Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna and
I'm Avery.
Speaker 2: It's Friday, February the twentieth, twenty twenty six, and our
producer has absolutely loaded us up. Today. We've got eight
stories to get through.
Speaker 1: Eight, that's right, and honestly, they're all worth it. We've
got huge breaking news from the Kennedy Space Center about
Artemis two, a genuinely damning report that NASA itself has
described as we failed them, some absolutely mind bending deep
space discoveries. And yes, we are going to briefly talk
about UFOs.
Speaker 2: We absolutely are, just briefly and responsibly.
Speaker 1: Responsibly that is the word. Right, let's dive in. There
is a lot of ground to cover.
Speaker 2: I think this might be the biggest episode we've ever done,
but there's plenty to cover today.
Speaker 1: We are going to start with the biggest space story
of the week, and it's one that broke overnight. DASA
has just completed its second wet dress rehearsal of the
Artemis two Space launch System rocket, and from everything we're hearing,
it went well.
Speaker 2: Really well. Actually, teams ran the SLS through a full countdown,
fueling the rocket with its super cold liquid hydrogen and
liquid oxygen, simulating launch day procedures right down to closing
the orion crue caudal hatch, and they got all the
way to T minus twenty nine seconds before wrapping up.
That is exactly where they wanted to stop.
Speaker 1: And this matters enormously because the first wet dress rehearsal
back on February second and third had to be called
off early due to hydrogen fuel leaks at launch Pad
thirty nine B. That was a setback. NASA had to
go in and replace seals and there was very real
uncertainty about whether they'd solve the problem.
Speaker 2: And it looks like they have. NASA is holding a
media briefing this morning eleven am Eastern, and we'll be
watching that closely, but the early word is positive.
Speaker 1: So for anyone who needs refresher on what this mission
actually is, Artemis two is the first crude flight of
the Artemis program. It's not a moon landing that comes
later with Artemis three, but it is the first time
humans will travel to lunar distance since Apollo seventeen in
nineteen seventy two. We are talking more than fifty years
and the.
Speaker 2: Crew is Commander Read Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist
Christina cock All NASA, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen from
the Canadian Space Agency. They're going to fly around the
Moon in a free return trajectory and come home ten days.
No landing, but an absolutely historic journey.
Speaker 1: And if this morning's press conference gives the all clear,
the launch window we're looking at is as early as
March sixth, That is just two weeks away. Avery, What
does that feel like to you?
Speaker 2: Honestly, it feels surreal. We've been living in the Artemis
era for years now. Artemis ie flew in twenty twenty two,
and it's been a long road to get here. But
two weeks from now there could be four astronauts on
their way to the Moon.
Speaker 1: We will have full coverage as things develop, and if
that briefing produces any surprises, we'll update you in tomorrow's episode.
For now, though, looking very good for Artemis three now.
Speaker 2: While NASA is very much in celebratory mode for this morning,
yesterday they were facing a very different kind of news day.
An independent review board release its full report into the
Boeing Starliner crude flight test, and it is a damning document.
Speaker 1: Damning is the word. The report formally classifies the Starliner
mission as a quote type A mishap, the most serious
category in NASA's safety framework. That means it was an
event that could have resulted in death or permanent disability.
And NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood up in front of
the cameras yesterday and said, and I'm paraphrasing here, we
almost did have a really terrible day.
Speaker 2: We failed them, them being astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams,
who launched in June twenty twenty four expecting to be
gone for eight to ten days and ended up spending
two hundred and eighty six days in orbit.
Speaker 1: Right, So let's just remind listeners how we got here.
Boeing won a four point two billion dollar contract from
NASA back in twenty fourteen to build the Starliner as
a second commercial crew vehicle alongside SpaceX's Crew Dragon. Starliner
ran into problems on its very first uncrewed test flight
in twenty nineteen, needed a second unpiloted flight before it
was deemed ready, and Butch and Sunny finally launched in
June of last year.
Speaker 2: The trip up went ok. They docked successfully with the
International Space Station, but during the rendezvous approach, the capsule
experienced multiple helium leagues in the propulsion system and several
of the maneuvering prusters failed. There was a moment where
they temporarily lost with a report calls six degrees of
freedom control. Had things gone differently in those minutes, had
the thrusters not recovered, docking might not have been possible.
