Voyager 1 Dying? NASA Powers Down Science Instrument + Life Clues on Mars & Artemis Suit Crisis

Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily guide to the universe and everything happening in it. I'm Anna and I'm Avery. It is Wednesday, April the twenty second, twenty twenty six, and it is a big day for fans of humanity's most well traveled spacecraft. It really is. Today. We have six stories, ranging from the Bitter Suite to the Thrilling, and two of them touch on Mars in very different ways. We've got a legendary probe fighting for survival, fifteen billion miles away, organic molecules hinting at life on the Red planet, a black hole that makes our sun look like a birthday candle, SpaceX hitting a stunning reusability milestone, a sobering reality check for the Artemis program, and tonight's sky that. Is a full show. Let's get into it, shall we. I'm ready to go. Our lead story today is about a spacecraft that launched before most of our listeners were born and is still against all odds, calling Home. Voyager one, the most distant human made object ever built. Right now, It's more than fifteen billion miles from Earth, so far away that a radio signal takes twenty three hours just to reach it. And on April this seventeenth, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent it a very difficult command. Engineers turned off the low Energy Charged Particles experiment, the LEECP, one of Voyager one's last remaining science instruments. The LACP had been running almost continuously since Voyager one launched in nineteen seventy seven, nearly forty nine years. It measured ions, electrons, and cosmic rays from interstellar space, data that literally no other instrument anywhere in the universe could provide. Though, why turn it off? This short answer is power. Voyager one runs on a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. It converts heat from decaying plutonium into electricity, and that power supply loses about four watts every year. After five decades, that decline has become critical. In late February, during a routine roll maneuver, Voyager once, power levels dropped unexpectedly and the probe came dangerously close to triggering an automatic under voltage fault protection. Basically, the spacecraft would have shut itself down in self preservation mode. That would have triggered a multi day recovery process. From fifteen billion miles away. The team needed to act first, so they made the call switch off the LEECP. It's worth noting this wasn't a panic decision. Years ago, the Voyager science and engineering teams set down together and agreed on an ordered shutdown sequence, which instruments would go offline first, to keep the most scientifically valuable systems running as long as possible. The LCP was next on the list. Of ten original instrument sets on Voyager one, seven are now shut down. Only two remain active, the magnetimeter, which measures interstellar magnetic fields, and the Plasma Waves subsystem, which listens for density changes in the plasma surrounding the spacecraft. There is a sliver of hope on the LCP, though engineers left a tiny motor just half a WoT running inside the instrument. It keeps the sensor able to rotate. The idea is that if engineers can find more power somehow, there's a chance the LACP could switch back on, and. NASA is working on exactly that. The team is developing what they're calling the Big Bang, an ambitious plan to swap out a group of older, power hungry components all at once with lower power alternatives. The goal is to buy the spacecraft significantly more time. They're planning to test a big bang on Voyager two first. It's slightly closer to Earth and has a little more power to spare, so it's the safer test subject. Those tests are scheduled for May and June. If they go well, the same fix will be attempted on Voyager one no sooner than July, and. If it works, there's a chance the LACP comes back online. The ultimate goal is to keep at least one science instrument operating on both Voyagers well into the twenty thirties. So is this the end? Not yet, but it's the beginning of the final chapter. Every day Voyager one drifts a little further into the unknown, still sending back data, still functioning in a region of space no other human made object has ever reached. For context, Voyager one was designed to last five years. It has now been flying for nearly ten times. That whatever the engineers at JPL have to do to keep it going, I think most of us are quietly cheering them on. Absolutely forty nine years, still out there, still talking to us. Our second story today takes us to Mars and to a discovery that's making astrobiologists sit up very straight. Indeed, NASA's Curiosity rover has just published the results of a chemistry experiment that had never been attempted on another planet before, and what it found is genuinely remarkable. Published yesterday in the journal Nature Communications, the study describes how Curiosity used a chemical called tetra methyl ammonium hydroxide TMAH to break apart larger organic molecules in Martian rock samples. The idea was to reduce complex compounds into something that rovers instruments could actually read, and. The results more than twenty distinct organic molecules, including several that had never been confirmed on Mars before, among them a nitrogen bearing molecule whose structure resembles a precursor of DNA, the first time anything like that has been found on the Martian surface. Curiosity also detected benzothiophine, a large, double ringed sulfurous compound that's commonly found in meteorites and asteroids, which raises an interesting question about where all this organic chemistry actually came from. That's the crucial and scientists are being very careful to flag it. This experiment cannot tell us whether these molecules came from ancient Martian life, from geological processes on the planet, or from meteorites that rained down billions of years ago. The chemistry looks similar in all three cases. Mead researcher Amy Williams put it this way, the same stuff that rained down on Mars for meteorites, is what rained down on Earth, and it probably provided the building blocks for life as we know it on