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Speaker 1: Welcome back to Astronomy Daily, the show that gets you

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caught up on the Cosmos every single day. I'm Anna, and.

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Speaker 2: I'm Avery and friends. What a day to be a

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space fan.

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Speaker 1: It is day three of the Artemis two mission. Four

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humans are right now hurdling toward the Moon and we

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have a lot to cover. A record breaking rocket launch,

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brand new lunar science, a stunning discovery about dead stars,

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and the best chance all year to spot the planet

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Mercury with your naked eye.

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Speaker 2: Plus we promise you an update on comment maps yesterday,

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and we are delivering the solar plunge has happened, the

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verdict that's still coming in. Stay with us, let's get

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into it. Projectory so perfect, NASA canceled its own burn.

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Speaker 1: We are now into day three of the Artemis two mission,

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and the headline today is honestly almost too good to believe.

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ASA had planned a trajectory correction burn for this evening,

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a small engine firing to nudge Oryan onto the path

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to the Moon, and they didn't need it.

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Speaker 2: Flight controllers in mission control at Johnson's Space Center looked

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at the data and made the call cancel the burn.

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Orian is already on the precise trajectory it needs. As Howard, who,

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the Orion Spacecraft program manager, put it, it's really good

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to see that we don't need these minor correction burns.

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It shows that our navigation performance and our ability to

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get ranging has been outstanding.

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Speaker 1: This was the first of three planned trajectory correction burns.

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The others are still on the schedule if needed, but

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this is a genuine vote of confidence in the precision

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of the entire mission so far.

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Speaker 2: Meanwhile, what were Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cock, and

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Jeremy Hansen actually doing today? Mission Control woke them up

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playing in a day Dream by the Freddie Jones Band,

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which is a great alarm clock choice, and then they

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got to work.

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Speaker 1: Day three was all about medical readiness. The crew demonstrated

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CPR procedures in weightlessness and checked out Ryan's onboard medical kid,

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a thermometer, blood pressure monitor, a steposcope, and otoscope. They

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also tested Orion's optical communication system, successfully transmitting high definition

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video back to ground stations in the United States.

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Speaker 2: But the really exciting part, the lunar science team back

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on Earth is already building what they call the Lunar

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targeting plan. They're selecting specific geological features on the Moon's surface, craters,

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ancient lava flows, ridges that the crew will observe and

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photograph during their six hour fly by window on Monday.

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Speaker 1: And Avery has been doing the math on what Monday

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actually means.

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Speaker 2: Well, it's history. On Monday, April sixth, the Artemis two

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crew will swing around the far side of the Moon,

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briefly out of contact with Earth entirely, and at their

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farthest point they will be two hundred and fifty two thousand,

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seven hundred and fifty seven miles from home. That breaks

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the all time human spaceflight distay since record set by

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the crew of Apollo thirteen back in April nineteen seventy

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fifty six years. We've been waiting fifty six years to

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break that record, and it gets better.

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Speaker 1: During the lunar flyby, Oryan will enter a solar eclipse,

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the Sun moving behind the Moon from the crew's perspective.

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The crew will use that window to look for meteoroid

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impacts flashing on the lunar surface and to try to

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photograph the deep space sky without the Sun in the way.

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Speaker 2: We'll have full Day four and Monday fly by coverage

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in Monday's episode. Right now four humans traveling toward the

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Moon and everything is going exactly to plan.

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Speaker 1: Next the solar plunge has happened.

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Speaker 2: Now we wait, all right, we promise you this and

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here it is your Comet Maps update.

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Speaker 1: Yesterday we introduced you to Comet C twenty twenty six,

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a one known as Maps, a rare kreutz sungrazer, discovered

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in January by a team of French astronomers in Chile.

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We told you it was about to make one of

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the most dangerous journeys in the Solar System, a pass

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within one hundred and sixty one thousand kilometers of the

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Sun's surface, closer than most comets ever come. And we

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promise to bring you the latest today.

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Speaker 2: So here's where we are at fourteen twenty two UTC today.

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That's right in the middle of the day in Australia.

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Comet Maps reached perihelion. It passed through the lower corona

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of the Sun. The plunge is done.

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Speaker 1: And the verdict that is genuinely still coming in because

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right now Maps is in the Sun's glare, basically invisible

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to ground based observers. We're relying on spacecraft imagery, particularly

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from Soho's Lasco coronograph, to track what happened.

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Speaker 2: The big question has shifted. It's no longer just did

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it survive, It's what kind of show will it put on?

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There are several scenarios. If the the nucleus survived intact,

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Maps could emerge in the next day or two as

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a stunning naked eye comet. Some predictions put its potential

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brightness at magnitude minus five brighter than venus. Others suggest

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it could reach magnitude minus fifteen, brighter than the full

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moon at perihelion. It may have even been briefly visible

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in daylight.

