One Sleep to Splashdown: Artemis II Heads Home + Lunar Science Bombshell

One more sleep after nine days in deep space, nine days that took humanity further from Earth than we have ever been. The Artemis two crew is coming home. Splashdown is tomorrow, and we have the full countdown. Plus the NASA scientists who literally screamed when the astronauts spotted something nobody expected to see on the Moon. We'll tell you what it was and why it matters so much for future missions. A brand new class of star has been discovered. Meet Gandolf and Moon sized, two cosmic oddballs that have just rewritten the stellar rule book. Mars still very much not welcoming visitors. We have the science to prove it, and four planets are lining up in the April sky for a rare celestial parade. And we close with the most relatable space story in years. What happens when four astronauts take their iPhones a quarter of a million miles from Earth. Boiler The photos are extraordinary. Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, Season five, Episode eighty five. I'm Anna and I'm Avery. It is Thursday, the ninth of April twenty twenty six, and we are broadcasting from Astronomy Daily dot io on the BYTES dot com podcast network. It has been a big week in space, and it is about to get even bigger. Let's go. I'm ready. It is day nine of the Artemis two mission, and right now the Orion spacecraft, call sign Integrity, is hurtling back toward Earth at extraordinary speed. Tomorrow evening, it will splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, and when it does, four astronauts will have completed the most significant human spaceflight since the Apollo program. The splashdown is scheduled for around eight pm Eastern time, that's Friday morning for US here in Australia and New Zealand, and NASA says the weather window is looking favorable. The USS John P. Murtha, the naval recovery vessel, is already on station in the Pacific with hell copters and divers ready to retrieve the crew and avery. Before any of that can happen, there's a critical sequence of events. The crew module, the part that carries the astronauts, has to separate from the service module. Then it plunges into the atmosphere at around twenty five thousand miles an hour. There'll be a blackout period of several minutes when mission control loses all contact as the plasma sheath forms around the capsule. And then parachutes. First, the drogue choots to slow them down dramatically, then the main parachutes and orion drops to about seventeen miles per hour for a soft ocean landing after nine days and nearly seven hundred thousand miles of travel. Now the heat shield. This is the thing that has been quietly keeping engineers awake at night. After the uncrewed Artemis one mission, inspectors found that chunks of the heat shield had sheared away unevenly during reentry. NASA and Lockheed Martin spent four years investigating and redesigning it. Both say they are highly confident it will perform perfectly tomorrow, but it will be the real world test. Once safely aboard the MIRTHA, the crew will undergo medical evaluations before flying to Johnson's Space Center in Houston. Commander Red Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Kock, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hanson. History makers, every single one of them. Victor Glover, the first person of color to travel to the Moon, Christina Cock, the first woman, Jeremy Hanson the first person from a country other than the United States to reach lunar distance. And when they get home, President Trump has apparently already promised them a White House visit. I'd say they've earned it. We'll, of course have the full splashdown coverage intomorrow's episode of Astronomy Daily. Set those alarms. Now, while all the drama of the homeward journey has been unfolding, the science team at Johnson Space Center has been going absolutely wild over what the crew observed during the lunar flyby on Monday. And I do mean wild avery NASA's lunar science lead Kelsey Young described, and this is a direct quote from the press conference, audible screams of delight in the science evaluation room. What were they screaming about? Micro meteorite impact flashes. During the solar eclipse phase of the flyby, when the Moon blocked the Sun and Orion was in darkness, the crew spotted between four and six distinct flashes of light on the lunar surface, brief, colorless pinpricks of light lasting just milliseconds. Each one was a tiny rock traveling thousands of miles per hour slamming into the Moon. Now. Scientists had hoped the crew might see one or two of these. Apollo astronauts reported a handful across all the missions, but to see multiple flashes so quickly, so clearly, they genuinely weren't expecting it. Commander Wiseman described it beautifully in the post flyby debrief. He said they had five minutes of what he called human emotional reaction just staring at the darkened Moon during the eclipse, and then the impacts started showing up. And why does this matter? Scientifically? Because knowing the frequency and location of micro meteorite impacts is critical engineering data. When future Artemis crews are living and working on the lunar surface, building habitats, doing spacewalks, those tiny rocks are going to be falling on their heads and their equipment. Every data point about impact rates helps engineers design better protection. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbitter team is right now using the crew's sketches and timing notes to hunt for fresh craters from those specific impacts. They may actually be able to see the new craters from orbit. And there's a beautiful human moment buried in all of this too. During the flyby, the crew proposed names for two previously unnamed craters on the lunar far side, suggested Integrity after their spacecraft, and Carol, in honor of Commander Wiseman's late wife. Those names have been submitted to the International Astronomical Union for official consideration. That stopped me in my tracks when I read it, History made names written into the Moon. Moving now to a story that has absolutely nothing to do with Artemis but is just as extraordinary in its own way. Astronomers have just identified a brand new class of stellar objects, and they've named them gandolf and moon sized. I'm immediately interested. As you should be so context. When a starlike our Sun runs out of fuel, it eventually collapses into what's called a white dwarf, an incredibly dense Earth sized remnant. These are common, we know them well. But when two white dwarfs in a binary system collide and merge, the resulting object can be strange, define strength, ultramassive, highly magnetic, rapidly rotating. And this is the weird part, emitting X rays even though they're completely alone, no companion star, no material being pulled in from somewhere else, just X rays from a solo stellar remnant. Normally, X ray emissions from white dwarfs come from accretion one star stealing material from another, so to see it happening in isolation is genuinely new. Exactly, and researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria ISTA have now confirmed two of these objects share five