Speaker 1: And what's really chilling about reading the report is discovering
just how many warning signs were there. The investigation found
that NASA and Boeing were aware of concerns that weren't
fully understood, but were considered acceptable for flight anyway. There
was pressure, institutional pressure to make this mission succeed because
the entire commercial crew program's credibility depended on having two
viable crew vehicles.
Speaker 2: The report quotes unnamed massive personnel saying things like there
was yelling in meetings, it was emotionally charged and unproductive,
and if you weren't aligned with the desired outcome, your
input was filtered out or dismissed. One person said they
stopped speaking up entirely because they knew they'd be dismissed.
Speaker 1: That is a profoundly troubling portrait of an organization under pressure,
and what makes it worse is this, One NASA worker
told the investigation panel roughly eleven months after the mission,
nobody within NASA or outside of NASA has been held accountable.
Speaker 2: Nobody Administrator Isaacman addressed that head on. He said there
will be accountability. He said, the report reveals that advocacy
for the missions success quote exceeded reasonable bounds and placed
the mission, the crew, and America Space program at risk.
He also made clear that NASA will not fly another
crew on Starliner until the technical causes are understood, the
propulsion system is fully qualified, and all sixty one recommendations
from this report are implemented.
Speaker 1: Sixty one recommendations spanning technical, organizational, and cultural domains. Boeing,
for its part, said they've made substantial progress and driven
significant cultural changes.
Speaker 2: We'll see. It's worth noting, Butch and Sony are safe.
They got home in a SpaceX crew drag in early
twenty twenty five and have since retired from NASA. But
this report is a stark reminder of just how close
things came to going very wrong, and how important is
that the lessons are actually learned.
Speaker 1: One more thing before we move on. Isaacman confirmed the
eventual cost of Starliner's woes exceeded the two million dollar
type A mishap threshold by quote one hundredfold, So not
just a safety crisis, an enormous financial one too.
Speaker 2: All right, we promised you this, and here it is.
President Trump has been making noise again about UAPs, unidentified
aerial phenomena, and the possibility of releasing classified government files,
including apparently what's actually going on at Area fifty one.
Speaker 1: And look, the serious astronomy community broadly keeps its distance
from this territory for good reasons. We're not going to
go deep on it today because there is genuinely not
much new substance to report yet, its hints and statements
rather than actual declassification.
Speaker 2: But and this is an honest butt, if genuine classified
data about UAP encounters were actually released in a verifiable,
scientifically usable form, that would be worth serious examination. The
scientific community has actually been pushing for more transparency in
this area for years. The issue has never been whether
UFOs are real as a phenomenon. There are clearly things
being observed that pilots and sensors can't immediately explain. The
question is what they actually are.
Speaker 1: Right, And the history of these big reveals is, shall
we say, not encouraging. You get a lot of heavily
redacted documents, a lot of blurry footage, and then not much.
Speaker 2: Area fifty one, though that is a name. If files
about what's actually been going on out there, and then
Nevada Desert come out, even if it's all just experimental aircraft,
that's going to be a fascinating day. Regardless.
Speaker 1: We will watch this space pun an tended. If something
genuinely newsworthy emerges from the UAP file story, we will
cover it properly. For now, back to the actual cosmos.
Speaker 2: Now, this is one of those stories that really makes
you stop and think about how strange the universe is.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has identified what may be the
most heavily dark matter dominated galaxy ever discovered.
Speaker 1: The object is called CDG two and CDG stands for
circumgalactic diffuse galaxy, which is already a fascinating description. It's
an extraordinarily faint, low surface brightness galaxy that's basically invisible
when you look at it. There are only a sparse
scattering of faint stars, but according to the measurements, the
vast majority of its total mass is dark matter.
Speaker 2: We should take a moment here to explain what dark
matter actually is for anyone who's new to the show.
Dark matter is the name we give to whatever makes
up most of the mass of the universe that we
can't see, can't di tech directly, and don't fully understand.
We know it exists because of its gravitational effects, the
way galaxies rotate, the way light bends around galaxy clusters,
but beyond that, it remains one of the great unsolved
problems in physics.
Speaker 1: And CDG two is interesting because it seems to be
almost entirely dark matter. The few stars it contains are
almost an afterthought. It's like finding a house that's built
almost entirely of invisible walls. You could only see the wallpaper.
