Speaker 1: Welcome back to Astronomy Daily, the show that gets you
caught up on the Cosmos every single day. I'm Anna, and.
Speaker 2: I'm Avery and friends. What a day to be a
space fan.
Speaker 1: It is day three of the Artemis two mission. Four
humans are right now hurdling toward the Moon and we
have a lot to cover. A record breaking rocket launch,
brand new lunar science, a stunning discovery about dead stars,
and the best chance all year to spot the planet
Mercury with your naked eye.
Speaker 2: Plus we promise you an update on comment maps yesterday,
and we are delivering the solar plunge has happened, the
verdict that's still coming in. Stay with us, let's get
into it. Projectory so perfect, NASA canceled its own burn.
Speaker 1: We are now into day three of the Artemis two mission,
and the headline today is honestly almost too good to believe.
ASA had planned a trajectory correction burn for this evening,
a small engine firing to nudge Oryan onto the path
to the Moon, and they didn't need it.
Speaker 2: Flight controllers in mission control at Johnson's Space Center looked
at the data and made the call cancel the burn.
Orian is already on the precise trajectory it needs. As Howard, who,
the Orion Spacecraft program manager, put it, it's really good
to see that we don't need these minor correction burns.
It shows that our navigation performance and our ability to
get ranging has been outstanding.
Speaker 1: This was the first of three planned trajectory correction burns.
The others are still on the schedule if needed, but
this is a genuine vote of confidence in the precision
of the entire mission so far.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, what were Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cock, and
Jeremy Hansen actually doing today? Mission Control woke them up
playing in a day Dream by the Freddie Jones Band,
which is a great alarm clock choice, and then they
got to work.
Speaker 1: Day three was all about medical readiness. The crew demonstrated
CPR procedures in weightlessness and checked out Ryan's onboard medical kid,
a thermometer, blood pressure monitor, a steposcope, and otoscope. They
also tested Orion's optical communication system, successfully transmitting high definition
video back to ground stations in the United States.
Speaker 2: But the really exciting part, the lunar science team back
on Earth is already building what they call the Lunar
targeting plan. They're selecting specific geological features on the Moon's surface, craters,
ancient lava flows, ridges that the crew will observe and
photograph during their six hour fly by window on Monday.
Speaker 1: And Avery has been doing the math on what Monday
actually means.
Speaker 2: Well, it's history. On Monday, April sixth, the Artemis two
crew will swing around the far side of the Moon,
briefly out of contact with Earth entirely, and at their
farthest point they will be two hundred and fifty two thousand,
seven hundred and fifty seven miles from home. That breaks
the all time human spaceflight distay since record set by
the crew of Apollo thirteen back in April nineteen seventy
fifty six years. We've been waiting fifty six years to
break that record, and it gets better.
Speaker 1: During the lunar flyby, Oryan will enter a solar eclipse,
the Sun moving behind the Moon from the crew's perspective.
The crew will use that window to look for meteoroid
impacts flashing on the lunar surface and to try to
photograph the deep space sky without the Sun in the way.
Speaker 2: We'll have full Day four and Monday fly by coverage
in Monday's episode. Right now four humans traveling toward the
Moon and everything is going exactly to plan.
Speaker 1: Next the solar plunge has happened.
Speaker 2: Now we wait, all right, we promise you this and
here it is your Comet Maps update.
Speaker 1: Yesterday we introduced you to Comet C twenty twenty six,
a one known as Maps, a rare kreutz sungrazer, discovered
in January by a team of French astronomers in Chile.
We told you it was about to make one of
the most dangerous journeys in the Solar System, a pass
within one hundred and sixty one thousand kilometers of the
Sun's surface, closer than most comets ever come. And we
promise to bring you the latest today.
Speaker 2: So here's where we are at fourteen twenty two UTC today.
That's right in the middle of the day in Australia.
Comet Maps reached perihelion. It passed through the lower corona
of the Sun. The plunge is done.
Speaker 1: And the verdict that is genuinely still coming in because
right now Maps is in the Sun's glare, basically invisible
to ground based observers. We're relying on spacecraft imagery, particularly
from Soho's Lasco coronograph, to track what happened.
Speaker 2: The big question has shifted. It's no longer just did
it survive, It's what kind of show will it put on?
There are several scenarios. If the the nucleus survived intact,
Maps could emerge in the next day or two as
a stunning naked eye comet. Some predictions put its potential
brightness at magnitude minus five brighter than venus. Others suggest
it could reach magnitude minus fifteen, brighter than the full
moon at perihelion. It may have even been briefly visible
in daylight.
Speaker 1: Even if the nucleus broke apart, which is what happens
to most sungrazers, the story isn't necessarily over. A post
perihelian breakup can produce what astronomers call a headless wonder,
a bright, glowing tale with no nucleus behind it. Sometimes
those can be spectacular in their own right.
