Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support.
Sponsor Details:
Ensure your online privacy by using NordVPN. To get our special listener deal and save a lot of money, visit www.astronomydaily.io/nordvpn. You'll be glad you did!
Get the best secure and private email on the planet. Stop your Government, google and who knows who else spying on every email you write. Do what we did and use ProtonMail. They beleive in privacy and there are no ads in their business model...yet they still provide a free forever service. Check them out and get out special deal at www.astronomydaily.io/protonmail
Become a supporter of Astronomy Daily by joining our Supporters Club. Commercial free episodes daily are only a click way... Click Here
This episode includes AI-generated content.
00:00:00 --> 00:00:03 Anna: A 4 ton piece of rocket has just
00:00:03 --> 00:00:06 carved a fresh crater into the Moon. And for
00:00:06 --> 00:00:08 once we had the telescopes pointed right at
00:00:08 --> 00:00:08 it.
00:00:09 --> 00:00:12 Avery: Sodium and lithium glowing in the plume. A
00:00:12 --> 00:00:14 spacewalk happening as we speak, and a star
00:00:14 --> 00:00:17 that died in a way nobody expected.
00:00:17 --> 00:00:20 Anna: Good day and welcome to Astronomy Daily.
00:00:20 --> 00:00:21 I'm Anna.
00:00:22 --> 00:00:24 Avery: And I'm avery. It's Thursday the 6th of
00:00:24 --> 00:00:27 August, 2026, and there is a lot of
00:00:27 --> 00:00:28 sky to get through.
00:00:28 --> 00:00:31 Anna: We lead on the Moon, we go live to the space
00:00:31 --> 00:00:34 station, we witness a supernova at
00:00:34 --> 00:00:36 first light and we meet the crew heading up
00:00:36 --> 00:00:39 next month. Then we point you at the sky
00:00:39 --> 00:00:42 north and south for what is shaping up to be
00:00:42 --> 00:00:43 the biggest week of the year.
00:00:44 --> 00:00:45 Avery: Let's get into it.
00:00:46 --> 00:00:48 Yesterday morning at about half past six
00:00:48 --> 00:00:51 Universal Time, a spent SpaceX Falcon
00:00:51 --> 00:00:53 9 upper stage, catalog number
00:00:53 --> 00:00:55
00:00:55 --> 00:00:58 010D, slammed into the
00:00:58 --> 00:01:01 far western edge of the Moon, close to
00:01:01 --> 00:01:04 Einstein Crater, at somewhere near five and a
00:01:04 --> 00:01:06 half thousand kilometers an hour.
00:01:06 --> 00:01:08 Anna: And this is the one we flagged for you
00:01:08 --> 00:01:11 yesterday and said, come back tomorrow. Well,
00:01:11 --> 00:01:13 it's confirmed. It hit almost
00:01:13 --> 00:01:15 exactly where and when the independent
00:01:15 --> 00:01:17 tracker Bill Gray of Project
00:01:17 --> 00:01:20 Avery: Pluto said it would, which is the first
00:01:20 --> 00:01:23 remarkable thing. This wasn't a planned
00:01:23 --> 00:01:26 impact. Nobody steered it in. A, uh, private
00:01:26 --> 00:01:28 citizen with orbital mechanics software
00:01:28 --> 00:01:31 called the shot to within a minute or two
00:01:31 --> 00:01:33 days ahead, though, where
00:01:33 --> 00:01:36 Anna: did this thing come from? Rewind to January
00:01:36 --> 00:01:39 2025. A Falcon 9 lifts
00:01:39 --> 00:01:41 off carrying two commercial moon landers.
00:01:41 --> 00:01:44 Firefly's Blue Ghost, which went on to make
00:01:44 --> 00:01:47 the first fully successful commercial soft
00:01:47 --> 00:01:50 landing that March and ispace's
00:01:50 --> 00:01:51 resilience land.
00:01:51 --> 00:01:54 Avery: The upper stage does its job, flings both
00:01:54 --> 00:01:57 landers onto a lunar trajectory, and then
00:01:57 --> 00:01:59 it's just left there, out of fuel,
00:01:59 --> 00:02:02 adrift, and that messy gravitational
00:02:02 --> 00:02:04 neighborhood between the Earth and the Moon.
