Artemis 4: The Moon’s Tiebreaker Awaits - The Weekend Wrap

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00] 5 o'clock Saturday morning, Sydney time. NASA's leadership stood up at the Kennedy Space Center and laid out, day by day, how they intend to put people back on the moon. And the first thing they told us is that the next crew isn't going anywhere near it.

[00:00:17] [SPEAKER_01] Fourteen days in low Earth orbit. Two different lunar landers from two rival companies launched on two different rockets and one Orion capsule trying to dock with both of them.

[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_00] It's a dress rehearsal and it's a tiebreaker. Plus, the week that was, a farewell to an old friend of this show, and a sky where Venus quietly swaps sides.

[00:00:40] [SPEAKER_01] This is Astronomy Daily, the weekend wrap for Saturday the 24th of October. I'm Avery.

[00:00:47] [SPEAKER_00] And I'm Anna. Let's get into it.

[00:00:49] [SPEAKER_01] If you listened on Wednesday, you'll know we got the day of this briefing wrong and corrected it on Thursday. So consider this the loop closed. NASA held its Artemis update on Friday afternoon at 2 Eastern at the press site at Kennedy with Administrator Jared Isaacman, Associate Administrator Amit Chattria, and the Artemis program manager Jeremy Parsons.

[00:01:10] [SPEAKER_00] And the headline is that Artemis 3 is still on track for the summer of 2027, northern summer, and that it's now a 14-day mission in low Earth orbit rather than a moon landing. That change itself isn't new. NASA converted Artemis 3 back in February. What's new is that we finally have the flight plan.

[00:01:32] [SPEAKER_01] Let's walk it. It takes three of the most powerful rockets in the world. First up is Blue Origin. A new Glenn launches a test version of its Blue Moon Mark II lander from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral. And it sits in orbit while Blue Origin checks it out.

[00:01:50] [SPEAKER_00] Then the crew. Four astronauts launch on the Space Launch System and Orion from pad 39B at Kennedy. Orion spends its first couple of days on systems checks, then raises itself into a rendezvous orbit, about 237 nautical miles up. That's roughly 440 kilometers.

[00:02:12] [SPEAKER_01] On day three, Orion meets Blue Moon and docks. And this is the part I find genuinely striking. Over the next two days, the crew opens the hatch, floats into the lander's cabin, and works through its life support and controls with mission control. People inside a lunar lander in Earth orbit for the first time since Apollo.

[00:02:34] [SPEAKER_00] Then SpaceX. A starship test lander launches from pad 39A, a few kilometers up the coast from where Orion lifted off. Orion undocks from Blue Moon, adjusts its orbit, and on day eight it docks with Starship. That docking is short, about two hours. And this time, the crew stays inside Orion.

[00:02:55] [SPEAKER_01] The rest of the mission is spacesuit evaluations, human research, science experiments, and technology demonstrations. And then Orion comes home to a splashdown. NASA's own summary describes the point of it as validating the coordination of multiple launch systems. And they've said the 14 days could stretch the 17 if weather or anything else lifts a launch.

[00:03:17] [SPEAKER_00] So why do this at all, rather than just go?

[00:03:21] [SPEAKER_01] Isaacman's argument back in February was about gaps. One uncrewed flight of the big rocket. Three years, a crewed flight around the moon. Another three years, and then a landing. He said, in effect, that you don't learn to land on the moon in one jump from there. You need flights in between.

[00:03:40] [SPEAKER_00] And if that sounds familiar, it should. In March 1969, Apollo 9 took the lunar module up for its first crewed flight and tested it in Earth orbit. Undocking, separation, rendezvous, and docking again. All close to home, where a problem could be survive. Two months later, Apollo 10 went to the moon and flew down to within about 15 kilometers of the surface. And then, Apollo 11.

[00:04:10] [SPEAKER_01] Artemis 3 is Apollo 9. Except this time there are two landers from two companies. And they're competing.

[00:04:18] [SPEAKER_00] And that competition is the other half of yesterday's news. Because the two companies now have quite different plans for actually getting crewed to the surface on Artemis 4, which NASA is targeting for 2028.

