Escapade’s Double Slingshot: Mars-Bound Probes, Missing Oxygen and Black Holes in Pants

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00] This Saturday night, somewhere above Southern Australia, a spacecraft about the size of a refrigerator will fire its engine for nine minutes and throw itself at Mars. Two nights later, its twin will do exactly the same thing. No Mars-bound spacecraft has ever pulled this off before.

[00:00:18] [SPEAKER_02] And if you have a telescope and a clear sky, you might actually be able to watch it happen. I'm Avery.

[00:00:24] [SPEAKER_00] And I'm Anna. And this is Astronomy Daily for Thursday, the 5th of November, 2026. Coming up, why small galaxies can't hold onto their oxygen, four people walk out of a year on a pretend Mars, and whether a black hole could ever split in two.

[00:00:41] [SPEAKER_02] Plus, the latest on SWIFT's final plunge and a sky full of morning planets. Let's go.

[00:00:48] [SPEAKER_00] Let's start with a mission that took a very strange road to Mars. ESCAPADE, which stands for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, is a pair of small NASA spacecraft nicknamed blue and gold after the colors of the University of California, Berkeley, which runs the mission. Rocket Lab built them.

[00:01:08] [SPEAKER_02] And they launched almost a year ago, on the 13th of November, 2025, on the second flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. Which raises the obvious question, Anna, if they launched a year ago, why are we only now talking about them heading to Mars?

[00:01:23] [SPEAKER_00] Because when they launched, Mars was in the wrong place. Normally, Mars missions launch in a window that opens about every 26 months, when Earth and Mars line up, so the trip is short and cheap on fuel. ESCAPADE launched when Earth and Mars were on opposite sides of the Sun.

[00:01:40] [SPEAKER_02] So, instead of heading out, they waited.

[00:01:44] [SPEAKER_00] They waited in a very clever way. The two spacecraft flew out to a region beyond Earth, called the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, about one and a half million kilometers away, and traced a kidney-bean shaped loop around it. That loop was designed to bring them back to Earth at exactly the moment the planets line up again. And that moment is now.

[00:02:06] [SPEAKER_02] Lagrange Point 2 will sound familiar to some listeners. It's the same neighborhood where the James Webb Space Telescope lives. A spot on the far side of Earth from the Sun, where the poles of the two balance out. So, a spacecraft can hang around without much fuel.

[00:02:21] [SPEAKER_00] And the launch itself made a little history. That November flight was the first time Blue Origin landed a New Glenn first-stage booster on a ship out in the Atlantic. It was also Rocket Lab's first interplanetary spacecraft. So, a lot of firsts were riding on these two small probes before they even started the hard part.

[00:02:43] [SPEAKER_02] Small is the word, too. Each spacecraft is about the size of a refrigerator. And the whole mission has been described as costing under 80 million U.S. dollars, which is extraordinarily cheap for a trip to Mars.

[00:02:55] [SPEAKER_00] So, here's what happens. The first spacecraft makes its closest approach to Earth around 5 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday the 7th of November. The second follows two days later around 6 a.m. Eastern on Monday the 9.

[00:03:10] [SPEAKER_02] As each one swings past, Earth's gravity speeds it up and bends its path toward Mars. That part is an ordinary gravity assist. Plenty of missions have used them. What's new is that at closest approach, each spacecraft will also fire its own engine for about 9 minutes. NASA calls this a Trans-Mars Injection Burn.

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_00] This is what engineers call a powered flyby, or an Oberth maneuver, after the rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth. And NASA says no Mars-bound spacecraft has ever successfully flown one.

[00:03:45] [SPEAKER_02] The reason it's worth doing is a neat bit of physics. A kilogram of fuel burned when you're moving fast gives you more useful energy than the same kilogram burned when you're moving slowly. And a spacecraft is never moving faster than at the bottom of a gravity well, right at closest approach. So you get the most out of your engine by firing exactly there.

[00:04:06] [SPEAKER_00] How much of a push are we talking about?

[00:04:09] [SPEAKER_02] According to NASA, the burn adds more than a thousand miles an hour, taking each spacecraft from about 6.3 to about 6.7 miles per second. That's roughly 10.1 to 10.8 kilometers per second. NASA's own comparison is that at that speed, you could cross the United States from Washington to San Francisco in under seven minutes.