00:02:04 --> 00:02:07 Anna: And here's the physics that traps it, because
00:02:07 --> 00:02:10 it surprised me. For a normal mission close
00:02:10 --> 00:02:13 to Earth, you nudge the stage down and it
00:02:13 --> 00:02:16 burns up in the atmosphere. Cheap, tidy.
00:02:16 --> 00:02:18 But a stage that's already been flung toward
00:02:18 --> 00:02:21 the Moon would need almost as much fuel to
00:02:21 --> 00:02:23 come home safely as it took took to get out
00:02:23 --> 00:02:24 there in the first place.
00:02:25 --> 00:02:28 Avery: And that feel is long gone. So it
00:02:28 --> 00:02:31 drifts for 18 months until a
00:02:31 --> 00:02:33 mixture of solar activity and plain old
00:02:33 --> 00:02:36 gravity bends its path just enough to put
00:02:36 --> 00:02:39 it on a collision course. Now, normally,
00:02:39 --> 00:02:42 that's the end of the story. A dead rocket
00:02:42 --> 00:02:44 hits the Moon, nobody sees it, we all move
00:02:44 --> 00:02:47 on. But this time, astronomers turned
00:02:47 --> 00:02:48 it into an experiment.
00:02:49 --> 00:02:51 Anna: This is the part I love. The European
00:02:51 --> 00:02:54 Southern Observatory pointed Its Very Large
00:02:54 --> 00:02:57 Telescope in Chile at the impact site. And it
00:02:57 --> 00:02:59 caught the flash chemically in the plume
00:02:59 --> 00:03:01 thrown up by the collision. The telescope
00:03:01 --> 00:03:04 detected glowing sodium and lithium for
00:03:04 --> 00:03:07 something like five to ten minutes afterward.
00:03:07 --> 00:03:09 Avery: And the two elements tell two different
00:03:09 --> 00:03:12 stories. The sodium almost certainly came
00:03:12 --> 00:03:15 from the lunar soil, itself vaporized on
00:03:15 --> 00:03:17 impact, but the lithium, that most likely
00:03:17 --> 00:03:18 came from the rocket.
00:03:19 --> 00:03:22 Anna: So the telescope is effectively reading the
00:03:22 --> 00:03:24 wreck's chemistry from 400
00:03:24 --> 00:03:27 kilometers away. You're watching a rocket
00:03:27 --> 00:03:30 cremate itself into the moon and picking out
00:03:30 --> 00:03:31 the ingredients in the smoke.
00:03:32 --> 00:03:34 Avery: And then NASA steps in for the long game.
00:03:35 --> 00:03:37 Their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter had
00:03:37 --> 00:03:39 already photographed this patch of ground
00:03:39 --> 00:03:41 before the impact. A clean before
00:03:42 --> 00:03:42 shot.
00:03:43 --> 00:03:45 Anna: And over the coming weeks, it'll go back and
00:03:45 --> 00:03:48 photograph the fresh crater, maybe 20
00:03:48 --> 00:03:50 meters across for the after.
00:03:50 --> 00:03:52 Avery: Which gives scientists something they almost
00:03:52 --> 00:03:55 never get. A known object of known
00:03:55 --> 00:03:58 mass hitting at known speed in
00:03:58 --> 00:04:01 known spot with pictures of the ground before
00:04:01 --> 00:04:02 and after.
00:04:02 --> 00:04:05 Anna: And that matters well beyond this one rock.
00:04:06 --> 00:04:08 Engineers have computer models that predict
00:04:08 --> 00:04:11 how a hollow human made object deforms
00:04:11 --> 00:04:14 the ground when it hits. Up to now, those
00:04:14 --> 00:04:17 models have been mostly untested against a
00:04:17 --> 00:04:18 real measured impact.
00:04:18 --> 00:04:21 Avery: This is the calibration. Every future lunar
00:04:21 --> 00:04:24 lander team, NASA's Artemis crews, the
00:04:24 --> 00:04:26 commercial landers, they all need to know how
00:04:26 --> 00:04:29 the surface behaves and how far debris flies
00:04:29 --> 00:04:32 to work out safe landing margins. This crater
00:04:32 --> 00:04:34 helps write those numbers down.
