'Pink Planet,' located 57 light-years away. •       First direct evidence of salt clouds on a cold substellar companion object, a phenomenon theorised 15 years ago. •       At approximately 550°F, GJ504b is the coldest companion object ever directly imaged. •       Its true nature remains uncertain — it may be a giant planet or a brown dwarf. •       Research led by a Northwestern University team.   Story 5: The Swift Rescue Mission Heads for the Pacific •       NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory (orbiting since 2004) faces premature reentry due to orbital decay accelerated by recent solar activity. •       Katalyst Space Technologies' LINK robotic servicing spacecraft will attempt to grapple and boost Swift to a safer ~600km orbit. •       LINK launches on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, carried by Stargazer, the last flying Lockheed L-1011 TriStar. •       Stargazer departed NASA Wallops Flight Facility on 18 June 2026, en route to Kwajalein Atoll via California and Hawai'i. •       Launch targeted for 27 June 2026; if successful, it will be the first capture of an unprepared US government satellite by a commercial vehicle.   Story 6: Tianwen-2 Closes In on Kamo'oalewa •       China's Tianwen-2 spacecraft, launched May 2025, completed orbital insertion at near-Earth asteroid...

Welcome back to Astronomy Daily! In today's episode, Anna and Avery cover six of the biggest stories in space and astronomy for Friday June nineteenth, twenty twenty-six — from a salty surprise on a mysterious pink world to a little rover completing a marathon on Mars.   Story 1: JWST Reveals Salty Clouds on the 'Pink Planet' GJ504b Northwestern University astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to finally crack open the spectrum of GJ504b — the so-called 'Pink Planet' 57 light-years away. The discovery, published in The Astronomical Journal on June 18, reveals an atmosphere filled with exotic chemistry and salt clouds unlike anything previously observed. At just 550°F, it's the coldest planetary-mass companion ever directly imaged. Whether it's a giant planet or a brown dwarf remains an open question, but its salty skies are a first for astronomy. Study led by Aneesh Baburaj, Northwestern University's CIERA. Story 2: Astronomers Solve the Mystery of Black Holes' Delayed Radio 'Burps' Using the NSF's Very Large Array, a team led by Kate Alexander (University of Arizona) has found that roughly 40% of all tidal disruption events — moments when a supermassive black hole shreds a passing star — produce a powerful delayed radio burst months to years after the initial flare. The study, announced June 16, also identifies a chemical fingerprint in early optical spectra that can predict which black holes are likely to produce these late-stage outbursts, giving astronomers a roadmap for long-term monitoring. Story 3: SpaceX Launches NROL-179 — the 14th NRO Proliferated Architecture Mission SpaceX launched NROL-179 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in the early hours of June 19, making it the 14th mission dedicated to building out the National Reconnaissance Office's 'proliferated architecture' — a constellation of small, resilient surveillance satellites. It was the 71st Falcon 9 launch of 2026. Mission details including satellite count and orbit remain classified. Story 4: Astrobotic Unveils Griffin-1: NASA's Moon Base II Lander Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic publicly revealed its Griffin-1 lunar lander on June 15, ahead of environmental testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Designated 'Moon Base II' by NASA, Griffin-1 is a 650kg-capacity infrastructure-class lander targeting the lunar south pole region. It will carry 10 payloads from 6 nations, led by Astrolab's FLIP rover (500kg), and is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in Q4 2026. Astrobotic has been recently acquired by Voyager Technologies. Story 5: Lucy Reveals the Life Story of Double-Lobed Asteroid Donaldjohanson Results from NASA's Lucy spacecraft's April 2025 flyby of asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson were published in Science on June 18. The study, led by Simone Marchi (Southwest Research Institute), reveals a contact binary with a surface over 40 million years old and a younger neck (under 20 million years) built by slow-motion landslides triggered as sunlight gradually braked the asteroid's rotation from a few hours to its current 252.6-hour period. Donaldjohanson is likely a fragment of the Erigone family's parent body, destroyed ~155 million years ago. Story 6: Perseverance Rover Completes a Marathon Distance on Mars NASA's Perseverance rover has driven more than 26.2 miles (42.2 km) on Mars since landing in Jezero Crater in February 2021 — completing a marathon distance. The rover continues science operations beyond the crater's western rim, studying some of the oldest rocks in the mission's history. Perseverance is approaching Opportunity's all-time distance record of 45.16 km for a rover on another world. Mission operations are funded through at least 2028.   Links & References • JWST Pink Planet (GJ504b): The Astronomical Journal, June 18 2026 — Northwestern University / CIERA • TDE Radio Burps: NSF VLA / University of Arizona — Kate Alexander et al., announced June 16 2026 • NROL-179:...