[00:04:31] [SPEAKER_01] SpaceX's plan is the simpler one to picture. Starship would dock with Orion in Earth orbit, and then use its own engines to push the whole stack, crew capsule and all, out to the moon. The lander is also the translunar stage.

[00:04:46] [SPEAKER_00] Blue origin goes the other way. Blue moon would fly itself out to lunar orbit using separate transfer stages derived from its uncrewed Mark I lander. And Orion would meet it there, in orbit around the moon. That replaces a big propellant-carrying transporter vehicle that Blue Origin had in its earlier architecture.

[00:05:06] [SPEAKER_01] NASA hasn't picked which one flies Artemis 4. Isaacman described Artemis 3 as effectively the tiebreaker. And both companies are still saying they intend to land in 2028 either way. So, the docking tests next year aren't a formality. They're an audition.

[00:05:24] [SPEAKER_00] Now, we need to be straight about the calendar, because there's a lot of pressure on it.

[00:05:30] [SPEAKER_01] Isaacman himself said Artemis 3 is about 90 days behind on paper, mainly supply chain delays on both companies' test landers. He was blunt about the size of the job, calling what they're attempting extraordinarily difficult.

[00:05:43] [SPEAKER_00] And look at the hardware. Blue Origin's New Glenn hasn't flown since a launch pad explosion during a static fire test in May. So, that pad is being rebuilt. Starship reached orbit for the first time only last month on Flight 14. Parson said SpaceX is targeting Flight 15 for November from Starbase and its first in-space propellant transfer demonstration, Starship to Starship, for early 2027.

[00:06:11] [SPEAKER_00] That refueling is the thing SpaceX's lunar lander cannot work without.

[00:06:16] [SPEAKER_01] Parson's answer to the risk was that there will be multiple Starship launches, and multiple New Glenn launches from the rebuild pad, before anyone flies Artemis 3. Which is a reasonable answer. But every one of those dates is a target. We'll say targeted, not scheduled. And we'll report them when they happen.

[00:06:36] [SPEAKER_00] A couple of smaller details worth keeping an eye on. Axiom Space is developing a second, lighter moonwalking suit, a Sorti suit, at roughly 113 kilograms, about half the mass of its main suit, which means less for each lander to carry. And Blue Origin still plans to send its uncrewed Mark I cargo lander, called Endurance, to the Moon in 2027.

[00:07:03] [SPEAKER_01] And here's a counterpoint that landed the same week. NASA's landing target is the South Polar region, because that's where the water ice is. On Wednesday, a National Academies committee, led by Daniel Dumbacher of Purdue, recommended four sites for human exploration, based purely on science. And none of them is at the pole.

[00:07:24] [SPEAKER_00] Baba Crater, on the far side. Bonds Hadley, near where Apollo 15 landed beside Hadley Rill. The Oriental Basin, that huge bullseye right on the Moon's western limb. And the Aristarchus Plateau, home to the brightest crater on the near side, which you can pick out in a small telescope.

[00:07:45] [SPEAKER_01] Their argument is that these are the places where a human geologist, rather than a rover, answers the biggest questions, from the Moon's volcanic history to space weather. It doesn't change NASA's plan for 2028. But it's a useful reminder that the South Pole is one answer to where we should go. Not the only one.

[00:08:07] [SPEAKER_00] We'd usually find you an Australian thread here. And honestly, there isn't one in this mission. Artemis 3 never leaves low-Earth orbit. The European angle is real, because Orion's service module is European, filled by Airbus. But we're not going to manufacture a local hook for a test flight that's all about Florida.

[00:08:29] [SPEAKER_01] What we can say is that if all of this works, the 2028 landing is when the Moon itself becomes the story again. And that's a story every one of you can step outside and look at. Speaking of which, it's nearly full tonight.

[00:08:44] [SPEAKER_00] Time for the week that was. Five episodes, Monday to Friday, and here's one thing from each. Monday was launch day for Japan's Martian moons exploration mission. MMX is heading for Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons, to land, scoop up at least 10 grams of surface, and bring it home. The capsule is due to come down in South Australia in 2031, the third Japanese sample returned to land in the outback after the two Hayabusas.