[00:04:31] [SPEAKER_00] And then it's a 10-month cruise. Blue and gold should arrive at Mars on the 7th and 9th of September next year.

[00:04:38] [SPEAKER_02] Now, here's the part I love. Both burns happen as the spacecraft fly over southern Australia. NASA's own timing puts the first engine burn starting at 8.51 p.m. Australian Eastern Daylight Time on Saturday the 7th, and the second at 9.51 p.m. on Monday the 9th.

[00:04:55] [SPEAKER_00] So, for once, the dramatic bit of an American Mars mission happens over our heads in the evening at a civilized hour. It does.

[00:05:05] [SPEAKER_02] Let's be honest about what you'd actually see, though. At closest approach, the spacecraft will be somewhere between about 1,000 and 1,800 kilometers up. That's higher than most satellites. They're small, and NASA says you'll most likely need a telescope, where they'll look like faint points of light drifting slowly against the stars. Not a fireball, not a streak.

[00:05:28] [SPEAKER_00] NASA's own timing. And there's a practical wrinkle we checked. On Saturday the 7th at 8.51 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the sky over Sydney has only just become properly dark. Nautical twilight ends there around 8.28. In Melbourne, it's still twilight until just after 9, and in Adelaide until about 9.20. Monday's burn, an hour later, falls in a darker sky across the southeast.

[00:05:52] [SPEAKER_02] For our North American listeners, you get a different view. In the hours before each flyby, the spacecraft should be visible from the western United States, where NASA says they'll be best between midnight and 1 a.m. Pacific time on the 7th, and between 1 and 2 a.m. Pacific on the 9th, before they slip below the horizon about an hour ahead of the burn.

[00:06:12] [SPEAKER_00] If you want to try, NASA points people to JPL's Horizon system, which will give you exact coordinates for your location. And NASA Scientific Visualization Studio has star charts. We'll link both in the show

[00:06:24] [SPEAKER_02] notes. There are two reasons this matters, beyond a pretty maneuver. The first is about Mars itself. Once there, ESCAPADE will be the first mission to fly two spacecraft in formation around Mars. Together, they'll measure how the solar wind, that million-mile-an-hour stream of charged particles from the sun, strips away the Martian atmosphere. With two spacecraft, you can tell whether a change happened over time or just over distance, something a single orbiter can't separate.

[00:06:53] [SPEAKER_00] And Mars lost most of its atmosphere over billions of years. So this goes right to the question of how a once wetter planet dried out. The second reason is about how we get to Mars at all.

[00:07:06] [SPEAKER_02] If this works, it shows you don't have to wait for the 26-month window to launch. You could launch when a rocket is available, park your spacecraft near Earth, and leave when the planets line up. ESCAPADE's principal investigator, Rob Lillis, has described it as a way to cue spacecraft up.

[00:07:24] [SPEAKER_00] And the waiting wasn't wasted. On its loop, ESCAPADE flew through a distant stretch of Earth's magnetotail. The part of our magnetic field the solar wind stretches out behind the planet. NASA says no spacecraft had directly explored that region before, and that the team saw interesting

[00:07:42] [SPEAKER_02] activity and structure there. They haven't published those results yet, so we'll report what they found when they do. For now, the big date is Saturday night over Australia. And a few days afterwards, the team will know how well both spacecraft are aimed for Mars, and plan the course

[00:07:57] [SPEAKER_00] corrections to fine-tune the trip. We'll bring you that when it comes. Fingers crossed for two clean burns. Our second story is a cosmic missing persons case, except the missing person is an element. Oxygen.

[00:08:12] [SPEAKER_02] This one comes from the Galaxies Losing Oxygen Via Winds Project, or GLOW, led by Kristen McQuinn of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Rutgers University. The paper was published this week in the Astrophysical Journal. An earlier version had been circulating as a preprint since August.