00:04:34 --> 00:04:36 Anna: There's a bigger conversation underneath it
00:04:36 --> 00:04:39 too, isn't there? The space junk. One this
00:04:39 --> 00:04:42 was accidental, harmless in the sense that
00:04:42 --> 00:04:43 nobody was hurt and no satellites were
00:04:43 --> 00:04:46 threatened. But it's a reminder that we are
00:04:46 --> 00:04:48 now leaving hardware scattered through the
00:04:48 --> 00:04:49 whole Earth Moon system.
00:04:49 --> 00:04:52 Avery: It even nudges into space law and believe it
00:04:52 --> 00:04:55 or not, space archaeology, how we treat what
00:04:55 --> 00:04:57 we leave up there. But for today, the
00:04:57 --> 00:04:59 headline is the good news version. A piece of
00:04:59 --> 00:05:02 junk became a free science experiment and the
00:05:02 --> 00:05:03 observatories were ready.
00:05:03 --> 00:05:06 Anna: A rocket that delivered two landers to the
00:05:06 --> 00:05:08 moon 18 months ago finally arrived itself
00:05:09 --> 00:05:10 the hard way, right on schedule,
00:05:11 --> 00:05:13 Avery: from the moon back to low Earth orbit.
00:05:13 --> 00:05:15 Because as we speak, two astronauts are
00:05:15 --> 00:05:17 outside the International Space Station.
00:05:17 --> 00:05:20 Anna: This is US Spacewalk 96,
00:05:20 --> 00:05:22 NASA's Jessica Mair, the station commander,
00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 and Anil Menon went out the hatch this
00:05:25 --> 00:05:28 morning around 8:35 Eastern in the United
00:05:28 --> 00:05:30 States for a spacewalk expected to run about
00:05:30 --> 00:05:33 six and a half hours, streaming live on NASA
00:05:34 --> 00:05:34 as we go to air.
00:05:34 --> 00:05:37 Avery: And the job is genuinely important, if not
00:05:37 --> 00:05:39 glamorous. They're modifying one of the
00:05:39 --> 00:05:41 station's power channels so it can accept A
00:05:41 --> 00:05:44 new rollout solar array later this year,
00:05:44 --> 00:05:46 which is the station investing in itself for
00:05:46 --> 00:05:49 its final act. The ISS is now slated for
00:05:49 --> 00:05:52 a controlled D orbit around 2030. And
00:05:52 --> 00:05:54 these power upgrades keep it healthy and
00:05:54 --> 00:05:56 productive right to the end.
00:05:56 --> 00:05:58 Anna: Now, the human story here is lovely for Anil
00:05:58 --> 00:06:01 Menon. This is his very first spacewalk, and
00:06:01 --> 00:06:03 Avery: his path here is remarkable. He's a
00:06:03 --> 00:06:06 physician, an emergency medicine doctor who
00:06:06 --> 00:06:08 was a first responder after the earthquakes
00:06:08 --> 00:06:10 in Haiti and in Nepal. He was also
00:06:10 --> 00:06:13 SpaceX's very first flight surgeon before he
00:06:13 --> 00:06:16 joined NASA's astronaut class. The person who
00:06:16 --> 00:06:18 signed off that crews were medically fit to
00:06:18 --> 00:06:19 fly, and he
00:06:19 --> 00:06:21 Anna: only arrived at the station a few weeks ago
00:06:21 --> 00:06:24 on a Soyuz in mid July. And there's a
00:06:24 --> 00:06:26 nice family footnote. His wife, Anna Menon,
00:06:26 --> 00:06:28 flew on the Polaris dawn mission back in
00:06:28 --> 00:06:31 2024, the flight that carried out the first
00:06:31 --> 00:06:32 commercial spacewalk.
00:06:32 --> 00:06:35 Avery: So spaceflight really is the family business.
00:06:35 --> 00:06:37 We'll keep an eye on how the EVA wraps up.
00:06:38 --> 00:06:39 And there are two more of these spacewalks
00:06:39 --> 00:06:42 coming this month on the 13th and the 25th.