[00:09:11] [SPEAKER_01] And the update since Monday. JAXA says the spacecraft is in good health, and the team is working through its functional checks. The question it's chasing is still the one we laid out. Is Phobos a captured asteroid? Or debris from a giant impact on Mars?

[00:09:30] [SPEAKER_00] Tuesday. The Moon kept shrinking. Tom Waters and colleagues in the Planetary Science Journal cataloged more than 10,000 young thrust faults. The little cliffs that form as the interior cools and the crust squeezes in. Fair estimate is that the Moon's radius has dropped by roughly 42 to 46 meters.

[00:09:53] [SPEAKER_01] Small in kilometers, but big for anyone planning a base. Those faults can still slip, and some of them sit near the regions Artemis wants to land in.

[00:10:02] [SPEAKER_00] Wednesday. Our own galaxy. A team at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, using stellar ages and Gaia data, found the Milky Way's disk formed in two distinct stages, with a turning point about 10.8 billion years ago. Born thick, settled thin. It's an upside-down picture compared with the old idea of a thin disk that slowly puffed up.

[00:10:29] [SPEAKER_01] Thursday. A solar radiation storm measured from the ground up. On the 11th of November last year, Ground Level Enhancement 77, a team from Surrey, the Met Office, and the Dutch Weather Service, had a radiosonde balloon from Lerwick in Shetland climb right through it. Radiation readings exceeded the aviation authorities' moderate threshold at business jet altitudes, and were twice the severe threshold at supersonic altitudes.

[00:10:58] [SPEAKER_00] And their estimate for a London to New York flight on that day was a dose about 42.6% higher than normal. That's the figure in the paper. The press release said 46, and we went with the paper.

[00:11:14] [SPEAKER_01] And on Friday?

[00:11:15] [SPEAKER_00] And Friday? Your producers pick. A Korean team argued in scientific reports that the starry night shows the real pre-dawn sky over Saint-Rémy in late July 1889. A waning crescent moon, Venus, and a Hyades star cluster. We also gave you the critique from Donald Olsen at Texas State. And we noted that one of the research groups has a disclosed competing interest. A lovely idea.

[00:11:44] [SPEAKER_00] Held at arm's length.

[00:11:45] [SPEAKER_01] A few more from the week, quickly. On Monday, more than half of the mirror segments for the extremely large telescope had reached Chile. On Thursday, a marsquake under Valles Marineris turned out to be a strike-slip rupture 20 to 40 kilometers long. Evidence the Great Canyon is still tectonically active. And on Friday, the Roman Space Telescope moved into science commissioning, the final phase before its surveys begin.

[00:12:14] [SPEAKER_00] Roman, Rubin, the ELT. It's a good time to be watching big new telescopes come to life.

[00:12:23] [SPEAKER_01] Now, a farewell. Back in September, listeners rode in through the website, asking what had happened to the mission sent to rescue NASA's Swift Observatory. That's how the Link story got onto this show.

[00:12:35] [SPEAKER_00] Link never managed to capture Swift, and it re-entered on the 25th of September. Swift went back to doing science, observing hundreds of targets from supernova remnants to distant black holes to comets. But pointing at targets rather than holding its lowest drag attitude meant it sank faster.

[00:12:57] [SPEAKER_01] On Tuesday, the 20th, Swift reached 275 kilometers. At that point, it could no longer compensate for the drag and dropped into safe mode. And the operations team at Penn State sent a command that effectively ended the mission. NASA confirmed it yesterday. Re-entry is expected in the next few weeks.

[00:13:18] [SPEAKER_00] NASA hasn't published a re-entry date or a location, and we won't guess it either. What we will say is that Swift launched in November 2004, and for nearly 22 years, it was the observatory that turned within a minute or two to catch a gamma ray burst while it was still happening. So, thank you, Swift.

[00:13:38] [SPEAKER_01] And one last arc. Hera's second breaking burn, about 31 minutes long, was due on Thursday. We're still waiting for ESA's confirmation, and we'll bring it to you as soon as we have it. Arrival at Didymos is due in November, with the first signal after each burn picked up through ESA's deep space antenna at New Norca in Western Australia.

