Speaker 1: Four astronauts are sitting in quarantine right now at Kennedy's
Space Center in Florida, bags packed suits ready, waiting for
the weather to cooperate. SpaceX Crew twelve is almost go
and the countdown is very much on.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, our sun is doing what it does best, putting
on a show plus a lava tunnel. The size of
a city has just been confirmed under the clouds of Venus,
and the tiny teethpoon of asteroid dust has just rewritten
the story of how life's ingredients form in space. Good morning,
good evening wherever you are in the world, and welcome
to Astronomy Daily. I'm anna and I'm avery. Let's get
into it.
Speaker 1: Let's kick things off with our lead story because the
ISS is shorthanded right now and NASA wants to fix
that as soon as possible. The SpaceX Crew twelve mission
has been pushed back once again, this time to know
earlier than Thursday, February twelfth, at fight in the morning
Eastern Time. The culprit weather along the crew Dragon's flight path.
Speaker 2: Yeah, mission teams did a weather review and decided to
wave off the Wednesday window entirely. Conditions are expected to
improve Thursday but Friday the thirteenth is also being kept
as a backup, so we're in a holding pattern, but
a short one hopefully.
Speaker 1: And while we're waiting, let's talk about the crew, because
this is a really international team. Commanding the mission is
NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway, his first spaceflight command pilot seat
goes to the brilliant Jessica Meyer, who's no stranger to
the ISS. Then you've got Sophie at a Knot representing
the European Space Agency this is her first spaceflight, and
Ross Cosmos cosmonaut Andre Fejev completing the quartet.
Speaker 2: They'll be writing aboard Crewe Dragon Freedom, which is itself
a fascinating spacecraft. This will be Freedom's fifth flight, returning
after a whopping five hundred and one day turnaround since
crew nine. And here's something they'll watch for at launch.
This mission will mark the very first use of Landing
Zone forty, a brand new landing pad built right inside
the SLC forty complex itself. So the booster is going
to launch and then come back and land right next door.
That's wild.
Speaker 1: It is wild now. One thing that makes this particular
rotation different from the usual six months is the expected duration.
Because of Crew eleven's early medical evacuation back in January,
Crew twelve is expected to stay for eight to nine months,
longer than a typical stay. The ISS needs the staffing,
and this crew is ready, and.
Speaker 2: It's a big week for launches Beyond just Crew twelve.
The launch manifest is absolutely stacked. Right now. We have
ULA's Vulcan rocket going up with USSF eighty seven, a
pair of satellite surveillance for the US Space Force. Then
there's the first Arion six four launch, which will carry
thirty two Amazon Kuiper Internet satellites that's Starling's main competitor,
by the way, plus a Russian Proton m and surprise, surprise,
multiple Starlink missions. It is genuinely one of the busiest
launch weeks we've seen in a while.
Speaker 1: So if you're a launch watcher, clear your Thursday calendar.
Live streams will be available online for most, if not all,
of these launches.
Speaker 2: Okay, story two, And we keep an eye on our
star because right now, as we reported a few days ago,
it is being very talkative. Sunspot region AR four three
six six has been one of the most active regions
of solar cycle twenty five and overnight if fired off
four M class flares. The biggest was an M two
point eight that's a moderate flare for context, at around
two fourteen UTC this morning, which triggered a minor R
one class radio blackout over the seas between Australia and
Papa New Guinea.
Speaker 1: Just to give people a quick refresher on the scale here,
solar flares are classified by their peak X ray intensity.
C class are minor, M class are moderates and can
cause brief radio blackouts at high latitudes, and X class
are the big ones, the kind that can knock out
power grids and satellite communications. So four M class flares
in a day is definitely worth paying attention to.
Speaker 2: RC four three sixty six has actually been the source
of some spectacular X class activity over the past couple
of weeks. Two it's been a busy region. Now it's
rotating out of the Earth facing part of the Sun,
so today the forecast is quiet to unsettled as the
Corona whole stream influence gradually weakens, but forecasters will be
watching it closely. If we get any significant CMEs thrown
our way, that could mean Aurora's pushing further from the
poles than usual, which is always exciting news for skywatchers.
Speaker 1: We're still in an active phase of solar cycle twenty five,
which is tracking hotter than predicted. I don't put the
Aurora alert apps away just yet. We'll keep monitoring.
Speaker 2: We certainly will. This is exciting stuff.
Speaker 1: Okay. Moving on. Story three takes us to one of
the most exciting ongoing areas of science, the BENU samples
from NASA's Osyrius rex mission. We've talked about BENU a lot,
and each new study seems to shift our thinking a
little more. This week's paper, published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences might be the biggest shift yet.
Speaker 2: So what's the finding. For decades, sciences thought amino acids
and asteroids formed through what's called Strecher synthesis, a process
that requires warm liquid water. The classic picture was something
like a wet, warm asteroid interior chemistry bubbling along. But
the Penn State team, led by Alison Basinski looked at
the isotopic signatures of amino acids in the BENU samples,
specifically glycine, which is the simplest amino acid, and found
that the story is much more complicated.
Speaker 1: The data suggests these amino acids formed under harsh, cold,
icy radiation rich environments, the kind of environment we'd associate
more with the outer Solar System than a warm, watery asteroid.
Basinski described it as their results flipping the script on
how amino acids form. It's not just one pathway anymore.
It looks like there are many conditions under which life's
building blocks can emerge.
Speaker 2: And why does that matter? Because if amino acids can
form in extreme icy environments, not just warm watery ones,
the range of places in the cosmos where life's precursors
might exist just got dramatically wider. We're talking about icy moons,
comet nuclei, the outer reaches of the Solar System, places
we might not have been prioritizing in the search for
life's ingredients.