our planet. So even the most conservative interpretation is pretty profound. What the experiment does confirm strongly is that complex organic molecules can be preserved in the Martian subsurface for over three and a half billion years. That's huge. It means Mars can hold on to the kinds of chemical signatures that could tell us whether life ever lived there. The samples were taken from the Glen Torden region of Gale Crater, an area rich in clay minerals that scientists believe was once a lakebed. Those clays are particularly good at locking in and preserving organic compounds over geological time scales. And the timing matters for future missions too. The Rosalind Franklin rover that European Space Agency's Mars mission carries a longer drill than Curiosity and will bring TMAH experiments of its own. Dragonfly heading to Saturn's moon Titan will carry similar chemistry. Curiosity has effectively proven the technique works on another world. The Mars sample return mission, which would have brought Martian rocks back to Earth for definitive analysis, has effectively been canceled under the current US administration, so the path to a definitive answer has narrowed, but the evidence is still accumulating. Building blocks of life preserved for three and a half billion years on Mars. That's not a smoking gun, but it's a very interesting set of footprints. Now from the edge of our Solar system and the surface of Mars, we're going somewhere truly wild. Story three is about black holes and a measurement that scientists have been trying to pin down for decades. Researchers led by Curtain University in Australia have published the new study in Nature Astronomy that directly measures for the first time the instantaneous power of jets erupting from a black hole. The black hole in question is Signus X one, one of the most famous systems in the sky. It was the first black hole ever confirmed, and it sits about sixty one hundred light years away. It has a mass around twenty one times that of our Sun, and it orbits a massive blue, super giant companion star. The jets coming off this black hole are extraordinary. The study found. They carry energy equivalent to the output of ten thousand suns, and they travel at roughly half the speed of light, about one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers per second. What's especially elegant about how this measurement was made is that the team used the companion star as a kind of natural instrument. As the black hole or orbits its companion, the star's powerful stellar winds pushed the jets sideways, bending them like a strong gust bending water from a fountain. By measuring how strong those stellar winds were and observing precisely how much the jets were deflected, the researchers could calculate the jets' real time power for the first time ever. Previous estimates had only been able to average jet energy over thousands or even millions of years. They called these the dancing jets because the direction of the jets shifts as the black hole and star move around each other in their orbit. It's a beautiful image, actually, this immense destructive force dancing. The finding also confirmed something furious have long assumed but never proven directly, that roughly ten percent of the energy released as matter falls into the black hole is carried away by the jets. That number has been baked into cosmological models for years now, it has actual observational. Backing, and the implications go well beyond just signus x one. The physics around black holes scales consistently, so a measurement from a black hole twenty one times the mass of our Sun can anchor our understanding of black holes millions or even billions times more massive the one sitting at the hearts of entire galaxies. There's also a lovely Australian connection here. The Square Kilometer Array Observatory, currently under construction in Western Australia and South Africa, is expected to detect black hole jets from millions of distant galaxies. This new measurement gives scientists the calibration point they'll need to interpret all of that future data. Ten thousand suns dancing half the steed of light. I love this. Job, fame every day, just Before we. Head into our next story about another SpaceX record, I'd like to take a moment to remind you to check out this episode's sponsor, Nord VPN. If you really care about your online privacy, you really should be using a trusted VPN service. Not all VPNs are equal, but we use Nord and can certainly vouch for them. If you'd like to check them out and save a heap of money in the process, just click on the link in the show notes for our special deal NordVPN. Visit them today and secure your online life. Okay, Avery back to you. Story four is a milestone that would have seemed like science fiction just a decade ago. On Sunday, the nineteenth of April, SpaceX completed its six hundred successful landing of an orbital class rocket booster DIX hundred. The landing happened during a Starlink mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Starlink seventeen to twenty two mission carrying twenty five broadband satellites into low Earth orbit. The booster, involved B one zero OWN ninety seven, was making its eighth flight. It came back down and touched down perfectly on the drone ship, of course, I still love you in the Pacific Ocean. The six hundred recovery as routine as it gets. What makes that number extraordinary is the pace at which it's arrived. Bacex hit five hundred landings in September twenty twenty five. That means the jump from five hundred to six hundred took just seven months. Booster recovery has gone from an audacious experiment to a production line operation. And SpaceX Vice president of Launch Kiko Danchev confirmed the breakdown on social media. Four hundred and ninety six of those six hundred landings have been on autonomous drone ships at sea, and one hundred and four on solid ground that landing zones. And remember where this all started. The very first successful Falcon nine land landing was in December twenty fifteen. The first drone ship landing followed in April twenty sixteen. SESS rates since then has climbed to essentially one hundred percent. Reusing the