distinct characteristics ultramassive, highly magnetic, rapidly rotating, companionless, and X ray emitting. Two is enough to define a class. And one of them is surrounded by a half ring of ionized gas trapped in its own asymmetrical magnetic field. Hydrogen emission spectra that looked like and I love this description cat ears cat ears. The spectral signature kept switching between two peaks in sync with the objects six minute rotation period, something no one had ever seen in a white dwarf before, which is why they named it after the Tolkien character who famously speaks in riddles. Gandolf, who likes to speak in riddles. That is perfect and moon size is its companion in this new class, a white dwarf so dense that a mass equivalent to our entire sun is compressed into something roughly the size of the moon. I need a moment to process that. Take your time. The universe will wait. So what does it all mean? Are there more of these out there? Almost certainly? The researchers say, finding two objects with five overlapping features is and I'm paraphrasing here, more than enough to start a search. The hunt for more gandolfs and moon sizes is on down to. The red place in it and a story that offers a rather sobering perspective on humanity's ambitions there. New research published this week suggests that Mars's surface was never really a viable candidate for life, not just now, but potentially at any point in its history. Scientists at Universe Today have been covering a study that consolidates a growing body of evidence radiation bombardment, toxic perclorates in the soil, and the near total absence of a protective atmosphere. We've known for a long time that Mars is hostile now. The question has always been whether there was a window billions of years ago when Mars had liquid water in a thicker atmosphere, when life could have gained a foothold. And the emerging picture is that even then, the surface may have been too brutal. The radiation levels alone, without a magnetic field to the flex soolar particles, would have been devastating to any surface biology. Whatever life Mars may have had, if any, would have needed to be underground almost immediately. Which actually may missions like Artemis even more striking. By contrast, Earth got it right. We're here, we evolved, We survived long enough to send four people around the Moon on iPhones. Mars just didn't make it. The subsurface is still the focus of active scientific interest. There may be liquid water deep below the Martian crust, there may be microbial life sheltering from the surface hellscape, But the romantic notion of ancient surface life basking under a warm Martian sun, the science is increasingly against. It, and it makes the search for life elsewhere feel even more precious, and the protection of life here feel even more urgent. Well said, onto something a little more uplifting, at least visually. Guy watching time, and this month's night sky is offering up a genuinely lovely alignment. Four planets are currently visible together in April skies Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune. Now Neptune you'll need binoculars or small telescope for it's not naked eye under any practical conditions, but Mercury, Mars and Saturn are all available to the unaided eye if you know where and when to look. For our Southern Hemisphere listeners in Australia and New Zealand, the best viewing window is the eastern sky and the hours before dawn. Mercury is the trickiest. It's always close to the sun, but right now it's at a reasonable elongation and worth hunting. For Bars has been a reliable presence in our skies for months now, and Saturn is that beautiful, steady golden glow that never twinkles the way stars do. If you grab even a modest pair of binoculars and point them at Saturn, you can make out the ring system. It never gets old. This is a great time to get kids outside and look up four planets at once. Artemis two coming home tomorrow. The timing couldn't be better for a bit of genuine wonder. Clear skies permitting, check the star Walk app or your localist astronomy society for specific viewing times from your location. Links has always in our show notes and. We close today with perhaps the most delightfully human story of the entire Artemis two mission. You know, amongst all the orbital mechanics and the heat shield engineering and the science about micro meteorite impacts, there's this other story quietly running alongside it all. Before Artemis two, astronauts brought their iPhones. Not to make calls, there's no signal two hundred and fifty two thousand miles from Earth, but NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman made a deliberate decision to allow the crew to bring iPhone seventeen pro maxes on board as personal cameras. The idea was simple, give the crew the tools to capture their own story. And they have. Christina Coach and Commander Weisman use the iPhone's front camera, the selfie camera, to take what are being described as genderinely the greatest selfies in human history, their faces softly lit from inside the cabin, and behind them, suspended in the black of space, our entire planet, a pale blue crescent from a quarter of a million miles away. The EXIF data from the images shows they kept the camera on default settings, no special filters, no complicated exposures, just point the phone at the window, press the button. And then there's Reed Weizman during the lunarflyby turning off all the cabin lights so there's no reflection on the windows, zooming his iPhone seventeen to eight X and photographing Chebyshev Crater on the far side of the Moon, a place that had never been photographed by a human holding a camera in their hands. Before you could argue Apple should just retire the shot on iPhone ad campaign. Now it has been definitively one. The crew has reportedly shot more images on their phones than through the professional Nikon cameras, and NASA says everything captured will be made publicly available within six months, so there's a lot more to come. There's something quietly extraordinary about this story. We're in an era of such technological sophistication, orbital mechanics, deep space navigation, radiation shielding, and yet one of the most resonant moments of the entire mission is for humans far from home pulling out their phones to take pictures of each other. Because that's what people do, that's what we've always done. We go somewhere extraordinary, we look at each other, We press the button. That's humanity right there. And that is Astronomy Daily for Thursday, the ninth of April twenty twenty six. We'll be back tomorrow with everything you need for Artemis two splash down Day. Set your alarms. You can find us on all major podcast platforms. Search Astronomy Daily or head to Astronomy Daily dot io. We are on x and Instagram as astro Daily Pod, on TikTok, YouTube and tumbler. If today's episode gave you something to think about, or if the Gandalf story made you look up at the sky a little differently, share it with someone. That's how we grow. From all of us at the bytes dot com podcast network. Clear skies and we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye Sunday, starstz Start