00:06:43 --> 00:06:45 Now to something that only happens if you're
00:06:45 --> 00:06:48 very quick and a little lucky. Astronomers
00:06:48 --> 00:06:50 have caught a massive star at the very first
00:06:50 --> 00:06:51 instant of its death.
00:06:52 --> 00:06:54 Anna: This dropped today, two research teams
00:06:54 --> 00:06:56 publishing together. And it starts back in
00:06:56 --> 00:06:59 March, when China's Einstein probe and X ray
00:06:59 --> 00:07:02 telescope spotted a brief flash of soft X
00:07:02 --> 00:07:05 rays from a galaxy about 500 million light
00:07:05 --> 00:07:06 years away.
00:07:06 --> 00:07:08 Avery: Within the hour, telescopes on the ground
00:07:08 --> 00:07:10 swung around to look and watch watched a
00:07:10 --> 00:07:12 supernova rapidly brighten. It's now
00:07:12 --> 00:07:14 cataloged as SN
00:07:14 --> 00:07:16 M2026GZF.
00:07:16 --> 00:07:19 Anna: And that opening X ray flash has a name,
00:07:19 --> 00:07:22 the Shock Breakout. Picture the core
00:07:22 --> 00:07:25 of a giant star collapsing. That
00:07:25 --> 00:07:27 launches a shock wave that tears outward
00:07:27 --> 00:07:30 through the star. And the breakout is the
00:07:30 --> 00:07:33 instant that wave finally bursts through the
00:07:33 --> 00:07:36 surface. First light the starting gun,
00:07:36 --> 00:07:36 and it's
00:07:36 --> 00:07:39 Avery: fiendishly hard to catch. It lasts seconds to
00:07:39 --> 00:07:42 hours. And in 20 years, astronomers have only
00:07:42 --> 00:07:45 clearly bagged a couple in X rays. So
00:07:45 --> 00:07:47 having two teams capture this one from the
00:07:47 --> 00:07:49 first flash onward is a real event.
00:07:49 --> 00:07:52 Anna: But here's the twist, and it's a good one.
00:07:52 --> 00:07:54 This was a particular kind of supernova, A,
00:07:54 --> 00:07:57 uh, broad, lined type 1C. That
00:07:57 --> 00:08:00 family usually comes with fireworks. Narrow
00:08:00 --> 00:08:02 jets of material moving near the speed of
00:08:02 --> 00:08:05 light and often a, uh, gamma ray burst. The
00:08:05 --> 00:08:07 brightest explosions in the universe.
00:08:07 --> 00:08:10 Avery: This one had none of that. No gamma ray
00:08:10 --> 00:08:13 burst, no lasting jet, and the faintest
00:08:13 --> 00:08:15 opening X ray flash ever tied to this type.
00:08:15 --> 00:08:17 Even though the explosion itself was
00:08:17 --> 00:08:18 Powerful,
00:08:18 --> 00:08:21 Anna: which makes it uh, a kind of missing link. An
00:08:21 --> 00:08:23 explosion that looks like the jet and gamma
00:08:23 --> 00:08:26 ray crowd in visible light but behaves like a
00:08:26 --> 00:08:29 quieter cousin at higher energies. It hints
00:08:29 --> 00:08:31 there's more than one way for a massive star
00:08:31 --> 00:08:32 to go.
00:08:32 --> 00:08:34 Avery: And a nice detail for the telescope nerds
00:08:34 --> 00:08:37 among us. The follow up leaned on the big US
00:08:37 --> 00:08:39 survey facilities, including the brand new
00:08:39 --> 00:08:42 Vera Rubin Observatory. Exactly the kind
00:08:42 --> 00:08:45 of fast all sky work these observatories
00:08:45 --> 00:08:46 were built for.
00:08:46 --> 00:08:48 Anna: For our next story, let's head Back to the
00:08:48 --> 00:08:51 ISS. Let's meet the crew heading up next.
00:08:52 --> 00:08:55 NASA and SpaceX are now targeting 12
00:08:55 --> 00:08:58 September for Crew 13 flying up on
00:08:58 --> 00:09:00 the Dragon capsule named Grace or
00:09:00 --> 00:09:01 aboard
00:09:01 --> 00:09:03 Avery: Commander Jessica Watkins of NASA, a uh,
00:09:03 --> 00:09:06 geologist. And this is a milestone for her.
