[00:00:00] Today, right now, as you're listening, SpaceX may already have launched something the world barely knows exists. A brand new spacecraft. A secret disc-shaped capsule called Starfall. It blasted off this morning from Cape Canaveral, and it could change how things are made in space.
[00:00:18] Today on Astronomy Daily, that story, plus the next great space telescope just touched down in Florida, and the most mysterious glow in the galaxy just got a whole lot more mysterious. Stay with us. Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna. And I'm Avery. It is Tuesday, the 23rd of June, 2026, and the universe has been busy.
[00:00:43] We have six big stories for you today. A same-day launch, a telescope milestone, two JWST blockbusters, a ticking clock space rescue, and China's asteroid mission approaching the moment of truth. Let's get into it. Here's something a bit unusual to kick things off. We're covering a story that is happening right now, this morning, as this episode goes out.
[00:01:08] SpaceX launched, or is about to launch, a spacecraft that the company has said almost nothing about publicly. It's called Starfall, and everything we know about it comes not from SpaceX press releases or Elon Musk, but from filings with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission. So what is it? Starfall is a reentry capsule, a vehicle designed to carry cargo into orbit and bring it safely back to Earth.
[00:01:38] But it's not another dragon. It's a flat disk, about 3.1 meters across and only 75 centimeters tall. Think of a large flying saucer rather than a pointy rocket cone. The launch window opened at 6.43 this morning Eastern Time. That's 8.43 p.m. here on the east coast of Australia. It's flying on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the booster supporting the mission, on its 29th flight.
[00:02:06] Now, why does this matter? The target market is space manufacturing. The idea is that microgravity, true weightlessness, lets you make things you can't make on Earth. Pure pharmaceutical crystals, advanced materials, bioprinted tissues. But to make any of that commercially viable, you need a cheap, reliable way to bring your product home. Until now, a small California company called Varda Space Industries has been pioneering that market.
[00:02:35] They've flown six capsule missions, but their capsules are small, carrying dozens of kilograms at most. Starfall is rated for up to 1,000 kilograms. That's roughly 30 times more return capacity. Which creates an interesting situation, because Varda has been launching all of its missions on SpaceX rockets. SpaceX is now entering the market it's been powering.
[00:02:59] After reentry, Starfall splashes down in the Pacific Ocean off the U.S. West Coast, about 1,300 kilometers offshore. It's designed to be mass-produced for Starship flights in the future, though today's demo uses Falcon 9. SpaceX has been approved for two reentry demonstrations. This is the first. We'll be watching closely for news of successful recovery. A genuinely exciting morning to be a space nerd.
[00:03:26] Now, from a launch happening today, to a launch that's just a couple of months away, NASA's next great space telescope has arrived in Florida. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, Roman for short, arrived at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday, the 21st of June, riding NASA's Pegasus barge down from Baltimore, after being loaded up at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
[00:03:50] The telescope was tucked inside a special transport container that NASA has nicknamed, I love this, the Chariot, keeping with the Roman theme. Because the telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's very first chief of astronomy, not after the Empire. Roman is often called the mother of Hubble. She was the driving force for getting Hubble built in the first place. It's a fitting tribute.
[00:04:14] Now, Roman is at KSC's payload hazardous servicing facility for final launch preparations. The team will check all six solar panels, inspect insulation and thermal blankets, and load around 290 gallons of hydrazine fuel. And here's the headline number. NASA's targeting launch no earlier than Sunday, the 30th of August, on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. And that timeline puts Roman a full eight months ahead of its original schedule.
[00:04:44] Eight months ahead? That's remarkable for a flagship space telescope. So what will Roman actually do? Its main instrument is a 300-megapixel infrared camera with a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble's. It will survey billions of galaxies, discover hundreds of thousands of exoplanets, probe dark energy and dark matter, and do all of this at speeds and scales that simply weren't possible before.
[00:05:13] It also carries a coronagraph, a starlight-blocking instrument that will directly image planets around nearby stars, a key step in the long hunt for Earth-like worlds. After launch, Roman will travel to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, L2, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the same neighborhood where the James Webb Space Telescope is parked right now.
[00:05:36] Webb looking deep and narrow, Roman looking wide and fast. They're going to complement each other beautifully. And speaking of the James Webb Space Telescope, let's talk about what it's been showing us lately, because JWST keeps finding things that shouldn't be there. This week, a series of three new papers published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters reveal something extraordinary about a galaxy cluster called XLSSC-122.
