Moon Rocket, Lost Spacecraft, and a Comet That Fell Apart on Camera

Hey, they're stargazers, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily dose of what's happening out there in the cosmos. I'm Anna, and I'm Avery. Today is Saturday, March twenty first, twenty twenty six, and honestly, Anna, we've got another busy show. Today, We really do. A moon rocket has arrived at the launch pad for the first time in over fifty years, carrying astronauts. We've got a pair of weird, dying stars behaving in ways nobody's ever seen before. And a comment that basically fell apart while Hubble happened to be watching accidentally. Plus fifteen brand new moons in our Solar system, a growing garbage problem on our own moon, and the genuinely dramatic spacecraft story one lost, one found. It's a big one. Let's get into it. We're going to start with NASA's Artemis two, and this one feels different. After months of delays, repairs, and anxious waiting, the rocket is finally on the pad. At eleven twenty one am Eastern Time on Friday, March twentieth, NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Oryan spacecraft arrived at launch pad thirty nine b at Kennedy's Space Center in Florida, after an eleven hour overnight journey from the vehicle assembly building hauled by the Giant Crawler transporter at less than one mile per hour. A three hundred and twenty two foot tall moon rocket creeping through the night at jogging pace. And honestly, that's exactly how it should be. It really is, And the current target launch date is no earlier than Wednesday, April first, which means we could be watching the first humans leave Earth's orbit in over fifty years in less than two weeks. So who's on board the Artemis two crew is Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Coach, all from NASA, along with Canadian Space Agency mission specialists Jeremy Hansen. And this mission is full of historic firsts. Victor Glover will become the first person of color to travel be yond Earth orbit, Christina Coach will be the first woman to do so, and Jeremy Hansen will be the first non American citizen to leave Earth orbit. They'll fly a free return trajectory around the Moon and back to Earth in approximately ten days, no landing. This is a test flight, but it's a crucial one now. The road to the pad was not smooth. Earlier this year, a helium flow problem in the rocket's upper stage forced the team to roll the whole stack back to the vehicle assembly building. That pushed the launch from February, then March, and now April. But the team fixed when needed fixing, including replacing batteries on the flight termination system, and now PAD teams are moving into final countdown preparations. The last time humans flew beyond Earth orbit was Apollo seventeen in December nineteen seventy two. That was over fifty three years ago. April first cannot come come soon enough. We will absolutely be following this one. Let's move on, all right. Story two is pure stellar science, and it's one of those discoveries that makes you realize how much of the universe we still haven't seen yet. Astronomers have found something that until now nobody was sure could even exist. A pair of brown dwarf stars orbiting each other so closely that one is actively pulling material from the other. Let's back up slightly, so, what is a brown dwarf? So Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars, They're bigger than giant planets, but not massive enough to ignite and sustain hydrogen fusion the way our Sun does. They sort of sit in a strange no man's land between planet and star. And we know many of them exist in binary pairs, but this system, designated ztf J one two three nine plus eight three four seven, is something else entirely. These two brown dwarfs are in an incredibly tight orbit, completing a full loop around each other in fifty seven minutes. Fifty seven minutes, for context, our moon takes about twenty seven days to orbit Earth. These two are practically on top of each other. And because they're so close, the gravity of one is pulling material from the surface of the other, a process called mass transfer. This kind of behavior has been seen before in binary white dwarfs, the dense remnants of dead stars, but never in brown dwarfs. This is a first. The research team, led by Caltech graduate student Samuel Whitebook, actually had colleagues who didn't believe the finding at first. One co author said, and I love this. We've told some of our colleagues about them, and they didn't believe such a thing exists. Which is the best kind of science discovery. The system is only about a thousand light years away, which is close enough that follow up observations with the James Webbs telescope are being planned. And what's the eventual fate of these two Either they merge into a single brighter star or the one that's gaining mass eventually becomes massive and enough to trigger nuclear fusion and become a proper star. Either way, a