Speaker 2: What makes this particularly significant is that we've long theorized
that galaxies like this should exist. In the standard model
of cosmology, dark matter forms the scaffolding that ordinary matter
gas stars planets falls into and clumps around, but most
galaxies have converted a good portion of that gas into
stars by now. CDG two seems to have barely bothered.
Speaker 1: The question is why why did so little star formation
occur here? Was it stripped of its gas by interactions
with neighboring galaxies? Is it in an unusually isolated environment.
Those are the questions that will keep astronomers busy for
a while, but as a window into dark matter's dominant
role in shaping the cosmos, this.
Speaker 2: One is remarkable. Aimen to that.
Speaker 1: From one galaxy mystery to another, astronomers have spotted a
candidate jellyfish galaxy, one of the most visually striking types
of galaxies we know of, dating back to just five
billion years after the Big Bang. And the reason this
is extraordinary is because theory said this shouldn't be possible.
Speaker 2: Let me explain what a jellyfish galaxy is for anyone
picturing an actual jellyfish floating through space, which honestly is
not a bad mental image. A jellyfish galaxy gets its
name from the long streamers of gas and young stars
that trail behind it like tentacles. They form through a
process called ram pressure stripping.
Speaker 1: Ram pressure stripping is a essentially what happens when a
galaxy moves through the hot diffuse gas that fills galaxy
clusters what astronomers call the inter cluster medium. The galaxy
is moving so fast through this medium that it gets
the cosmic equivalent of a blast of wind from the front,
and the gas in its outer regions gets blown backwards,
forming those trailing streams.
Speaker 2: Now. The reason this discovery is so significant is that
ram pressure stripping was thought to require a dense enough
cluster environment to operate, and in the early universe, five
billion years after the Big Bang, clusters weren't expected to
be dense enough. Yet the universe was younger, less evolved,
clusters were less mature.
Speaker 1: And yet here we have what looks like a fully
formed jellyfish galaxy from that early era. It challenges our
timeline of how galaxy clusters developed and how ram pressure
stripping operated in the young universe.
Speaker 2: There's also a bonus mystery here. The discovery may shed
light on the so called red nugget galaxies compact red
massive galaxies from the early Universe that have puzzled astronomers
for years. The theory is that ram pressure stripping in
jellyfish galaxies could be one of the mechanisms that transform
normal star forming galaxies into those quiescent red nuggets. If confirmed,
this single galaxy could be a crucial missing link in
understanding how galaxies evolve.
Speaker 1: It does still need to be confirmed. It's officially a
candidate at this stage, but the evidence looks strong. And
this is exactly the kind of thing that makes deep
sky astronomy so endlessly fascinating.
Speaker 2: All right, here's a story that's a little different in flavor.
It's part wow, cool science, part should we be thinking
about this more carefully? Yes.
Speaker 1: For the first time ever, scientists have observed a cloud
of air pollution forming in near real time as a
SpaceX rocket burned up during re entry into Earth's atmosphere.
And I want to be clear about what we mean,
I burned up here. This isn't a failed mission. This
is the normal end of life process for a rocket
stage where it re enters the atmosphere and disintegrates through
the heat of reentry.
Speaker 2: So these things happen routinely, And what sciences have now
been able to do using atmospheric monitoring instruments is actually
watch in something close to real time the chemical cloud
that forms as the rocket material vaporizes, metals, aluminum oxide, particles,
various combustion products, all of it lighting up in the instruments.
Speaker 1: And this matters because we're launching things at an ever
increasing rate. SpaceX alone is launching dozens of missions per year.
If every re entry deposits a cloud of metallic particles
and other pollutants into the upper atmosphere, and we're doing
this hundreds of times a year, what does that add
up to over a decade.
Speaker 2: The honest answer right now is we don't fully know.
This is genuinely new science. Researchers have been raising concerns
about the potential impact of rocket exhaust and re entry
pollution in the stratosphere for a few years now, but
being able to observe it in real time to actually
characterize what's happening, is a significant step towards understanding the
cumulative effect.
Speaker 1: It's one of those stories where the science itself is fascinating,
but the implications quietly deserve more attention than they're getting.
The space economy is booming. That's wonderful in many ways,
but what are the environmental costs of a high cadence
launch industry is a question that needs answering, and researchers
are now developing the tools to start answering.