00:09:06 --> 00:09:08 She becomes the first NASA astronaut to fly
00:09:08 --> 00:09:11 on Dragon twice alongside her
00:09:11 --> 00:09:12 pilot
00:09:12 --> 00:09:14 Anna: Luke Delaney, a uh, former naval aviator
00:09:15 --> 00:09:17 and this will be his first trip to space.
00:09:18 --> 00:09:20 Then Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space
00:09:20 --> 00:09:23 Agency, a fighter pilot, and Sergey
00:09:23 --> 00:09:26 Tetteryatnikov of Roscosmos, a former
00:09:26 --> 00:09:29 submariner, both also flying for the very
00:09:29 --> 00:09:30 first time.
00:09:30 --> 00:09:33 Avery: It's a 180 day stay and it's worth
00:09:33 --> 00:09:35 noting the mission was actually moved earlier
00:09:35 --> 00:09:38 from November into September as NASA
00:09:38 --> 00:09:40 pushes to lift its launch cadence across the
00:09:40 --> 00:09:41 board.
00:09:41 --> 00:09:43 Anna: And for our North American listeners, one
00:09:43 --> 00:09:46 very on brand detail from the briefing. When
00:09:46 --> 00:09:48 the crew rolls out to the pad, they'll be
00:09:48 --> 00:09:50 riding in cybertrucks only
00:09:50 --> 00:09:53 Avery: in this era of spaceflight. We'll bring you
00:09:53 --> 00:09:54 the launch when it's locked.
00:09:54 --> 00:09:57 And that brings us to the sky because next
00:09:57 --> 00:09:59 Wednesday 12 August is the biggest, biggest
00:09:59 --> 00:10:02 sky watching day of the year. And it deserves
00:10:02 --> 00:10:04 a proper look for both halves of the planet.
00:10:04 --> 00:10:05 Anna: Two headline events land almost
00:10:06 --> 00:10:09 first, a uh, total solar eclipse. The moon's
00:10:09 --> 00:10:12 shadow sweeps down over the Arctic, across
00:10:12 --> 00:10:14 eastern Greenland and western Iceland and
00:10:14 --> 00:10:17 then across northern Spain and a corner of
00:10:17 --> 00:10:20 Portugal. That narrow path of totality is
00:10:20 --> 00:10:22 the only place the sun goes fully dark, up to
00:10:22 --> 00:10:25 2 minutes and 18 seconds of it. It's the
00:10:25 --> 00:10:27 first total eclipse over mainland Europe
00:10:28 --> 00:10:29 since 1999.
00:10:29 --> 00:10:31 Avery: Now for our audience in North America, you
00:10:31 --> 00:10:34 are not in the path of totality but much of
00:10:34 --> 00:10:36 the north gets ah, a partial eclipse. And
00:10:36 --> 00:10:38 here are your details. It runs across the
00:10:38 --> 00:10:41 afternoon of the 12th. The deepest bite in
00:10:41 --> 00:10:44 the lower 48 is up in northern Maine, around
00:10:44 --> 00:10:47 29% of the sun covered near Presque Isle
00:10:47 --> 00:10:49 just after 2pm Eastern New York sees
00:10:49 --> 00:10:52 Anna: a uh, modest partial, roughly 9%
00:10:52 --> 00:10:55 starting near 1:07 in the afternoon Eastern
00:10:55 --> 00:10:57 Time. Boston about 16%
00:10:58 --> 00:11:00 Bangor, around 24%. Head into
00:11:00 --> 00:11:03 Canada and it grows Montreal near
00:11:03 --> 00:11:06 18%, and St. John's in Newfoundland,
00:11:06 --> 00:11:08 over half the sun covered. West of the Great
00:11:08 --> 00:11:11 Lakes, though Chicago and beyond, it fades
00:11:11 --> 00:11:13 to essentially nothing.
00:11:13 --> 00:11:15 Avery: And, um, if you're not in the partial zone at
00:11:15 --> 00:11:18 all, NASA streams the whole thing live from
00:11:18 --> 00:11:19 1:15pm Eastern.