A landmark episode packed with discoveries at the cutting edge of space and astronomy. Webb and Hubble redefine a category of stellar object, JWST delivers unprecedented chemistry data from an extreme exoplanet, a 21-year-old NASA observatory faces a daring robotic rescue, a multi-telescope image reveals an ancient galactic supernova, China's Tianwen-2 zeroes in on a possible fragment of our own Moon, and astronomers detect the chemical fingerprint of a planet swallowed by its star.   Story 1: Webb & Hubble Rewrite History: Terzan 5 Is a 'Bulge Fossil Fragment' Using the James Webb Space Telescope and archival data from Hubble spanning 12 years, researchers have definitively reclassified Terzan 5 — a stellar system 22,000 light-years away in Sagittarius — from a globular cluster to an entirely new class of object: a 'bulge fossil fragment.' Four distinct generations of stars have been identified within Terzan 5, formed 12.5 billion, 4.7 billion, 3.8 billion, and 2.5 billion years ago. Unlike a typical globular cluster with a single ancient stellar population, Terzan 5 repeatedly formed new stars by retaining the gas and heavy elements expelled by its own supernovae. Astronomers believe Terzan 5 is a surviving relic of the primordial clumps that merged to form the Milky Way's central bulge billions of years ago — a living fossil of galaxy formation. Results were presented at the 248th American Astronomical Society meeting and published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Source: NASA / ESA / STScI press release, 16–17 June 2026   Story 2: JWST Catches the 'Roasted Exoplanet' HD 80606 b in the Act Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope's MIRI instrument have observed the extreme exoplanet HD 80606 b experiencing a temperature increase of 1,100°F (600°C) during its close approach to its host star. HD 80606 b is a gas giant four times the mass of Jupiter on a highly elliptical 111-day orbit. The JWST study — led by Tiffany Kataria of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory — also detected specific atmospheric chemical signatures including methane and carbon dioxide, enabling detailed study of how the planet's chemistry shifts under extreme heating. This is the most detailed look yet at an atmospheric response to a rapid, intense heating event. Results were presented at the 248th AAS meeting in Pasadena, California. Source: NASA / JPL press release, 16–17 June 2026   Story 3: Swift's Rescue Mission Cleared for Launch: LINK on the Pad NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which has studied gamma-ray bursts and other high-energy cosmic events since 2004, is facing re-entry as its orbit decays under increased solar activity. NASA contracted Katalyst Space Technologies in September 2025 to build and launch a robotic servicing spacecraft — called LINK — to boost Swift to a higher orbit. LINK is now encapsulated inside a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, which has been attached to the Stargazer L-1011 carrier aircraft and is en route to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands for launch later in June 2026. This will be the final flight of the Pegasus XL — the world's first privately developed orbital launch vehicle, which first flew in 1990. Its air-launch capability is uniquely suited to reaching Swift's unusual low-inclination orbit. Source: NASA press release and media teleconference, 17 June 2026   Story 4: Possible Supernova Remnant at the Galactic Centre A striking multi-telescope composite image released as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on 18 June 2026 reveals a possible supernova remnant near the galactic centre — a blue X-ray-emitting structure whose light is estimated to have reached Earth approximately 1,700 years ago, in the third century CE. The image combines X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton (the blue structure), radio data from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa (the large red cloud), and optical background star data from the PanSTARRS...