[00:08:29] [SPEAKER_00] The idea is beautifully simple. Stars make oxygen. And if you know how many stars a galaxy has made over its history, you know roughly how much oxygen it should have made. Then you go and count how much

[00:08:43] [SPEAKER_02] is actually still there. The team did that for 37 nearby dwarf galaxies, all within about 20 million light years, and all close enough for Hubble to pick out individual stars. They worked out each galaxy's star formation history from Hubble images, then looked for oxygen in three places. In the stars, in the gas, and locked up in dust. The gas measurements used radio data from the very large

[00:09:08] [SPEAKER_02] array in New Mexico, and from CSIRO's Australia Telescope Compact Array near Narrabri. And what did they find? That these galaxies have kept between about 4 and 25 percent of the oxygen their stars produced. The average is about 11 percent. And nearly all of what's left is in the gas, not the stars. So roughly nine-tenths of it is gone. Gone from the galaxy itself, yes. The explanation is

[00:09:35] [SPEAKER_02] supernovae. When massive stars explode, they drive winds out of a galaxy. And a small galaxy has a shallow gravitational well. So it can't hold onto that material. The surprise is how efficient those winds are. Computer simulations of galaxy formation predict retention fractions several times higher than what GLOW measured. Even though those same simulations get the overall chemistry of galaxies about right.

[00:09:59] [SPEAKER_00] Which is a nice reminder that matching one summary number doesn't mean your model has the physics

[00:10:05] [SPEAKER_02] right. Exactly. There's a subtle environmental twist as well. The dwarfs living near bigger galaxies in denser neighborhoods tended to hold onto more oxygen. The authors call that trend tentative.

[00:10:19] [SPEAKER_00] Regular listeners might hear an echo here. Back in episode 199, we covered the Andromeda Super Bubble Study, where supernovae were enough to keep a big galaxy's gas stirred up. Same engine, different outcome. In a big galaxy, supernovae churn the gas. In a small one, they throw it out.

[00:10:37] [SPEAKER_02] And the honest open question, which the paper is clear about, is where the oxygen ended up. Some is detected in the halos of gas around dwarf galaxies, but not nearly enough to account for all of it. Whether the rest is lingering nearby or has escaped into intergalactic space entirely, nobody

[00:10:57] [SPEAKER_00] knows yet. A final note for Southern listeners, several of the galaxies in the sample are Southern Sky objects, including NGC 3109, NGC 5253, and IC 5152. Next steps for the team include Roman, which will

[00:11:16] [SPEAKER_02] search for even smaller, fainter dwarves. Next, four people who have just come home from Mars without ever

[00:11:22] [SPEAKER_00] leaving Texas. On Saturday, the 31st of October, the crew of NASA's second CHAPEA mission, that's the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, walked out of their habitat at Johnson Space Center in Houston

[00:11:36] [SPEAKER_02] after 378 days inside. The crew were Commander Ross Elder, Medical Officer Ellen Ellis, Science Officer Matthew Montgomery, and Flight Engineer James Spicer. They went in on the 19th of October last year.

[00:11:52] [SPEAKER_00] Home for that year was Mars Dune Alpha, a 3D printed habitat of about 160 square meters, roughly the floor area of a modest family house, for four people for more than a year. Inside, they lived the way a

[00:12:09] [SPEAKER_02] Mars surface crew might. They did simulated Mars walks, grew crops, maintained the habitat and its equipment, ran science, exercised, and handled their own medical checks. And every message to and from Earth came with a built-in delay of up to 22 minutes each way, the kind of lag a real Mars crew would face. At one stage, the crew also went through a simulated two-week communications blackout.

[00:12:34] [SPEAKER_00] That delay is the bit people underestimate. You can't ask mission control a quick question. By the time the answer comes back, you've had to solve the problem yourself.

[00:12:44] [SPEAKER_02] Which is exactly what CHAPA is meant to study. It isn't testing hardware so much as people. How crews cope with isolation, confinement, limited supplies, and communication delays. And how that affects their health and their performance. NASA says the data will feed into things like food system design, how crew time is allocated, and how much bandwidth deep space missions need on the Deep Space Network.