Speaker 2: Maps belongs to the Krutz sun Grazer family, the same
family as comet ikeas Seki in nineteen sixty five, one
of the brightest comets of the twentieth century, and comet
Lovejoy in twenty eleven, which survived its own brush with
the Corona and went on to da Southern Hemisphere observers, and.
Speaker 1: That is the key phrase, Southern Hemisphere. If Maps emerges
from the glare as expected, the window to see it
from the ground opens around April sixth to tenth. Look
west after sunset low on the horizon in Australia and
across New Zealand. You are perfectly placed for this. Venus
will be your guide star bright in the western evening sky,
and Maps, if it survived, should appear nearby.
Speaker 2: We will have the latest on Monday's episode. This story
is very much not over.
Speaker 1: Atlas five lifts its heaviest payload ever, twenty nine Amazon
Leo satellites.
Speaker 2: While all eyes were on the Moon this morning, there
was a rocket launch happening simultaneously that setter record of
its own.
Speaker 1: In the early hours of this morning one forty five
am Eastern time, a United Launch Alliance Atlas five rocket
lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space for station in Florida.
Its cargo twenty nine Amazon Leo satellites, and that payload,
twenty nine satellites packed into one rocket, made history.
Speaker 2: It is the.
Speaker 1: Heaviest single payload the Atlas five has ever flown.
Speaker 2: This is Mission LA zero five for Amazon LEO, the
satellite Internet constellation, previously known as Project Cooper. Amazon renamed
the constellation in November last year, and they're building it
at pace. With today's launch, they now have around two
hundred and forty one satellites on orbit out of an
eventual constellation of more than three thousand, two hundred.
Speaker 1: The Atlas five flew in its most powerful configuration, the
five to five to one variant, with five solid rocket
boosters strapped on and Ula engineers made specific modifications to
the Centaur upper stage and its dispenser system to carry
the extra load. These twenty nine satellites went up on
a northeast trajectory to a low Earth orbit of around
four hundred and fifty kilometers.
Speaker 2: Amazon has an FCC deadline looming. They need to have
half of their constellation operational by July twenty twenty six,
which puts them in a serious race. Multiple Atlas five
and Vulcan Centaur launches are planned this year, plus missions
on Arion six, New Glen and Falcon nine.
Speaker 1: The Atlas five is one of the most reliable rockets
ever built. This was its one hundred and second mission,
and while the Vulcan Centaur is taking over as the
primary heavy lift vehicle going forward, today proved the old
workhorse has still got it okay.
Speaker 2: Our next story, Moon's Hot Cold Divide may be wrong.
Blue Ghost rewrites lunar science with the.
Speaker 1: Artemis two crew heading toward the Moon right now. This
next story feels especially timely because new data from the
Moon's surface is challenging something scientists thought they understood for decades.
Speaker 3: Firefly Aerospace's Blue ghosts lander touched down in the Moon's
Mari Chrisium, the Sea of Crises, back in March of
twenty twenty five. It operated for a full lunar day,
drilling into the surface and sending back over one hundred
and ten gigabytes of data. And now a year on,
scientists are presenting the first major scientific results, and they
are surprising.
Speaker 1: The long standing view of the Moon has been this
The near side, the face we always see from Earth,
is geologically hot. It's dominated by ancient volcanic planes, and
beneath the surface there's a concentration of heat producing radioactive elements,
particularly thorium. In a region called the Prosilarum creep terrain.
The far side, by contrast, is cooler, older, more heavily cratered.
Speaker 2: Blue Ghost was specifically sent to land outside that hot
region in mare Chrisium, well away from the creep zone,
precisely to test whether the temperature difference was as dramatic
as scientistics pres affected. The answer has upended the model.
Blue Ghosts heat probe found that the underground temperature at
mari Chrissium is not significantly different from what Apollo astronauts
measured at their landing sites deep inside the supposed hot zone.
Speaker 1: As Saichi Nagihara, the principal investigator of Blue Ghost's heat
probe at Texas Tech University, put it, we may have
to abandon that binary.
Speaker 2: What does this mean? Heat producing elements like thorium may
be more widely distributed beneath the lunar surface than anyone thought,
and one possible explanation is that volcanic activity in some
regions wasn't driven by those radioactive elements at all. It
may have simply been easier for magma to break through
in places where the crust was thinner.
Speaker 1: It's a fundamental rethink of how the Moon formed and evolved,
and it has direct implications for where future crude missions
might land and what they'll find. Blue Ghost Mission I,
expected to launch later this year, will land on the
lunar far side, giving scientists the next data point in
this evolving picture.