[00:06:04] Now, XLSSC-122 was first spotted way back in 2014 during an X-ray survey. It's about 10.4 billion light years away, meaning we're seeing it as it existed when the universe was only around 3.3 billion years old. That era is called Cosmic Noon, the peak of star formation, when galaxies were building themselves at a furious rate.
[00:06:28] The problem is XLSSC-122 looks far too grown up for its age. It's large, it's organized, it has a dense, concentrated core. According to standard cosmological models, galaxy clusters that far back should still be loose, scattered, still assembling. This one looks like it has millions more years to develop than it should have.
[00:06:51] But JWST has now revealed something even more surprising. When astronomers pointed the telescope at this cluster, they discovered it's acting as a gravitational lens. Its immense mass is bending and warping the light of even more distant galaxies behind it, creating beautiful blue-gray arcs around the cluster's center. And that makes XLSSC-122 the most distant galaxy cluster ever confirmed to act as a strong gravitational lens.
[00:07:21] Some of that bent light set out on its journey more than 12 billion years ago. The lensing effect is dominated not by the clusters stars and gas, but by dark matter. By studying the arcs, the team at Caltech's IPAC can map the dark matter distribution with remarkable precision. And what they found is a core that's far more concentrated than their models predict.
[00:07:43] The third paper in the series found something called intracluster light, a faint glow from stars that have been stripped loose from their galaxies and now drift free through the cluster. XLSSC-122 is the earliest known cluster where this glow has been detected. These results were announced at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Lead author Kyle Finner from IPAC summed it up.
[00:08:09] Before JWST, we couldn't do this level of science in the early distant universe. It's another reminder that the early universe was far more structured and stranger than our models expected. Right, we're staying in the realm of dark matter because a new study published in Physical Review Letters has just reignited one of astrophysics most stubborn debates.
[00:08:32] At the heart of our Milky Way, there's a mysterious spherical glow of high-energy gamma rays that extends for thousands of light years out from the galactic center. NASA's Fermi telescope first spotted it in the late 2000s, and astronomers have been arguing about it ever since. It's called the galactic center excess, and there are two main explanations.
[00:08:55] One, a huge population of millisecond pulsars, rapidly spinning neutron stars that beam gamma rays outward. Two, dark matter particles annihilating each other. When two dark matter particles collide and destroy each other, they can release energy, including gamma rays. The pulsar explanation had been gaining ground in recent years. Some earlier analyses suggested a relatively modest population of a few hundred pulsars could explain the signal.
[00:09:24] But this new research, led by Florian List at the University of Vienna and Nick Rod at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has changed the picture. They trained the machine learning model on more than one million simulated gamma ray observations. And the result? For pulsars to account for the signal, you would need more than 35,000 of them, concentrated near the galactic center. 35,000! That's an implausibly high number.
[00:09:52] And crucially, those pulsars would need to be so individually faint that they'd be nearly indistinguishable from the emission you'd expect from annihilating dark matter. As Nick Rod put it, our new analysis shows that the sources would have to be so faint that they would be almost indistinguishable from the emission expected from annihilating dark matter. The study doesn't prove dark matter is the cause. Far from it. But it means the dark matter explanation cannot be ruled out.
[00:10:19] And the pulsar hypothesis is on much shakier ground than many thought. Upcoming observatories, including the Cherenco Telescope Array and the Southern Wide Field Gamma Ray Observatory, should eventually give us the resolution to separate these two signals. That observatory, incidentally, is being built in Chile, well-placed for Southern Hemisphere sky watchers.
[00:10:40] Something to watch closely. The heart of our own galaxy may be telling us something profound about the invisible stuff that makes up most of the universe. Now, a ticking clock. NASA's Swift Observatory rescue mission is four days from launch, and the people behind it are honest about what they've pulled off. Sean Domigal Goldman, NASA's astrophysics division director, said at a briefing last week, and I quote, Frankly, I have to be honest, no one thought it was going to be possible.
[00:11:10] The story so far. The Neil Jarrell's Swift Observatory has been watching the sky for gamma ray bursts since 2004. Over 2,000 detected across more than two decades. But it's been slowly losing altitude. Increased solar activity has puffed up Earth's upper atmosphere, creating drag that's been pulling Swift down faster than expected. Without intervention, Swift faces a 90% chance of uncontrolled reentry by the end of this year.
