Artemis II Heads to the Moon + Comet Death or Glory + Dark Matter Mystery

0:00 Speaker 1: Right now as you're listening to this, four human beings

0:04 Speaker 1: are traveling to the Moon, not orbiting Earth, not docked

0:08 Speaker 1: at the space station, heading to the Moon. And today

0:12 Speaker 1: we're going to tell you everything that's happened in the

0:14 Speaker 1: past twenty four hours because on the Artemis two mission,

0:19 Speaker 1: every hour counts.

0:20 Speaker 2: Welcome to Astronomy Daily.

0:22 Speaker 1: I'm Avery and I'm Anna. It's Friday, April third, twenty

0:26 Speaker 1: twenty six, and this is Season five, episode eighty strap in.

0:31 Speaker 1: We've got a packed show today.

0:34 Speaker 2: Let's start with the big one. Last night, April second,

0:37 Speaker 2: at seven forty nine pm Eastern Time, the Orion spacecraft

0:42 Speaker 2: fired its main engine for five minutes and fifty five seconds.

0:46 Speaker 2: That engine, built by the European Space Agency, produces six

0:50 Speaker 2: thousand pounds of thrust. In that time, it added about

0:54 Speaker 2: nine hundred miles per hour to Orion's velocity, and that

0:58 Speaker 2: was enough enough to escape Earth's gravitational embrace entirely.

1:03 Speaker 1: That burn, known as the trans lunar injection or TLI,

1:08 Speaker 1: is the defining moment of any lunar mission. Everything before

1:12 Speaker 1: it is preparation, everything after it is commitment. And the

1:16 Speaker 1: last time mission control performed a TLI with a crew

1:19 Speaker 1: on board was December seventy two, Apollo seventeen, fifty three

1:24 Speaker 1: years ago.

1:26 Speaker 2: Mission control Capcom Chris Burge radioed up immediately after the burn,

1:31 Speaker 2: integrity looks like a good burn. Integrity. That's the call

1:35 Speaker 2: sign for the Orion Mule crew module, and the crew

1:38 Speaker 2: responded through Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

1:41 Speaker 1: He said, humanity has once again shown what we are

1:45 Speaker 1: capable of, and it's your hopes for the future that

1:48 Speaker 1: carry us now on this journey around the Moon. I've

1:51 Speaker 1: listened to that quote three times and I'm still getting goosebumps.

1:55 Speaker 2: The crew is now on a free return trajectory, meaning

1:58 Speaker 2: lunar gravity will bend their path around the far side

2:01 Speaker 2: of the Moon and slingshot them back towards Earth no

2:05 Speaker 2: additional burns required. On April six, they'll pass within eight

2:09 Speaker 2: thousand kilometers of the lunar surface, getting an unprecedented view

2:14 Speaker 2: of the far side that no crew has seen since

2:17 Speaker 2: Apollo seventeen splashed down in the Pacific. Is targeted for

2:21 Speaker 2: April tenth, and.

2:22 Speaker 1: In a lovely touch. Flight Day two started with mission

2:26 Speaker 1: control playing green Light by John Legend and Andre three

2:29 Speaker 1: thousand as the CRU's wake up call, because sometimes the

2:33 Speaker 1: poetry of the moment gets a little help from the playlist.

2:36 Speaker 2: Now, while mission control was riding high from the successful

2:39 Speaker 2: TLI burn, there was a slightly less heroic problem to

2:43 Speaker 2: solve a boarder Ryan.

2:45 Speaker 1: The toilet broke, specifically the Universal Waste Management System, which

2:50 Speaker 1: is a rather grand name for what is essentially the

2:54 Speaker 1: world's most expensive and complicated toilet twenty three million dollars

2:59 Speaker 1: for context.

3:00 Speaker 2: So what went wrong?

3:02 Speaker 1: A fan in zero gravity? You can't rely on gravity

3:05 Speaker 1: to pull waste away from the body. That's Earth's job,

3:09 Speaker 1: and there is no Earth up there in that sense. Instead,

3:13 Speaker 1: the toilet uses a powerful airflow to do the job.

3:16 Speaker 1: When the fan controller malfunctioned, the urine system stopped working.

3:20 Speaker 1: The crew could still, how do I put this, use

3:23 Speaker 1: the solid waste side of the system, but the liquid

3:26 Speaker 1: side was out of order.