A launch-packed Wednesday kicks off with two rocket milestones — SpaceX's BlueBird 8-10 direct-to-cell satellite launch and Ariane 6's record-breaking Amazon Leo flight — followed by a splashdown update for the science-laden Dragon CRS-34. Then a Chandra double-header delivers the most detailed X-ray view ever of M87's famous black hole jet, plus the discovery of possible supernova wreckage at the very heart of the Milky Way. We close with JWST's extraordinary weather portrait of WASP-121b — a planet where the rain is made of rubies and sapphires.   Story Summaries & Key Facts   Story 1 — SpaceX BlueBird 8-10 Launch •       Launched: 2:39 a.m. EDT, 17 June 2026, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (SLC-40) •       Vehicle: SpaceX Falcon 9 (booster B1077, 29th flight) •       Booster recovery: drone ship 'A Shortfall of Gravitas', Atlantic Ocean •       Payload: AST SpaceMobile BlueBird 8, 9 & 10 (Block 2 next-generation satellites) •       Antenna array: ~2,400 sq ft each — largest commercial phased arrays in LEO •       Peak data speed: 120 Mbps per coverage cell (nearly double Block 1) •       Processing bandwidth: 10 GHz per satellite •       Goal: space-based cellular broadband direct to standard smartphones •       AST network partners: 50+ MNOs including AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone (~3 billion subscribers)   Story 2 — Ariane 6 Record Payload •       Mission: VA269 / LE-03 (Amazon Leo 3rd Ariane 6 flight; 8th Ariane 6 overall; 3rd of 2026) •       Launch site: Guiana Space Centre, Kourou, French Guiana •       Payload: 36 Amazon Leo broadband satellites — heaviest Ariane payload ever (~20,820 kg) •       First flight of upgraded P160C solid rocket boosters (debut; replaces P120C) •       P160C improvement: +1 metre longer, carries 156 tonnes propellant each (+10% performance) •       Ariane 64 LEO capacity with P160C: ~22 tonnes •       Previous flights each carried 32 satellites; today's adds 4 more •       Arianespace milestone: 100 Amazon Leo satellites launched in under 5 months •       Next Ariane 6 launch: 28 August (2-booster configuration; likely Meteosat-14)   Story 3 — Dragon CRS-34 Splashdown (Update) •       UPDATE on yesterday's S05E116 story (undocking reported 16 June 2026) •       Dragon CRS-34 splashed down off Southern California coast, 17 June 2026 (~5:08 a.m. PDT) •       Capsule: Cargo Dragon 2 (C209, 6th flight); undocked ~12:25 p.m. EDT 16 June •       Science returned: bioprinted organ/cartilage tissue; DNA-inspired cancer treatment materials •       Also returned: blood-forming stem cells; cryogenic propellant storage experiment data •       Dragon is the ONLY ISS cargo vehicle capable of returning cargo to Earth intact •       Time-sensitive samples flown by helicopter from recovery ship to Kennedy Space Center •       CRS-34 launched 15 May 2026; delivered ~6,500 lbs cargo to Expedition 74 crew   Story 4 — Chandra / M87 Jet (Double-Header Part 1) •       Published: 15 June 2026; presented at 248th AAS Meeting, Pasadena, CA •       Lead researcher: Camille Poitras (PhD student, Laval University, Canada) •       M87* mass: 6.5 billion solar masses; distance: ~55 million light-years •       M87* was the first black hole ever directly imaged (Event Horizon Telescope, 2019) •       Data span: Chandra observations 2012–2025, processed with advanced deconvolution •       Key finding 1: Two distinct components revealed in feature HST-1 (previously blended) •       Key finding 2: Global X-ray emission decrease of up to 84% — consistent with synchrotron cooling •       Key finding 3: Jet features show both quasi-stationary and superluminal apparent motion •       Multi-wavelength: Chandra + JWST + Hubble + VLA + ALMA combined •       Significance: most detailed evolving picture of any black hole jet ever produced   Story 5 — Chandra / Galactic Centre Supernova (Double-Header Part 2) •       Published: Astrophysical Journal, released 14–15 June 2026...