[00:11:39] So NASA awarded a contract to an Arizona company called Catalyst Space Technologies last September to build and launch a rescue spacecraft in under nine months. Nine months from scratch to build something that has never been attempted before. That spacecraft is called LINK, Lightweight In-Space Navigation and Kinematics. It's a boxy vehicle about the size of a fridge carrying three robotic arms fitted with LiDAR sensors,
[00:12:07] three hall thrusters and 16 reaction control thrusters. LINK is now encapsulated inside a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, which itself will be making history as the last ever Pegasus XL flight. The rocket is carried under the belly of a modified aircraft called Stargazer, the only remaining airworthy Lockheed 101 TriStar in the world. Launch is set for Saturday, the 27th of June from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
[00:12:36] The air launch method is required because Swift's orbit inclined 20.6 degrees to the equator can't be efficiently reached from a ground-based launch site. Once LINK reaches Swift, it faces a delicate capture operation. Swift was never designed to be serviced. It has no docking port, no handholds. LINK will have to grab it anyway. And after more than 20 years in space, Swift's insulation blankets may be as brittle as glass.
[00:13:04] If all goes well, LINK will gradually raise Swift's orbit back to its original 600-kilometer altitude, adding years to the telescope's life and proving that commercial satellite servicing can work at scale. We will absolutely be back with updates as this one unfolds. Saturday, June 27th. Mark it in your calendars. And finally, China's Tianwen-2 mission, an asteroid sample return mission that is now in its most critical phase yet.
[00:13:34] Tianwen-2 launched in May 2025. And on June 7th this month, it performed its main insertion burn to enter orbit around a tiny near-Earth asteroid called Kamo Oalea, formally designated 469219 Kamo'oalewa. Kamo'oalewa is extraordinary.
[00:13:53] It's a quasi-satellite of Earth, not a moon in the traditional sense, but a space rock that orbits the sun on a path so similar to our own that it dances around us perpetually, staying between 38 and 100 times the distance of the moon. It's been Earth's companion for a century and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The asteroid is tiny, somewhere between 40 and 100 meters across, smaller than a football pitch.
[00:14:21] It spins once every 28 minutes, which presents real challenges for the sampling operation. Since the June 7th orbit insertion, amateur radio operators using a 20-meter dish in Germany and the 25-meter Dwingelo telescope in the Netherlands have been tracking the spacecraft's fine adjustment burns because China has published no official mission updates or ephemeries. Everything we know about the mission's progress has come from independent observers.
[00:14:48] The mission timeline has sample collection beginning on July the 4th. Tianwen 2 has three sampling methods available, touch and go, hover, and anchor and attach, to cope with whatever surface conditions it finds on arrival. There's also a fascinating scientific debate simmering beneath all of this. Kamo'oalewa's reddish color resembles lunar rock, leading some scientists to propose it's a fragment blasted off the moon by an ancient impact.
[00:15:16] But a new study in Nature Communications suggests it may instead have originated in the flora family of the main asteroid belt. The samples, expected to return to Earth in late 2027, should settle that debate definitively. If the isotopes match lunar rock, the lunar fragment theory wins. If not, we're looking at a space-weathered asteroid from the inner belt that just happens to look lunar. After delivering the samples, Tianwen 2 doesn't stop.
[00:15:44] It uses Earth's gravity to slingshot toward a main belt comet called 311P Pan-STARRS, with rendezvous expected in January 2035, a 10-year mission of remarkable ambition. We will be watching the July 4th Samble Collection attempt very closely indeed. Lastly for today, well, tonight, Tuesday the 23rd, the moon sits beautifully close to Spica, the brightest star in Virgo.
[00:16:11] They're separated by less than two degrees, so easy to find with the naked eye after sunset. Spica shines as a brilliant, bluish-white point right beside the moon's glow. Looking ahead, on June 25th, Mercury will appear close to Jupiter low in the western sky after sunset. Venus will be shining nearby to complete a nice little planetary trio. You'll want a clear horizon to the west to catch Mercury, but Jupiter will be unmissable.
[00:16:37] And for our southern hemisphere listeners, you're well-placed for the Milky Way core right now. Midwinter means dark, early evenings, and the galactic center rises nicely in the north after sunset. Get away from city lights if you can. It's a beautiful time of year for it. The strawberry moon, June's full moon, rises on June 29th. That's coming up fast, shining in Sagittarius, near the teapot asterism.
[00:17:03] For parts of southern Australia and New Zealand, keep an eye out. There may be a lunar occultation of Antares visible on June 27th. That's Astronomy Daily for Tuesday, the 23rd of June, 2026. What a morning! Starfall in the air, Roman in Florida, and the universe full of mysteries that keep getting deeper. We'll be back tomorrow with the latest from the cosmos.
[00:17:29] Find us at AstronomyDaily.io and subscribe so you never miss an episode. On behalf of Avery and the whole Astronomy Daily team, keep looking up. Clear skies, everyone! Clear skies! There may be any other words. The first part. It's aate.