00:11:20 --> 00:11:23 Anna: And this is the line we never cut. A partial
00:11:23 --> 00:11:25 eclipse is never safe to look at with the
00:11:25 --> 00:11:28 naked eye. You must use certified eclipse
00:11:28 --> 00:11:30 glasses or a safe solar filter that meets the
00:11:30 --> 00:11:33 ISO 123122
00:11:33 --> 00:11:36 standard. Every moment the sun is even partly
00:11:36 --> 00:11:39 uncovered, a, um, 99% covered sun
00:11:39 --> 00:11:42 can still burn your eyes. Only inside the
00:11:42 --> 00:11:44 path of totality. And only during those brief
00:11:44 --> 00:11:46 seconds of total darkness can you look
00:11:46 --> 00:11:47 unaided.
00:11:48 --> 00:11:50 Avery: The second headline is a gift to the whole
00:11:50 --> 00:11:53 planet. Though it leans north, the Perseid
00:11:53 --> 00:11:55 meteor shower peaks the Same night, the 12th
00:11:55 --> 00:11:58 into the 13th. And this year it peaks under a
00:11:58 --> 00:12:00 new moon. No moonlight to wash them out.
00:12:01 --> 00:12:03 Anna: Dark, perfect skies for the northern
00:12:03 --> 00:12:06 hemisphere. That could mean up to 100 meteors
00:12:06 --> 00:12:09 an hour from a dark site. Now, honestly,
00:12:09 --> 00:12:11 southern friends, the Perseids are a northern
00:12:11 --> 00:12:14 shower. The point they radiate from barely
00:12:14 --> 00:12:16 clears our horizon, so we see very few.
00:12:17 --> 00:12:18 I won't oversell it.
00:12:18 --> 00:12:20 Avery: So what does the southern hemisphere get?
00:12:20 --> 00:12:23 Quite a lot, actually. Look before dawn and
00:12:23 --> 00:12:25 there's a planet parade strung along the sky.
00:12:25 --> 00:12:28 Saturn is superb right now, riding high and
00:12:28 --> 00:12:30 heading towards opposition. Mars is up there
00:12:30 --> 00:12:33 too, with Mercury low and Uranus and Neptune
00:12:33 --> 00:12:36 for those with binoculars and a telescope.
00:12:36 --> 00:12:38 Anna: And Venus is the jewel of the evening,
00:12:39 --> 00:12:41 brilliant in the western twilight after
00:12:41 --> 00:12:44 sunset and actually better placed for us in
00:12:44 --> 00:12:46 the south than for far northern viewers.
00:12:47 --> 00:12:49 Add the winter Milky Way overhead here in
00:12:49 --> 00:12:52 Australia, Scorpius and Sagittarius
00:12:52 --> 00:12:55 blazing, and it's a glorious few weeks of
00:12:55 --> 00:12:56 stargazing
00:12:56 --> 00:12:58 Avery: and one to circle for the Americas,
00:12:58 --> 00:13:01 especially north and south. On
00:13:01 --> 00:13:03 28 August, a deep partial lunar
00:13:03 --> 00:13:06 eclipse with 96% of the moon sliding
00:13:06 --> 00:13:09 into Earth's shadow. Very nearly a total
00:13:09 --> 00:13:12 blood moon. And it favors the whole of the
00:13:12 --> 00:13:12 Americas.
00:13:13 --> 00:13:16 Anna: So wherever you are, get outside this week.
00:13:16 --> 00:13:18 And that's the show for today. A rocket
00:13:18 --> 00:13:21 arrived at the moon, a star showed us its
00:13:21 --> 00:13:24 first light, and there are astronauts outside
00:13:24 --> 00:13:25 the station as you listen.
00:13:26 --> 00:13:28 Avery: Full links and sources are in your show notes
00:13:28 --> 00:13:31 and over at astronomydaily IO and you
00:13:31 --> 00:13:33 can find us anywhere you get your podcasts
00:13:33 --> 00:13:36 and on socials. Astrodaily Pod,
00:13:36 --> 00:13:37 we're back tomorrow.
00:13:37 --> 00:13:40 Anna: Until then, from Anna and Avery
00:13:40 --> 00:13:42 and clear, uh, skies.