Speaker 1: What's remarkable is that all of this came from a
sample smaller than a tea spoon. That speck of four
point six billion year old asteroid dust is genuinely changing
our understanding of how life may have gotten started. The
Osiris REX mission just keeps on giving.
Speaker 2: Story four today, and I genuinely love this one. We
found lava tubes on the Moon, we found them on Mars,
and now, for the first time, scientists have confirmed one
on Venus. A team from the University of Trento in
Italy has published the paper in Nature Communications this week
revealing the existence of a massive underground lava tunnel on
our closest planetary neighbor.
Speaker 1: And the really clever part of this story is how
they found it. Venus is famously difficult to observe. It's
permanently wrapped in thick sulfuric acid clouds that block direct
photography of the surface. So the team went back to
radar data collected by NASA's Magellan spacecraft between nineteen ninety
and nineteen ninety two, data that's over thirty years old.
They developed a new imaging technique specifically designed to detect
underground conduits near surface collapse features called skylights, and when
they applied it to the nix Mons region, named for
the Greek goddess of the night, they found it.
Speaker 2: Now let's talk size for a moment, because, because this
thing is enormous, the lava tube is estimated to be
around one kilometer wide. That's wider than any lava tube
found on Earth, the Moon, or Mars. The roof is
at least one hundred and fifty meters thick, the empty
void below is at least three hundred and seventy five
meters deep, and based on the surrounding terrain analysis, the
whole conduit could extend for at least forty five kilometers underground.
Speaker 1: Forty five kilometers. That's a subterranean highway. And there's an
interesting reason it's so big. Venus has lower gravity than
Earth and a denser atmosphere, which actually favors the rapid
formation of a thick insulating crust on top of lava flows,
so the tubes can grow larger and last longer on
Venus than elsewhere. The planet with the worst surface conditions
in the Solar System might have some remarkably stable real
estate underground.
Speaker 2: This also has really important implications for future Venus missions.
Issa's Envisions based craft and NASA's Veritas are both being
developed for Venus, and both will carry advanced radar systems
capable of doing this kind of subsurface analysis in far
greater detail. The team describes this discovery as only the
beginning of what could be a long and fascinating research
program into Venus's Hidden Geology.
Speaker 1: And our final story Today takes a delightfully unexpected angle
on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A new paper in
the International Journal of Astrobiology by plant biologist Lincoln Ties
at UC Santa Cruz argues that if we want to
find advanced alien civilizations, we should be looking for exoplanets
with large, accessible deposits of coal.
Speaker 2: Coal, not radio signals, not Dyson spheres. Coal. I genuinely
love this, So what's the argument? Tye traces the chain
of development that led to us being able to communicate
across interstellar distances. On Earth. None of our advanced technology,
no steel, no deep fossil fuel extraction, no electricity, no
radio telescopes would have been possible without first being able
to forge steel, and steel required coal, specifically huge amounts
of shallow energy dense coal, like the deposits laid down
during the Carboniferous and Permian periods roughly three hundred and
thirty to two hundred and sixty million years ago.
Speaker 1: The paper argues that the same logic should apply to
any technological civilization anywhere in the universe. Intelligence isn't enough.
Biology isn't enough. You need the geology to match a
planet that happened to grow the right kinds of forests
at the right time in its history, under the right
conditions to bury them and compress them into energy dense
coal seams that a curious civilization could then dig up
and use to bootstrap and industrial revolution.
Speaker 2: And the implication for SETI are fascinating. The paper suggests
planets in the so called photosynthetic habitable zone, where both
liquid water and oxygen producing photosynthesis are possible, might be
relatively rare. Even rarer are the planets where all the
conditions align. The right star, the right orbit, the right biology,
the right geology, and the right timing. Cole doesn't just appear.
It requires a very specific sequence of events across hundreds
of millions of years.
Speaker 1: There is also a potential detection angle. An alien industrial
revolution would produce atmospheric signatures elevated carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide,
nitrogen oxides, so these are theoretically detectable with sufficiently powerful telescopes.
The catch, as the paper acknowledges, is that the coal
burning phase of any civilization would be relatively brief. We
certainly hope it is so. The detection window would be narrow,
but it it adds a whole new layer to what
we're looking for when we study exoplanet atmospheres.
Speaker 2: It's also a slightly humbling thought. The reason we can
have this conversation, the reason we built the telescopes and
the rockets and the radio transmitters, might ultimately come down
to a lucky geological accident three hundred million years ago.
We happen to live on a planet with a lot
of coal in the right places at the right time.
Not every world will be so fortunate.
Speaker 1: And that is your Astronomy Daily for Tuesday, the tenth
of February twenty twenty six. From Solar Fireworks and a
count down to Launch to Lava Tunnels on Venus, Rewritten
Science from Benu and a genuinely thought provoking new take
on the search for extraterrestrial life. It's been quite the episode.
Speaker 2: If you enjoy today's show, please take a moment to
leave us a review wherever you listen. It genuinely helps
more people find us, and if you want to go
deeper on any of today's stories, we have links to
all the source articles waiting for you in the show
notes at Astronomy Daily dot io.
Speaker 1: Find us on social media at Astro Daily Pod, and
if you've got a question, a story tip, or just
want to tell us what you think, we'd love to
hear from you. Thanks for listening and we'll see you
again tomorrow.
Speaker 2: I'm Anna and I'm Avery. Keep looking up Sunday, star
st star St