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Speaker 1: Even if the nucleus broke apart, which is what happens

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to most sungrazers, the story isn't necessarily over. A post

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perihelian breakup can produce what astronomers call a headless wonder,

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a bright, glowing tale with no nucleus behind it. Sometimes

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those can be spectacular in their own right.

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Speaker 2: Maps belongs to the Krutz sun Grazer family, the same

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family as comet ikeas Seki in nineteen sixty five, one

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of the brightest comets of the twentieth century, and comet

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Lovejoy in twenty eleven, which survived its own brush with

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the Corona and went on to da Southern Hemisphere observers, and.

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Speaker 1: That is the key phrase, Southern Hemisphere. If Maps emerges

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from the glare as expected, the window to see it

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from the ground opens around April sixth to tenth. Look

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west after sunset low on the horizon in Australia and

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across New Zealand. You are perfectly placed for this. Venus

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will be your guide star bright in the western evening sky,

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and Maps, if it survived, should appear nearby.

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Speaker 2: We will have the latest on Monday's episode. This story

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is very much not over.

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Speaker 1: Atlas five lifts its heaviest payload ever, twenty nine Amazon

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Leo satellites.

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Speaker 2: While all eyes were on the Moon this morning, there

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was a rocket launch happening simultaneously that setter record of

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its own.

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Speaker 1: In the early hours of this morning one forty five

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am Eastern time, a United Launch Alliance Atlas five rocket

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lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space for station in Florida.

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Its cargo twenty nine Amazon Leo satellites, and that payload,

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twenty nine satellites packed into one rocket, made history.

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Speaker 2: It is the.

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Speaker 1: Heaviest single payload the Atlas five has ever flown.

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Speaker 2: This is Mission LA zero five for Amazon LEO, the

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satellite Internet constellation, previously known as Project Cooper. Amazon renamed

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the constellation in November last year, and they're building it

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at pace. With today's launch, they now have around two

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hundred and forty one satellites on orbit out of an

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eventual constellation of more than three thousand, two hundred.

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Speaker 1: The Atlas five flew in its most powerful configuration, the

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five to five to one variant, with five solid rocket

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boosters strapped on and Ula engineers made specific modifications to

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the Centaur upper stage and its dispenser system to carry

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the extra load. These twenty nine satellites went up on

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a northeast trajectory to a low Earth orbit of around

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four hundred and fifty kilometers.

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Speaker 2: Amazon has an FCC deadline looming. They need to have

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half of their constellation operational by July twenty twenty six,

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which puts them in a serious race. Multiple Atlas five

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and Vulcan Centaur launches are planned this year, plus missions

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on Arion six, New Glen and Falcon nine.

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Speaker 1: The Atlas five is one of the most reliable rockets

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ever built. This was its one hundred and second mission,

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and while the Vulcan Centaur is taking over as the

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primary heavy lift vehicle going forward, today proved the old

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workhorse has still got it okay.

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Speaker 2: Our next story, Moon's Hot Cold Divide may be wrong.

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Blue Ghost rewrites lunar science with the.

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Speaker 1: Artemis two crew heading toward the Moon right now. This

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next story feels especially timely because new data from the

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Moon's surface is challenging something scientists thought they understood for decades.

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Speaker 3: Firefly Aerospace's Blue ghosts lander touched down in the Moon's

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Mari Chrisium, the Sea of Crises, back in March of

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twenty twenty five. It operated for a full lunar day,

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drilling into the surface and sending back over one hundred

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and ten gigabytes of data. And now a year on,

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scientists are presenting the first major scientific results, and they

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are surprising.

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Speaker 1: The long standing view of the Moon has been this

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The near side, the face we always see from Earth,

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is geologically hot. It's dominated by ancient volcanic planes, and

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beneath the surface there's a concentration of heat producing radioactive elements,

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particularly thorium. In a region called the Prosilarum creep terrain.

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The far side, by contrast, is cooler, older, more heavily cratered.

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Speaker 2: Blue Ghost was specifically sent to land outside that hot

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region in mare Chrisium, well away from the creep zone,

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precisely to test whether the temperature difference was as dramatic

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as scientistics pres affected. The answer has upended the model.

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Blue Ghosts heat probe found that the underground temperature at

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mari Chrissium is not significantly different from what Apollo astronauts

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measured at their landing sites deep inside the supposed hot zone.

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Speaker 1: As Saichi Nagihara, the principal investigator of Blue Ghost's heat

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probe at Texas Tech University, put it, we may have

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to abandon that binary.

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Speaker 2: What does this mean? Heat producing elements like thorium may

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be more widely distributed beneath the lunar surface than anyone thought,

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and one possible explanation is that volcanic activity in some

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regions wasn't driven by those radioactive elements at all. It

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may have simply been easier for magma to break through

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in places where the crust was thinner.

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Speaker 1: It's a fundamental rethink of how the Moon formed and evolved,

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and it has direct implications for where future crude missions

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might land and what they'll find. Blue Ghost Mission I,

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expected to launch later this year, will land on the

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lunar far side, giving scientists the next data point in

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this evolving picture.