Speaker 2: Onwards the story five. Let's simply call this one stellar science.
Pulsars are broadcasting from the edge of their magnetic.
Speaker 1: Reach down to a discovery that overturns decades of thinking
about some of the most extreme objects in the universe,
and it has an Australian fingerprint on it.
Speaker 2: Pulsars are the class remnants of dead stars. They're among
the densest objects we know of. A teaspoon of pulsar
material would weigh around ten million tons on Earth. As
they spin, they sweep beams of radio waves across the cosmos,
like cosmic lighthouses, and a special class called millisecond pulsars
spins hundreds of times per second, so regularly that they
rival atomic clocks in their precision.
Speaker 1: For decades, the textbook answer to where those radio pulses
come from was simple. Near the surface, close to the
magnetic poles. That's where scientists assumed all the action happened.
Speaker 2: A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society has just rewritten that. Professor Michael Kramer from
the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and
doctor Simon Johnson from Australia's own CSIRO analyzed radio observations
of nearly two hundred millisecond pulsars and compared them with
gamma ray data from NASA's Fermi Space telescope.
Speaker 1: What they found, about one third of millisecond pulsars are
broadcasting radio waves from two completely separate regions at once,
not just the magnetic poles, but also from a distant
swirling zone of charged particles called the current sheet right
at what's called the light cylinder. That's the boundary where
the pulsar's magnetic field would need to travel faster than
light just to keep pace with the spinning star.
Speaker 2: As doctor Johnston it, these tiny, fast binning stars are
even more complex and surprising than we thought, broadcasting from
both their surfaces and from the very edge of their
magnetic reach.
Speaker 1: The practical consequences are significant because the radio signals are
spreading out over a wider range of directions than previously understood.
More pulsars should be detectable than scientists thought, and that's
good news for projects like pulsar timing arrays, networks of
pulsars used as detectors for gravitational waves rippling across the universe.
Speaker 2: A great piece of science and a proud moment for CSIRO,
Australia's National Science Agency.
Speaker 1: And finally, today an invitation to go outside and look up,
because right now Mercury is putting on its best performance
of the entire year, and we have the best seats
in the house.
Speaker 2: Mercury reached what astronomers call greatest elongation on April third,
the point where it appears farthest from the Sun in
our sky. This is the year's greatest elongation for Mercury,
full stop, the best it will get all of twenty
twenty six.
Speaker 1: Here's the key thing about Mercury. It's always close to
the Sun in our sky, which makes it genuinely difficult
to spot. Most people have never actually seen it. Greatest
elongation is your best window. The planet pulls as far
from the Sun's glare as it ever gets, giving you
a brief clear opportunity before it slips back.
Speaker 2: Right now, Mercury is sitting about twenty eight degrees from
the sun rising in the eastern sky before dawn. Look
east about thirty to forty minutes before sunrise. You're looking
for a steady point of light magnitude around zero point four,
which is bright enough to see with the naked eye
under decent conditions. It's sitting low on the horizon, just
above Mars and the constellation Aquarius.
Speaker 1: And here's the Southern Hemisphere advantage. This is specifically the
best morning apparition of mercury for the Southern Hemisphere in
twenty twenty six from Australia and New Zealand. The geometry
of the ecliptic gives us a steeper angle to the horizon.
Mercury climbs higher and stays out of the murk longer
than it does for Northern hemisphere observers.
Speaker 2: If you have binoculars or a small telescope, there's a bonus.
Mercury is currently showing a half illuminated face what astronomers
call a quarter phase. You can see it going through
phases just like the moon, which is something a lot
of people don't realize about. Mercury and keep.
Speaker 1: Watching the eastern sky over the next couple of weeks,
because Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune will gather in a
tight cluster on the morning of April eighteenth. Three of
those four will be visible to the naked eye, close
enough to cover with three fingers held at arm's length.
A lovely little planetary alignment to chase.
Speaker 2: So this week, look east before sunrise for Mercury, look
west after sunset for any sign of comet maps emerging
from the Sun's glare, and keep an eye on Monday's
episode for everything you need to know about the Artemis
two lunarflyby.
Speaker 1: And that is your Astronomy Daily for Saturday, the fifth
of April twenty twenty six. A crew heading to the Moon,
a comment that may be putting on the sky show
of the decade, a record breaking rocket launch, science from
the lunar surface, a pulsar discovery out of Australia, and
Mercury waiting for you in the dawn sky.
Speaker 2: We'll be back Monday with day four and five of
Artemis two and the latest on comet maps. If you're
heading outside tonight, clear skies. Everyone from all of.
Speaker 1: Us at Astronomy Daily, keep looking up Sunday.
Speaker 2: Stars Stars so Stories, The Soul m