[00:14:01] [SPEAKER_00] Moving on to today's Skywatch.

[00:14:04] [SPEAKER_01] Let's look up. And we start with something you won't be able to see at all. Which is the point. Today, Venus reaches inferior conjunction. It passes between us and the Sun, coming within about 6.5 degrees of it around 2 in the afternoon, Universal Time. That's 1 in the morning Sunday in Sydney, and Saturday morning in the Americas.

[00:14:27] [SPEAKER_00] Which means the brilliant evening star of the last few months is gone from the evening sky. And over the next couple of weeks, it reappears in the east before dawn as the morning star. Same planet, other side of the Sun.

[00:14:43] [SPEAKER_01] And please, don't go hunting for it near the Sun with binoculars or a telescope. 6.5 degrees is a hands-width at arm's length. Never point any optics anywhere near the Sun. And if you ever do want to look at the Sun itself, use only a filter certified to the ISO 12312-2 standard. Fitted properly over the front of the instrument, never improvised, and never sunglasses.

[00:15:08] [SPEAKER_00] Down south, Mercury is your evening planet this week. From Sydney, it's about 14 degrees up in the west at the end of civil twilight, around 20 to 8 in the evening, and shining at about magnitude 0.8. Look low in the west-southwest after sunset.

[00:15:28] [SPEAKER_01] Northern listeners, I'm sorry, this one's ours. From Los Angeles, it's only about 3 degrees up, at the same stage of twilight. From New York, about 1, and from London, it's already below the horizon. And it fades fast, so by Halloween, it's gone for everyone.

[00:15:46] [SPEAKER_00] Tonight, wherever you are, the Moon is almost full. And Saturn is nearby. At 9 o'clock local time, the gap is about 6.5 degrees. From Sydney, about 7 from London, and 9 to 11 from the Americas, with Saturn 30 to 45 degrees up everywhere. Saturn is the steady, slightly golden point next to the Moon.

[00:16:09] [SPEAKER_01] The Moon is full on Monday at 4.11 Universal Time, which is quarter past 3 on Monday afternoon in Sydney, just after 9 on Sunday evening in Los Angeles, and just after midnight Monday in New York. Up north, that's the Hunter's Moon.

[00:16:28] [SPEAKER_00] And you may remember our anti-harvest Moon from September. Same geometry, same result. On the nights around this full moon, the Moon rises only about 20 to 25 minutes later each night from London. 30 to 40 from New York, around 40 from Los Angeles. From Sydney, it's more than 70 minutes later each night. So, the North gets a run of bright, early evening Moon rises for the Hunters. And we get the ordinary version.

[00:16:57] [SPEAKER_01] And here's the North's reward. Before dawn, Jupiter and Mars are closing in on each other. They're about 9 degrees apart this morning. And about 6 by the end of the month. At nautical dawn from Los Angeles or New York, Jupiter is more than 50 degrees up, with Mars higher still. From Sydney, they're only around 22 to 25 degrees up. Jupiter is the bright one. Magnitude minus 1.8. Mars is fainter and reddish.

[00:17:26] [SPEAKER_00] Finally, a housekeeping note for our British listeners. Your clocks go back an hour early tomorrow morning, Sunday the 25th, as British summertime ends. In the United States, that's next Sunday, the 1st of November. You're in Sydney. We're staying on daylight time until April. So, for one week, the gaps between us all shift around. Check your meeting times.

[00:17:48] [SPEAKER_01] That's the weekend wrap. NASA has its rehearsal planned. Two landers are auditioning for the moon. And SWIFT has taken its final bow.

[00:17:57] [SPEAKER_00] If there's a story you want us to chase, the way you chased SWIFT, write to us through the contact form at AstronomyDaily.io. You can also find every episode there. And we're at AstroDailyPod on social media.

[00:18:10] [SPEAKER_01] We're back on Monday with a fresh week of space and astronomy news. I'm Avery.

[00:18:14] [SPEAKER_00] And I'm Emma. Clear Skives.