Today's episode covers six stories spanning cosmic mysteries, lunar exploration, robotic rescue missions, cutting-edge space medicine, and what's happening in your own night sky tonight.   1. JWST Solves the "Little Red Dots" Mystery Four years after the James Webb Space Telescope began spotting strange, compact red objects in the ancient universe, scientists have a definitive answer. A team led by Vasily Kokorev at the University of Texas at Austin published the most detailed spectrum ever obtained of one of these objects — GLIMPSE-17775 — in The Astrophysical Journal on June 10. The data confirms these objects are supermassive black holes in their furious early growth phase, wrapped in dense cocoons of hot gas that disguise them. The universe is not broken — the little red dots were just very well hidden. 2. Astrobotic Unveils Griffin-1 Lunar Lander Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic publicly unveiled its Griffin-1 lunar lander on June 15 at the Moonshot Museum. NASA selected Griffin as the vehicle for its Moon Base II mission. The lander will carry Astrolab's FLIP rover and payloads from multiple nations — including Australia — to the lunar South Pole, targeting launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in late 2026. Griffin-1 heads to JPL for environmental testing this month. 3. Robotic Rescue Mission for NASA's Swift Observatory NASA's 22-year-old Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is losing altitude fast due to accelerated solar activity. A startup called Katalyst Space Technologies has built a robotic spacecraft — LINK — in under a year, and it's now integrated into a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket ready for launch from Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, later this month. If successful, LINK will boost Swift's orbit and extend its life — while pioneering on-orbit servicing capabilities. 4. SpaceX CRS-34 Dragon Departs the ISS NASA's 34th SpaceX commercial resupply mission departed the ISS today, June 16, carrying blood stem cells, bioprinted organ and cartilage tissue, DNA-inspired cancer treatment materials, and cryogenic fuel storage experiment data. Splashdown off California is expected June 17. 5. Tonight's Sky: Moon Meets Three Planets A stunning western sky show is on offer tonight — a crescent Moon appearing between Mercury and Jupiter about an hour after sunset, with brilliant Venus also on display. Mercury reached its greatest eastern elongation on June 15, making this the best time of its current apparition to spot it. Tomorrow evening the Moon drifts to sit beside Venus. 6. Space Weather: CME Glancing Blow A coronal mass ejection from June 12 is expected to deliver a glancing blow to Earth on June 16-17. Active geomagnetic conditions (Kp up to 4) are forecast, with a chance of minor G1 storm conditions. High-latitude aurora watchers in the Southern Hemisphere may see some activity.   Links & Further Reading • GLIMPSE-17775 study — The Astrophysical Journal (June 10, 2026) • Astrobotic Griffin-1 mission info: astrobotic.com • NASA Swift Boost mission: science.nasa.gov/mission/swift/swift-boost-mission • ISS research blog: nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation • Space weather: spaceweather.gov | NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center   Find us at astronomydaily.io  |  Follow: @AstroDailyPod

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In today's episode, Anna and Avery cover six major stories: NASA's historic Artemis III crew announcement, the official August 30 launch date for the Roman Space Telescope, a G3 geomagnetic storm delivering northern lights to mid-latitudes, a worrying air leak aboard the International Space Station, the fallout from Blue Origin's New Glenn explosion and its impact on NASA's Moon programme, and JAXA's H3 rocket attempting a redemption launch tonight.   Stories Covered •        BREAKING: NASA announces the four-person crew for Artemis III at Johnson Space Center -- a mission redesignated as a low-Earth-orbit docking rehearsal, paving the way for the Artemis IV Moon landing in 2028. •        NASA officially sets August 30, 2026 as the launch date for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope -- eight months ahead of schedule. Roman will survey the sky 100x wider than Hubble, targeting dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets. •        A cannibal coronal mass ejection -- two merged CMEs -- arrives at Earth triggering a G3 geomagnetic storm, with auroras visible to mid-northern latitudes on June 8-9. •        Crew aboard the ISS briefly shelters in the docked SpaceX Dragon on June 5 as a worsening air leak in the Russian Zvezda module's PrK transfer tunnel prompts precautionary evacuation procedures. •        NASA seeks an alternative launch vehicle for Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander following the catastrophic May 28 New Glenn explosion at Cape Canaveral, which destroyed LC-36 and threatened the autumn cargo lander demonstration flight. •        JAXA launches the H3 rocket (H3-30 variant) tonight from Tanegashima on a test flight -- Japan's first large rocket powered entirely by liquid engines -- following the December 2025 failure that lost the QZS-5 navigation satellite.   Links & Further Reading NASA Artemis III crew announcement: nasa.gov Roman Space Telescope launch update: science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman Space weather updates: spaceweather.com | earthsky.org/sun ISS status blog: blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation Blue Origin New Glenn updates: spaceflightnow.com JAXA H3 launch: global.jaxa.jp  