3:28 Speaker 2: Which meant at least one astronaut had to use a

3:31 Speaker 2: backup contingency bag a collapsible contingency urinal to give it

3:36 Speaker 2: its full dignified name. It was later emptied overboard into space,

3:40 Speaker 2: which feels like a very poetic way to leave one's

3:43 Speaker 2: mark on the Cosmos mission.

3:45 Speaker 1: Control guided Christina Cock through the repair. She found the blockage,

3:49 Speaker 1: cleared it, and the toilet was back online within about

3:52 Speaker 1: six hours of launch. NASA confirmed it in the early

3:55 Speaker 1: morning hours of April second. The crew's relief was presumably

3:59 Speaker 1: both metaphorical and literal.

4:02 Speaker 2: And here's the thing, this is exactly what a test

4:05 Speaker 2: flight is for. Orion's toilet is the first commode ever

4:09 Speaker 2: installed on a crude deep space mission. Apollo astronauts had

4:13 Speaker 2: no toilet at all. They used bags for the entire

4:17 Speaker 2: lunar journey, So even a malfunctioning space toilet represents significant progress,

4:23 Speaker 2: and everything learned from this fix will make future missions better.

4:27 Speaker 1: Also worth noting, it's so loud that the crew has

4:31 Speaker 1: to wear ear protection to use it, which raises questions

4:35 Speaker 1: I didn't know I had about the acoustics of deep

4:38 Speaker 1: space plumbing.

4:39 Speaker 2: Now, while humans are heading to the Moon, there's something

4:42 Speaker 2: else heading toward our Sun, and tomorrow we'll find out

4:46 Speaker 2: if it survives.

4:47 Speaker 1: Pommet C twenty twenty six a one known as Maps,

4:52 Speaker 1: named for the four astronomers who discovered it from the

4:54 Speaker 1: Atacama Desert in Chile back in January. It's a Kreutz

4:58 Speaker 1: Sungrazer which which is a family of comets that all

5:01 Speaker 1: share the same ancient ancestor a massive comet that broke

5:05 Speaker 1: apart roughly eighteen hundred years ago. Some of its descendants

5:10 Speaker 1: have become the most spectacular comets in recorded history. Tomorrow

5:15 Speaker 1: Maps finds out which side of that ledger it falls on.

5:18 Speaker 2: Tomorrow, Saturday, April fourth, at around fourteen twenty two, UTC

5:23 Speaker 2: Maps will pass just one hundred and sixty one thousand

5:27 Speaker 2: kilometers from the Sun's surface. That's less than half the

5:30 Speaker 2: distance from the Earth to the Moon. It'll be threading

5:33 Speaker 2: the inner solar corona, the Sun's own atmosphere. At that point,

5:38 Speaker 2: it's traveling through million degree plasma, being subjected to tidal

5:42 Speaker 2: forces that could simply tear it apart.

5:45 Speaker 1: So what might we see? Three scenarios. One, it disintegrates

5:50 Speaker 1: before or during perryhillion, and we get nothing or maybe

5:54 Speaker 1: a dusty, headless tail for a few days. Two it

5:57 Speaker 1: survives as a modest object. It's right enough for binoculars

6:01 Speaker 1: or a small telescope emerging from the solar glare around

6:05 Speaker 1: April seventh. Three, the scenario that has the comet community buzzing.

6:10 Speaker 1: It survives and brightens dramatically like its famous cousin Lovejoy

6:14 Speaker 1: did in twenty eleven. In that case, we could be

6:17 Speaker 1: looking at a naked eye comet with a tail stretching

6:20 Speaker 1: ten degrees or more across the Southern Hemisphere sky.

6:24 Speaker 2: And for our Australian listeners, you are in prime position.

6:28 Speaker 2: If MAPP survives, look to the western horizon after sunset

6:32 Speaker 2: from April sixth. The Southern Hemisphere gets the best views.

6:36 Speaker 2: We'll have updates in tomorrow's episode. Regardless of the outcome,

6:39 Speaker 2: this is very much a story to watch in the meantime.

6:42 Speaker 1: Coronagraphs on the Soho spacecraft and NASA's New Punch mission

6:47 Speaker 1: are watching the Commet right now as it makes its

6:49 Speaker 1: final approach towards the Sun. It's a vigil in its

6:53 Speaker 1: own way.

6:54 Speaker 2: Here's a counterintuitive piece of science for you. Finding a

6:57 Speaker 2: galaxy with no dark matter actually makes the case for

7:00 Speaker 2: dark matter stronger. Let me explain.