[00:13:09] [SPEAKER_00] And the Deep Space Network is a nice place to drop in an Australian connection. Because one of its three complexes is at Tidbinbilla, outside Canberra, run for NASA by CSIRO. Any real crew on Mars would be

[00:13:25] [SPEAKER_02] talking to Earth through dishes like those. The crew now face about two weeks of post-mission evaluations. The first CHAPA crew came out in July 2024, also after 378 days. What comes next is an integrated study, planned for 2027, that links CHAPA with NASA's HER habitat. HERA placed the spacecraft and CHAPA placed the base on the surface. NASA hasn't said when the results

[00:13:51] [SPEAKER_00] from this second mission will be published or fixed a start date for that combined study. So, as ever,

[00:13:59] [SPEAKER_02] watch this space. Next up, I know our audience loves a good black hole story. And you have a good

[00:14:05] [SPEAKER_00] one for us today, Anna. Our last story is pure theory, and it comes with an unusual name.

[00:14:11] [SPEAKER_02] Black holes wearing pants. I promise that's the actual title. The paper's called When Black Holes Admit Pair of Pants Topologies by Giacomo Cacciapalli, Manuel Del Piano, Francesco Sanino, and Vania Bellucci, mostly from the Quantum Field Theory Center at the University of Southern Denmark. It was published in Physical Review D on the 22nd of October, after appearing as a preprint in June.

[00:14:35] [SPEAKER_00] We know black holes merge. Two go in, one comes out, and we hear the gravitational waves. The question here is whether the reverse could ever happen. Could one black hole become two? Normally, the answer is

[00:14:49] [SPEAKER_02] no, and the reason is entropy. A black hole has entropy, a measure of how many microscopic arrangements could produce the same outside appearance. For a black hole that isn't spinning, splitting into two smaller ones would lower the total entropy. And the second law of thermodynamics says that, left to itself, total entropy doesn't go down. So where is the loophole? Spin. A rapidly rotating black hole stores energy

[00:15:16] [SPEAKER_02] in its rotation, and that changes the bookkeeping. The team found that for fast spinners, a split might not break the entropy rule. But there's a second condition. The two new black holes have to be able to fly apart, rather than immediately fall back together. When the team added that requirement, the window almost closed again. It's left open only, possibly, for black holes spinning close to the maximum rate physics

[00:15:40] [SPEAKER_02] allows. And the pants? If you draw the black hole's boundary, its event horizon, as it moves through time, a split would look like one tube dividing into two, a waist and two legs. Mathematicians call that shape

[00:15:54] [SPEAKER_00] a pair of pants. Here's our caveat, and it's an important one. This paper works out when a split would be allowed. It does not show how a split would actually happen. In the author's own diagram, the crotch of the pants, the moment of splitting, is labeled unknown dynamics. And there's no observational

[00:16:14] [SPEAKER_02] evidence that any black hole has ever split. The team suggests that small primordial black holes from the early universe would be more prone to it than big astrophysical ones, and that gamma ray telescopes like Fermi might one day search for signs of tiny fragments. Sanino says they can't yet put a probability on it because it depends on how gravity behaves beyond Einstein's theory. So not impossible, not observed, and not yet

[00:16:43] [SPEAKER_00] explained, which is a perfectly good place for a theory paper to be. Now let's move on to a few quick hits.

[00:16:51] [SPEAKER_02] First, a farewell. NASA's Neil Garrel Swift Observatory has re-entered Earth's atmosphere almost 22 years after launch. Swift re-entered Earth's atmosphere at 1239 GMT today over northern Sumatra, according to U.S. Space Force data. Swift was designed for a two-year mission. It caught more than 2,000 gamma ray bursts, and its archive has been cited in thousands of papers. It was the subject of our listener-driven link rescue story, and it's been a

[00:17:21] [SPEAKER_00] pleasure to follow it to the end. Starch Flight 15 is now showing on a U.S. air traffic planning slide for Thursday, the 12th of November, a few days later than the 8th on earlier slides. SpaceX hasn't announced a date and doesn't yet have a launch license, so treat that as a target, not a schedule. The headline goal remains the first attempt to catch both stages with the launch tower. And two dates for the diary. Bepi

[00:17:46] [SPEAKER_02] Colombo is due to be captured into orbit around Mercury on the 21st of November. And around the 18th, Voyager 1 will become the first spacecraft to sit one full light day from Earth. A radio signal will take

[00:18:00] [SPEAKER_00] 24 hours to reach it. Time for the sky. And we'll start with this weekend's headline, because Escapade gives Australia a rare evening spacecraft spotting challenge. The engine burns start at 8.51 p.m. Eastern daylight time on Saturday and 9.51 p.m. on Monday. Remember, it's a telescope job, not a naked eye one.