most expensive part of the rocket, the first stage, has transformed the economics of getting to orbit. Each refurbished booster saves tens of millions of dollars and allows SpaceX to maintain a launch cadence that no one else can match, and all of. That expertise feeds directly into Starship, the massive vehicle designed to eventually carry humans to the Moon and Mars. The six hundred landings aren't just a number, They're a foundation. Dix hundred congrats to the SpaceX team. Story five brings us back to the Artemis program, and we're still glowing from the success of Artemis two, which returned safely to Earth just twelve days ago. But today's story is a sobering companion to that triumph. Because even as the program celebrates getting humans further from Earth than anyone has been since Apollo, a significant problem is quietly growing on the ground, and it centers on something that might sound mundane, the space suits. Bassa's Office of Inspector General released a report on Monday, the twentieth of April, and it makes for uncomfortable reading. The central finding the next generation spacesuits that astronauts are supposed to wear on the lunar surface during Artemis three, the actual moon landing may not be ready until twenty thirty one or later, which. Would be three years after the twenty twenty eight target date that NASA leadership is still publicly defending. The suits are being developed under a program called Exploration extra Vehicular Activity Services EXVA. NASA originally selected two companies, Axiom Space building the lunar surface suit and Collins Aerospace building a microgravity suit for the ISS. Collins is effectively out. According to the OIG report, Collins began missing milestones within about a year of its contract award. It completed its preliminary design review a full year late before NASA and Collins agreed to descope and wind down the contract. Collins had actually received an excellent rating during the proposal process, despite concerns NASA program managers already had about the company's existing spacesuit work. The OIG was not flattering about that source selection. So Axiom Space is now the sole contractor building the suit intended for the lunar surface, and the OIG's math on that situation is star. Looking at comparable NASA human space flight programs, commercial cargo, commercial crew, Orion the Space launch System, the average time from contract award to first test flight has been eight point seven years. Axiom's EXVA contract was awarded in twenty twenty two. Apply that historical average and first flight lands in twenty thirty one. The OIG was careful to say it isn't formally predicting that outcome, but it also said the projection was more realistic than the original schedule. In auditor language, that's pretty pointed. NASA administrator Jared Isaacmanh pushed back on April twentieth, posting on social media that NASA is inserting its own subject matter experts directly into Axiom's development work and is confident the suits will be ready for a twenty twenty eight lunar landing. Axiom has said it plans to test the suit in twenty twenty six, either on the ISS or during an Artemis related mission. The OIG's response, essentially is that a demonstration suit and a crew rated lunar surface suit are very different things, and the gap between them is measured in years, not months, and the. Problem doesn't stop at the Moon. The ISS version of Axiom suit also slips past twenty thirty. NASA faces a scenario where the space station literally runs out of operational spacesuits before replacement is certified. The current EMU suits are decades and there's a hard deadline the ISS is being decommissioned at the end of this decade. The OIG report also notes that the spacesuit delay sits within a broader context of Artemis three schedule pressure. A separate report from March found SpaceX's lunar starship Lander at least two years behind schedule and Blue Origins Blue Moonlander at least eight months late. Every component of Artemis three rocket, capsule, Lander, spacesuit is on its own delayed schedule. The critical path isn't any single element, It's whichever one finishes last. That's the uncomfortable reality. Artemis two was a genuine triumph, and we should celebrate it. But the road to boots on the Moon is still longer and bumpier than the official timeline suggests. We'll keep watching it, and we'll keep reporting it. And we'll finish tonight with something much more immediate and much more beautiful. Story six is your skywatching alert for this. Evening tonight, Wednesday, April twenty second up after sunset, and you'll be treated to a lovely conjunction. The half moon is sitting just three degrees away from Jupiter, with the pair framed beneath the twin stars. Castor and Polyx in the constellation Gemini. Three degrees is close enough that you can cover both with a width of three fingers held at arm's length with the naked eye. It's a beautiful pairing two of the brightest objects in the sky side by side, and if you. Have binoculars, even better. You should be able to pick out Jupiter's four Galilean moons as tiny dots flanking the planet Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto in a little line. For our listeners in the southern hemisphere, you'll find a pair in the northwestern sky after dark, tracing their arc toward the horizon through the evening. The further south you are, the shorter the viewing window, so don't wait too long. A half moon is actually a pretty good time for this kind of observation. It's bright enough to make a dramatic visual companion, but not so overwhelmingly bright that it washes out everything nearby. Step outside tonight, look northwest after sunset, and say hello to Jupiter. It's been the standout planet of the season, and it's still putting on a show. That's all for today's edition of Astronomy Daily, Season five, episode ninety. Thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating or review. It genuinely helps new listeners find us. You can find us at Astronomydaily dot io and on social media at astro Daily Pod on all the major platforms. For Avery, I'm anna, We'll see you tomorrow. Clear Skies, everyone, Sunny Day. Start Starz