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Speaker 2: Onwards the story five. Let's simply call this one stellar science.

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Pulsars are broadcasting from the edge of their magnetic.

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Speaker 1: Reach down to a discovery that overturns decades of thinking

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about some of the most extreme objects in the universe,

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and it has an Australian fingerprint on it.

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Speaker 2: Pulsars are the class remnants of dead stars. They're among

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the densest objects we know of. A teaspoon of pulsar

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material would weigh around ten million tons on Earth. As

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they spin, they sweep beams of radio waves across the cosmos,

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like cosmic lighthouses, and a special class called millisecond pulsars

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spins hundreds of times per second, so regularly that they

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rival atomic clocks in their precision.

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Speaker 1: For decades, the textbook answer to where those radio pulses

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come from was simple. Near the surface, close to the

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magnetic poles. That's where scientists assumed all the action happened.

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Speaker 2: A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal

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Astronomical Society has just rewritten that. Professor Michael Kramer from

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the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and

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doctor Simon Johnson from Australia's own CSIRO analyzed radio observations

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of nearly two hundred millisecond pulsars and compared them with

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gamma ray data from NASA's Fermi Space telescope.

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Speaker 1: What they found, about one third of millisecond pulsars are

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broadcasting radio waves from two completely separate regions at once,

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not just the magnetic poles, but also from a distant

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swirling zone of charged particles called the current sheet right

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at what's called the light cylinder. That's the boundary where

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the pulsar's magnetic field would need to travel faster than

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light just to keep pace with the spinning star.

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Speaker 2: As doctor Johnston it, these tiny, fast binning stars are

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even more complex and surprising than we thought, broadcasting from

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both their surfaces and from the very edge of their

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magnetic reach.

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Speaker 1: The practical consequences are significant because the radio signals are

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spreading out over a wider range of directions than previously understood.

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More pulsars should be detectable than scientists thought, and that's

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good news for projects like pulsar timing arrays, networks of

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pulsars used as detectors for gravitational waves rippling across the universe.

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Speaker 2: A great piece of science and a proud moment for CSIRO,

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Australia's National Science Agency.

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Speaker 1: And finally, today an invitation to go outside and look up,

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because right now Mercury is putting on its best performance

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of the entire year, and we have the best seats

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in the house.

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Speaker 2: Mercury reached what astronomers call greatest elongation on April third,

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the point where it appears farthest from the Sun in

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our sky. This is the year's greatest elongation for Mercury,

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full stop, the best it will get all of twenty

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twenty six.

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Speaker 1: Here's the key thing about Mercury. It's always close to

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the Sun in our sky, which makes it genuinely difficult

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to spot. Most people have never actually seen it. Greatest

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elongation is your best window. The planet pulls as far

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from the Sun's glare as it ever gets, giving you

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a brief clear opportunity before it slips back.

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Speaker 2: Right now, Mercury is sitting about twenty eight degrees from

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the sun rising in the eastern sky before dawn. Look

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east about thirty to forty minutes before sunrise. You're looking

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for a steady point of light magnitude around zero point four,

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which is bright enough to see with the naked eye

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under decent conditions. It's sitting low on the horizon, just

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above Mars and the constellation Aquarius.

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Speaker 1: And here's the Southern Hemisphere advantage. This is specifically the

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best morning apparition of mercury for the Southern Hemisphere in

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twenty twenty six from Australia and New Zealand. The geometry

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of the ecliptic gives us a steeper angle to the horizon.

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Mercury climbs higher and stays out of the murk longer

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than it does for Northern hemisphere observers.

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Speaker 2: If you have binoculars or a small telescope, there's a bonus.

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Mercury is currently showing a half illuminated face what astronomers

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call a quarter phase. You can see it going through

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phases just like the moon, which is something a lot

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of people don't realize about. Mercury and keep.

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Speaker 1: Watching the eastern sky over the next couple of weeks,

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because Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune will gather in a

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tight cluster on the morning of April eighteenth. Three of

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those four will be visible to the naked eye, close

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enough to cover with three fingers held at arm's length.

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A lovely little planetary alignment to chase.

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Speaker 2: So this week, look east before sunrise for Mercury, look

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west after sunset for any sign of comet maps emerging

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from the Sun's glare, and keep an eye on Monday's

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episode for everything you need to know about the Artemis

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two lunarflyby.

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Speaker 1: And that is your Astronomy Daily for Saturday, the fifth

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of April twenty twenty six. A crew heading to the Moon,

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a comment that may be putting on the sky show

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of the decade, a record breaking rocket launch, science from

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the lunar surface, a pulsar discovery out of Australia, and

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Mercury waiting for you in the dawn sky.

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Speaker 2: We'll be back Monday with day four and five of

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Artemis two and the latest on comet maps. If you're

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heading outside tonight, clear skies. Everyone from all of.

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Speaker 1: Us at Astronomy Daily, keep looking up Sunday.

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Speaker 2: Stars Stars so Stories, The Soul m