fascinating, ending. Incredible stuff story. Three on a and this one involves Hubble being very, very lucky. So this story starts with a mishap and ends up as one of the most extraordinary observational luck stories in recent astronomy. Tell us all about it. Okay, So, researchers at Auburn University had won telescope time on the Hubble Space Telescope to study a specific comment, but then new technical constraints meant their original target wasn't viewable, so they quickly found a replacement, a different comment designated C slash twenty twenty five K one slash at lisk or just comment K one for short. Routine. Enough, so far. Routine until one of the team, co investigator John Nonan, sat down to look at the data the next morning, and he found not one comment in the images. He found four because Comment K one was falling apart right in front of Hubble's cameras. The commet had fragmented into at least four distinct pieces, each with its own coma that fuzzy envelope of gas and dust around the commentary nucleus, and Hubble's sharp eyes could clearly resolve each fragment separately, something ground based telescopes could barely make out as blurry blobs. The timing was extraordinary. The comet had passed closest to the Sun its perihelion just about a month before. That's the most intense heat and gravitational stress a comet experiences, and for long period comets like Cone, it's when they're most vulnerable to breaking up, and. Hubble just happened to be watching. The team was able to trace the history of each fragment back in time, essentially reconstructing exactly how and when the breakup happened. This is the first time Hubble has captured a comment this early in the fragmentation process. There's also an intriguing mystery buried in the data. There was a delay between when the comet broke up and when bright foutbursts were seen from the ground. Normally, when a comet fragments and exposes fresh ice to sunlight, you'd expect it to brighten almost immediately, but this one didn't. Why. Nobody knows yet, and. The initial analysis shows that comet K one is unusually depleted in carbon, which gives us new clues about the primorial chemistry of our early Solar system, all from a comet that wasn't even the intended target. Best accidents in science, honestly, onwards. Story four is a numbers came So. How many moons to Saturn have. As of this week two hundred and eighty five. Two hundred and eighty five and Jupiter. One hundred and one. The Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union announced on March sixteenth that four new moons have been confirmed around Jupiter and eleven new moons around Saturn. Fifteen new moons just like that. I love this recurring story. It feels like somebody keeps going around the back of these planets and finding more hiding. There, sort of exactly what's happening. Actually, the Saturn moons were found by a team led by Edward Ashton from the University of British Columbia who combed through data from the Canada, France Hawaii telescope going back to twenty nineteen, and the Jupiter moons were spotted by a team led by Scott Shephard at the Carnegie Institution. All of these newly confirmed moons are tiny, barely a couple of miles across, with magnitudes around twenty five to twenty seven, meaning they're far too faint to see without some of the world's most powerful telescopes. Far what astronomers call irregular moons, captured objects orbiting far from the planet, often going the wrong way in retrograde. Most of the new Saturnian moons are doing just that, moving in the opposite direction to the planet's rotation, which is a strong sign they were probably captured from somewhere else, either asteroids snagged by Saturn's gravity or fragments from a collision that broke up a larger moon in the distant past. And this count is only going to keep climbing. The Veric Reuben Observatory went fully online last year, and it's going to be detecting these tiny, faint moons at a rate we haven't seen before. Poor Jupiter, though, still two hundred moons behind Saturn. It's like Jupiter just can't catch up. Jupiter just needs a try harder. Okay, story five, and this one's a little closer to home. So here's a question. What's on the Moon right now? Other than dust and rock, I mean. The flags, some rovers, U golf ball, I. Think more than one hundred metric tons of human made material, spacecraft parts, scientific instruments, cameras, landers, crash sites, and yes, actually bags of human waste left behind by Apollo astronauts. We left star rubbish on the Moon. We absolutely did. And that's just what's there now. We're on the verge of a completely new era of lunar activity, crude missions, commercial landers, scientific rovers, resource prospectors, and nobody has a comprehensive framework for what happens to all the stuff we're about to bring up there. There's no Lunar Environment Protection Agency, there's no international treaty specifically addressing lunar surface contamination. The