[00:18:20] [SPEAKER_02] And the timing helps because the moon is out of the way. New moon is on Monday the 9th, so the evenings this weekend are dark, which is also good news for meteor watchers. That's the Torrid's. The Southern Torrid's

[00:18:34] [SPEAKER_00] peak around the 4th and 5th of November, with the Northern Torrid's following around the 12th. Rates are low, maybe five an hour from a dark site. But the Torrid's are known for occasional bright fireballs, so they're worth a look. The radiant in Taurus climbs to about 43 degrees from Sydney, around 60 degrees from New York, and almost 70 from Los Angeles. So Northern observers get it a bit higher, but everyone

[00:19:02] [SPEAKER_02] is in the game. Now, the mornings, this is where most of November's action is, and it favors the North this time. Mars and Jupiter are drawing together in Leo. This morning they're about four and a half degrees apart. By our calculation, they close to a minimum of about 1.2 degrees on the 16th of November,

[00:19:22] [SPEAKER_00] around 2 a.m. Universal Time. Quick note on that. You'll see some listings say they pass within less than a degree. Our own calculation gives 1.2 degrees, and they stay within about 1.3 degrees from the 14th to the 17th. So there's no wrong morning to look. Jupiter is the brighter of the two, about magnitude minus two, with Mars a ruddy magnitude plus 0.7. Here's the hemisphere contrast. 45 minutes before sunrise on the

[00:19:51] [SPEAKER_02] 15th, the pair is about 32 degrees up from Sydney, in the northeast. From Los Angeles, they're nearly 70 degrees up. From New York, about 64, and from London, about 53. So Northern listeners kept them high and easy. While from Australia, they sit lower, but still clear of the horizon murk. Lower down, Venus

[00:20:11] [SPEAKER_00] is climbing out of the morning twilight. On Saturday morning, the 7th, a very thin crescent moon, only about 5% lit, sits close to Venus. Our calculation puts the two closest, under a degree apart, around 10.45 universal time on the 7th. That's about 5.45 a.m. in New York, before sunrise. So the eastern U.S. and Canada get the tightest pairing. Look low in the east-southeast with a clear horizon.

[00:20:40] [SPEAKER_02] From Australia, the Moon and Venus are several degrees apart that morning, and very low, around 5 degrees up from Sydney, 45 minutes before sunrise. Binoculars will help, but please put them away

[00:20:54] [SPEAKER_00] before the sun comes up. Then Venus slides past the star Spica, the brightest in Virgo, coming within about 1.2 degrees on the mornings of the 9th and 10th. Again, it's low, so you'll need a clear eastern

[00:21:08] [SPEAKER_02] view. And a reminder of our standing rule. Never look at the sun, and never point binoculars or a telescope anywhere near it, without proper protection. For direct solar viewing, that means certified filters or eclipse glasses that meet the international safety standard ISO 12312 part 2. Ordinary sunglasses are not

[00:21:29] [SPEAKER_00] safe. And one last thing. Mercury passes between Earth and the sun today, so it's out of sight for now. But it swings back into the morning sky and reaches its greatest western elongation on the 20th of November. By then, there'll be four planets in the pre-dawn sky. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. More on

[00:21:50] [SPEAKER_02] that closer to the date. And that's Astronomy Daily for today. We had ESCAPADE's double slingshot over Australia this weekend. The dwarf galaxies that lost most of their oxygen. Chapeya's crew back on solid Texan ground. Plus black holes that might, just might, wear pants. And the demise of Swift.

[00:22:10] [SPEAKER_00] Show notes, sources and lengths, including NASA's Escapades star charts, are at AstronomyDaily.io. You can find us on social media at AstroDailyPod. And if you have a question you'd like us to tackle on air, use the contact form on the website. Some of our best segments have started there.

[00:22:29] [SPEAKER_02] Wherever you are, north or south, clear skies. I'm Avery.

[00:22:33] [SPEAKER_00] And I'm Anna. See you tomorrow.