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In today's Astronomy Daily, Anna and Avery cover six major stories: Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp pledges New Glenn will fly again before year's end despite last week's launchpad explosion; astronomers announce the first direct evidence of magnetic fields on exoplanets using Hot Jupiter wind data; NASA's Roman Space Telescope clears its final mirror inspection ahead of a September 2026 launch; SpaceX wins a $4.16 billion Space Force contract for an airborne threat-tracking satellite constellation; a reflection on the lasting scientific legacy of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS; and Hungarian researchers publish the definitive mass boundary between neutron stars and black holes at 2.2–2.3 solar masses.   Stories Covered •       Blue Origin New Glenn explosion aftermath — CEO Dave Limp confirms damage is less severe than feared, pledges return to flight before end of 2026 •       First direct evidence of exoplanet magnetic fields — Nature Astronomy, June 2, 2026 — ESO VLT and Gemini North study of seven Hot Jupiter wind speeds •       NASA Roman Space Telescope primary mirror passes final Earth-side inspection — September 2026 launch target confirmed •       SpaceX $4.16 billion US Space Force SB-AMTI contract — threat-tracking satellite constellation targeting 2028 operational capability •       3I/ATLAS scientific legacy — new analysis on what the interstellar comet reveals about solar system formation across the Milky Way •       Neutron star mass limit defined at 2.2–2.3 solar masses — HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Hungary   Key Terms Explained •       Hot Jupiter: A gas giant exoplanet similar in size to Jupiter, orbiting very close to its host star, typically tidally locked •       Magnetic field: An invisible force field generated by electrically conducting material moving inside a planet, critical for atmospheric protection •       Lagrange point 2 (L2): A gravitationally stable point in space approximately 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, opposite the Sun — home to both JWST and (soon) Roman •       SB-AMTI: Space-Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator — a satellite constellation for tracking airborne threats from orbit •       Neutron star: The ultra-dense remnant of a collapsed massive star, composed almost entirely of neutrons •       3I/ATLAS: Third confirmed interstellar object, discovered July 2025; an active comet from outside our solar system •       Deuterium: A heavy isotope of hydrogen containing one neutron; its abundance in 3I/ATLAS water suggests formation in an extremely cold environment

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China launches three astronauts to Tiangong — including Hong Kong's first-ever taikonaut — on a mission that breaks multiple records. NASA's Psyche probe delivers breathtaking imagery from its Mars flyby. A bizarre 19-day solar radio burst finally gets an explanation. Scientists zero in on the source of the most powerful neutrino ever detected. Two dead stars orbit each other in less than nine minutes. And researchers propose using fungi to turn Martian soil into farmland. It's a big Monday on Astronomy Daily.Story Timestamps
•       00:00 — Intro •       02:10 — Story 1: Shenzhou-23 Launches with Historic Crew •       08:45 — Story 2: NASA Psyche's Stunning Mars Flyby Images •       14:20 — Story 3: Record-Breaking 19-Day Solar Radio Burst Explained •       20:30 — Story 4: Source of Most Powerful Neutrino Ever Detected •       26:15 — Story 5: White Dwarf Devouring Its Companion in 8.5-Minute Orbit •       32:00 — Story 6: Mars Fungi Could Fertilise Red Planet Regolith •       37:30 — OutroStory Sources & Links
Story 1:Shenzhou-23 Mission — NPR / Space.com / CGTN (May 24, 2026) Story 2:NASA Psyche Mars Flyby — NASA JPL / Engadget (May 23, 2026) Story 3:19-Day Solar Radio Burst — Astrophysical Journal Letters / Gizmodo (May 19-22, 2026) Story 4:Neutrino Source — Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics / ScienceDaily (May 24, 2026) Story 5:White Dwarf Binary — The Astrophysical Journal / Phys.org (May 23, 2026) Story 6:Mars Fungi — Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences / Universe Today (May 23, 2026)

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