7:03 Speaker 1: I love it when the universe does that.

7:05 Speaker 2: A team at Yale University has confirmed that a third

7:08 Speaker 2: galaxy in a group called NNGC one zero five to

7:11 Speaker 2: two appears to essentially have no dark matter at all.

7:15 Speaker 2: It's an ultra diffuse galaxy as wide as the Milky Way,

7:19 Speaker 2: but containing one thousand times fewer stars, making it almost ghostly.

7:24 Speaker 2: Using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, they measured how fast

7:27 Speaker 2: the stars inside it are moving. In a normal galaxy,

7:30 Speaker 2: stars move quickly because dark matter's gravity is helping hold

7:34 Speaker 2: everything together. In this galaxy, the stars are barely moving.

7:38 Speaker 2: There's no dark matter required to explain what's there.

7:42 Speaker 1: And this is now the third galaxy in the same

7:45 Speaker 1: region of sky to show the same signature. They're lined

7:48 Speaker 1: up in a trail DF two, DF four, and now

7:51 Speaker 1: DF nine, and the Yale team thinks they know why the.

7:55 Speaker 2: Bullet dwarf collision theory two dwarf galaxies collide at enormous

7:59 Speaker 2: speeds bit millions of years ago. Here's the key. Dark

8:02 Speaker 2: matter only interacts through gravity. It doesn't collide, it doesn't stick,

8:07 Speaker 2: so the dark matter halos of both galaxies pass straight

8:10 Speaker 2: through each other like two ghosts walking through the same wall.

8:14 Speaker 2: The gas and stars, however, do interact. They get stripped away,

8:18 Speaker 2: thrown into a trail, and that trail cools and collapses

8:22 Speaker 2: into a string of ultra diffuse dark matter free galaxies.

8:26 Speaker 1: Which is exactly what DF two, DF four, and DF

8:29 Speaker 1: nine appear to be, and the reason this strengthens the

8:32 Speaker 1: case for dark matter is that this can only happen

8:35 Speaker 1: if dark matter is a real, separate substance, something that

8:39 Speaker 1: can be physically separated from normal matter. If dark matter

8:42 Speaker 1: were just a modification to our laws of gravity, as

8:45 Speaker 1: some alternative theories suggest, you couldn't separate it like this.

8:50 Speaker 1: The trail of missing dark matter is paradoxically proof that

8:53 Speaker 1: dark matter exists.

8:55 Speaker 2: The team is now going after a fourth and fifth

8:58 Speaker 2: galaxy along the same trail the story's building.

9:02 Speaker 1: For thousands of years, there have been stars being born

9:05 Speaker 1: in our galaxy that no human eye has ever seen,

9:08 Speaker 1: hidden behind curtains of thick cosmic dust. This week, thanks

9:13 Speaker 1: to the James Webb Space Telescope, we finally got to

9:16 Speaker 1: look behind one of those.

9:17 Speaker 2: Curtains, the W fifty one star forming region, about seventeen

9:22 Speaker 2: thousand light years away. A team from the University of

9:25 Speaker 2: Florida pointed JWST's infrared instruments at this region and captured

9:30 Speaker 2: images of unprecedented clarity. Infrared light passes through dust the

9:35 Speaker 2: way X rays pass through skin, revealing structures that optical

9:39 Speaker 2: telescope simply cannot see, and what they found was extraordinary.

9:44 Speaker 1: Proto stellar jets, beams of material blasting outward from newly

9:49 Speaker 1: forming stars, bubbles of ionized gas carved out by the

9:53 Speaker 1: radiation of massive young stars, dark filaments of cold gas

9:58 Speaker 1: threading through the region like ink and water, and young stars,

10:02 Speaker 1: some of the most massive in our galaxy still embedded

10:06 Speaker 1: in their birth clouds, having begun forming less than a

10:09 Speaker 1: million years ago. In cosmic terms, that's brand new.

10:13 Speaker 2: The lead researcher Tyu put it, simply, because of James Web,

10:18 Speaker 2: we can see those hidden young massive stars forming in

10:21 Speaker 2: the star forming region. By looking at them, we can

10:24 Speaker 2: study their formation mechanisms. And every time the team reviewed

10:28 Speaker 2: the images, Professor Ginsberg said, they found something new and unexpected.