Speaker 2: It something to watch, and full credit to the scientists
making these observations pioneering work.
Speaker 1: Now we come to a story that, and I say
this with genuine enthusiasm, is about as mind bending as
astronomy gets. Researchers may have confirmed the very first true
dark galaxy. Not just a galaxy dominated by dark matter
like CDG two we discussed Earth, but a galaxy made
almost entirely of dark matter with effectively no stars at all.
Speaker 2: A dark galaxy, in theory, is a region of space
where dark matter has clumped together in sufficient quantity to
form a gravitationally bound structure, essentially a galaxy shaped thing,
but where ordinary matter has never clumped enough to form
stars or has been stripped away entirely. We've theorized they
should exist for decades, and now we may finally have one.
Speaker 1: I want to sit with that for a second. A
galaxy a structure that has all the gravitational signatures of
a galaxy with no stars in it. You literally cannot
see it with any optical telescope. It's detectable only by
its gravitational effects on nearby visible matter.
Speaker 2: It's like detecting a ghost by watching how other people
react to the room it's standing in.
Speaker 1: That is exactly the right analogy. Actually, the way astronomers
identify these objects is by looking at how their gravity
warps the light and motion of surrounding galaxies, and when
they do the maths on the candidate identified in this
new research, the numbers point to a massive dark matter
structure with essentially no luminous component.
Speaker 2: If confirmed, this would be a genuinely landmark moment in cosmology.
We've known for decades that dark matter vastly outweighs ordinary
matter in the universe, roughly five to one, but actually
finding a structure that is purely dark matter with no
ordinary matter hitch hiking along inside it would be extraordinary
observational proof of how dark matter can organize itself independently.
Speaker 1: The researchers are being appropriately cautious. This requires further confirmation
and independent verification, but the evidence is compelling. We'll keep
you posted as this one develops, and.
Speaker 2: We close today with something a little different in mood,
something poetic actually, comments.
Speaker 1: C Slash two zero two four e one, known as
comet wear Kosh after its discoverer, as we mentioned earlier
in the week, is making its closest approach to Earth today.
Right now, as you listen to this, the comet is
passing at roughly the same distance from Us as the Sun,
about one astronomical unit, and it's putting on a genuinely
beautiful display for those with telescopes or binoculars in the
right conditions.
Speaker 2: There are images out already, a gorgeous thirty minute exposure
taken last week from Chile showing a five degree long
ion tail that's ten times the width of the full
Moon in the sky, plus three shorter dust tails. The
coma of the comet glows green from the breakdown of
dicarbon molecules by sunlight.
Speaker 1: But here's what makes this one special and why we
wanted to close the show with it. Commetware Coche is
on a hyperbolic.
Speaker 2: Orbit, which means it is not coming back.
Speaker 1: It is not coming back. This comment has traveled from
the outermost reaches of the Solar System. It's wung around
the Sun, passed close by our little blue dot, and
when it leaves, it will leave forever. Its orbit carries
it out of the Solar System entirely into interstellar space.
It will become a wanderer between the stars.
Speaker 2: You know, we had THREEI dot atls this season, the
interstellar object that came into our solar system from somewhere
else entirely, that was a visitor from interstellar space commetware
Koch is going the other direction. It's leaving.
Speaker 1: We're waving goodbye to a comment that no human will
ever see again. And I find that genuinely moving. So
if you have clear skies tonight or this weekend, and
you can get to a dark spot with a pair
of binoculars, it is worth trying to find it. Check
the Astronomy apps for its exact position. It is bright
enough to see last chance, a cosmic farewell. And that's
a wrap on a genuinely packed episode of Astronomy Daily.
Eight stories, breaking news, accountability, journalism, mind bending, deep space science,
and a cosmic goodbody.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for spending part of your Friday
with us. If you enjoy today's show, please do leave
a review wherever you listen. It makes a huge difference
in helping new listeners find us.
Speaker 1: You can find us at Astronomy Daily dot io for
the blog and show notes, and we're at astro Daily
Pod across all the social platforms we'll see you again tomorrow,
and if Artemis two gets a launch date confirmed today,
we'll make sure that's front and center.
Speaker 2: Until then, keep looking up clear skies.
Speaker 3: Everyone say, star is the tall, Star is the tall
Speaker 2: Story is the