Outer Space Treaty of nineteen sixty seven says countries are responsible for their national activities in space, but it doesn't get into the specifics of say a crash lander leaking propellant near a scientifically important site. And there are real concerns beyond aesthetics. Some of the most scientifically valuable areas of the Moon, like the permanently shadowed craters near the Poles, which may hold ancient ice deposits, could be contaminated by human activity before we've even finished studying them in their pristine style. Space policy researchers and planetary scientists are increasingly pushing for binding international agreements about lunar preservation zones, impacts, site protections, and responsible disposal of mission hardware. It's a conversation the space community needs to have urgently, because the missions are coming, whether the policy frameworks are ready or not. The Moon has been waiting four and a half billion years. The least we can do is think carefully before we trash it. All Right, We're ending today's show with a story that has two very different outcomes, one spacecraft recently lost and one spacecraft recently found. Let's start with the one that was found. ESA's Proba three mission, which we mentioned yesterday, has now been officially confirmed as recovered, and the details of how it happened are genuinely dramatic. So PROBA three is a fascinating mission. It uses two separate spacecraft flying in precise formation at an altitude of over sixty thousand kilometers to create an artificial solar eclipse. One satellite carries a disc that blocks the Sun, and the other carries a cornograph to study the faint outer atmosphere of the Sun, which is normally washed out by the Sun's blinding light. On February fourteenth, the Corona spacecraft, one of the two, suffered a chain of failures that caused it to lose its orientation. Its solar panels turned away from the Sun, its batteries drained, and it entered survival mode, tumbling silently through space for nearly a month. Engineers tracked it and waited for an opportunity. That opportunity came when the tumbling spacecraft briefly turned its solar panels toward the Sun just enough to generate a small amount of power. Teams in Spain acted immediately and contact was re established. LISA Director General Joseph Ashbacker said they saw that some sunlight was actually hitting the solar panels, and that was their moment. The spacecraft has now regained stable orientation and is charging its batteries. Engineers are carefully running checks before resuming science operations. Relief all around now. Contrast that with the story of NASA's Maven spacecraft, currently orbiting Mars, or at least it should be. NASA lost contact with Maven on December sixth last year, after the spacecraft was expected to emerge from behind Mars after a routine pass on the far side of the planet. Two days before contact was lost, telemetry showed everything was normal, no problems whatsoever. But then a fragment of tracking data from the day contact was lost suggested Maven was rotating unexpectedly as it came out from behind Mars and was no longer in its planned orbit. NASA immediately began recovery efforts. Those efforts have now been ongoing for over three months. DASA has used its deep space network, the Green Bank Observatory, even the Curiosity rover pointed skyward on the Martian surface in attempts to detect a signal. So far nothing. At a conference this week, NASA's Planetary Science Director Louise Procter said, and I thought this was a poignant quote. We haven't officially said Mavin is lost, yet we're still looking for it. Mavin has been orbiting Mars since twenty thirteen, twelve years of science studying how Mars lost its atmosphere over billions of years and transformed from a potentially habitable world into the cold desert we see today. It also handles about twenty percent of communications between Earth and the Mars rovers. Other orbiters, including Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and issa's Trace Gas Orbiter, are taking up the relay duties for now, and NASA's exploring options for a replacement Telecommunicationations orbiter. One story of recovery one still unresolved. Will keep you posted on both. And that is your Astronomy Daily for Saturday, March twenty first, twenty twenty six. What a show today? A moon rocket on the pad, a comet in pieces, failed stars behaving unexpectedly, fifteen new moons, a moon covered in our junk, and two spacecraft with very different stories. As always, links to all our source articles are in the show notes. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. It genuinely helps more people find the show. You can find us at Astronomy Daily dot io and on social media everywhere. At astro Dailypod, we are part of the Bytes dot com podcast network. Check them out for more great shows. Until next time, keep looking up clear skys. Everyone say, stars, Stars, the Soul, Stars, the Soul