10:33 Speaker 1: But here's the detail I think is most striking. When

10:37 Speaker 1: the team compared the JWST images with radio observations from

10:41 Speaker 1: the Alma telescope array, they found that only a small

10:45 Speaker 1: fraction of stars were visible in both, which means that

10:49 Speaker 1: even with the most powerful space telescope ever built, there

10:52 Speaker 1: are still stars so deeply embedded in dust that only

10:57 Speaker 1: radio waves escape. The universe still has hiding places that

11:01 Speaker 1: JWST alone cannot reach.

11:04 Speaker 2: Let's close with a story that's been building for months,

11:07 Speaker 2: and this week it moved from debate to imminence.

11:10 Speaker 1: As we reported earlier this week, a California startup called

11:13 Speaker 1: reflect Orbital is preparing to launch its first demonstration satellite,

11:18 Speaker 1: erindill one, potentially as early as this month. When it

11:22 Speaker 1: reaches orbit, it will unfold a mirror the size of

11:25 Speaker 1: a small building eighteen meters by eighteen meters, and when

11:29 Speaker 1: that mirror is in the right position, it will cast

11:32 Speaker 1: a beam on the ground that's as bright as the

11:34 Speaker 1: full moon.

11:35 Speaker 2: Their business model is sunlight on demand. Solar farms could

11:39 Speaker 2: stay operational after dark, greenhouses could get extended. Light cities

11:44 Speaker 2: could theoretically be illuminated from orbit. If reflect Orbital gets

11:48 Speaker 2: to its target of fifty thousand mirrors, those mirrors would

11:51 Speaker 2: outnumber every star visible to the naked eye by a

11:54 Speaker 2: factor of more than five.

11:56 Speaker 1: And that's before we get to SpaceX. In January, SAX

12:00 Speaker 1: filed with the FCC for permission to launch up to

12:03 Speaker 1: one million satellites orbital data centers for artificial intelligence one million.

12:09 Speaker 1: There are currently around fifteen thousand active satellites in Earth orbit.

12:14 Speaker 1: SpaceX wants to increase that number by roughly seventy times.

12:18 Speaker 2: The response from the scientific community has been unified and urgent.

12:23 Speaker 2: The International Astronomical Union, the European Southern Observatory, the Royal

12:28 Speaker 2: Astronomical Society all have filed opposition. A study published in

12:32 Speaker 2: Nature last December found that if all currently proposed constellations

12:36 Speaker 2: are launched, one third of Hubble space telescope images would

12:40 Speaker 2: be contaminated. Base based telescopes could have more than ninety

12:44 Speaker 2: six percent of their exposures affected.

12:46 Speaker 1: The FCC comment periods have closed, but Dark Sky International

12:51 Speaker 1: is continuing the fight with open letters to both SpaceX

12:55 Speaker 1: and reflect Orbital calling for a pause and a full

12:58 Speaker 1: environmental review before any launches proceed. We'll link to those

13:02 Speaker 1: letters in the show notes.

13:04 Speaker 2: For our listeners. In Australia and across the Southern Hemisphere,

13:08 Speaker 2: you live under some of the darkest, most spectacular skies

13:11 Speaker 2: on Earth. The Milky Way that stretches overhead in a

13:14 Speaker 2: clear night in the outback, the Magellanic clouds that our

13:18 Speaker 2: Northern Hemisphere friends rarely get to see. These are part

13:22 Speaker 2: of your natural heritage and they are worth fighting for.

13:25 Speaker 1: What a Friday. Humans on the way to the Moon,

13:28 Speaker 1: a comment about to face judgment from the Sun, ancient

13:32 Speaker 1: cosmic collisions, solving dark matter mysteries, hidden stellar nurseries revealed,

13:37 Speaker 1: and the future of the night sky hanging in the balance.

13:40 Speaker 2: Tomorrow's episode is going to be big. We'll have the

13:43 Speaker 2: outcome of comet maps, Perihelion, and the next Artemis milestone

13:48 Speaker 2: as the crew continues their journey toward the Moon.

13:50 Speaker 1: If you're enjoying Astronomy Daily, please subscribe, leave us a review,

13:54 Speaker 1: and share us with someone who looks up at the

13:56 Speaker 1: sky and wonders. Find us at Astronomy Daily dot m

14:00 Speaker 1: and on social media at astro Daily Pod. I'm avery

14:05 Speaker 1: keep looking up and I'm anna clear skies everyone, And

14:08 Speaker 1: if you're in the southern Hemisphere, check the western horizon

14:11 Speaker 1: after sunset this weekend. Something might be waiting for you.

14:15 Speaker 2: Sunny day stars to start all