Artemis II: Three Days to Go — Plus Mars Sample Return Is Officially Dead

0:00 Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily.

0:03 Speaker 2: I'm Ana and I'm Avery. It is Monday, the thirtieth

0:06 Speaker 2: of March twenty twenty six, and this is season five,

0:10 Speaker 2: episode seventy six of your daily space and astronomy news podcast.

0:14 Speaker 1: What a day to be paying attention to space news, Avery.

0:18 Speaker 1: We are three days out from what could be the

0:21 Speaker 1: most significant human space flight event in over fifty years.

0:25 Speaker 2: We are absolutely leading with Artemis two today and the

0:29 Speaker 2: countdown is real. But we've also got a tough story

0:32 Speaker 2: about a major Mars mission that's now officially off the table,

0:36 Speaker 2: and the science end is just as compelling, from exoplanet

0:40 Speaker 2: hunting to the secrets of pulsars and lightning on the

0:42 Speaker 2: Red planet.

0:43 Speaker 1: If you've been following along with us this season, you

0:46 Speaker 1: know this moment has been a long time coming. NASA's

0:49 Speaker 1: Artemis two mission, the first crude flight to lunar distance

0:53 Speaker 1: since Apollo seventeen in nineteen seventy two, is now just

0:57 Speaker 1: three days away from launch.

1:00 Speaker 2: Person crew held a virtual press conference yesterday, March twenty ninth,

1:03 Speaker 2: and NASA officials confirmed they are currently tracking zero technical

1:08 Speaker 2: issues with the rocket or spacecraft. Everything is on track

1:11 Speaker 2: for liftoff on April first, and know that is not

1:15 Speaker 2: an April fool's joke.

1:16 Speaker 1: The launch window opens at six twenty four pm Eastern

1:20 Speaker 1: Time on Wednesday, with a six day window available if needed.

1:24 Speaker 1: The Space Launch System rocket and the Orion crew capsule

1:27 Speaker 1: are sitting at Launch Complex thirty nine B at Kennedy's

1:30 Speaker 1: Space Center in Florida, having completed that incredible overnight rollout

1:35 Speaker 1: to the pad back in March twentieth, and.

1:38 Speaker 2: The mission itself, Artemis two, will send the four person

1:41 Speaker 2: crew on a ten day voyage around the Moon and back.

1:45 Speaker 2: It won't land, but it will take humans to lunar

1:48 Speaker 2: distance for the first time in more than half a century.

1:51 Speaker 2: The mission's primary purpose is to test Orion's life support

1:55 Speaker 2: systems in deep space, the critical piece that will eventually

1:58 Speaker 2: keep crusafe for surface landings.

2:01 Speaker 1: Fifty four years since Apollo seventeen left the lunar surface

2:06 Speaker 1: and now here we are three days out. We'll be

2:09 Speaker 1: watching every second of it, and of course we'll have

2:12 Speaker 1: full coverage right here on Astronomy Daily Day tuned.

2:16 Speaker 2: Wednesday's going to be a big day.

2:19 Speaker 1: From the excitement of what's launching to the sobering reality

2:23 Speaker 1: of what's not one of the most ambitious planetary science

2:27 Speaker 1: missions ever conceived, has now effectively collapsed, and this week

2:31 Speaker 1: we got the final confirmation that the plug has been

2:34 Speaker 1: pulled on the ESA side.

2:36 Speaker 2: Essay's Earth Return Orbiter, the agency's primary contribution to the

2:40 Speaker 2: joint NASA ESA Mars Sample Return Mission, has been formally

2:44 Speaker 2: canceled after member states voted to end the program. ESA's

2:48 Speaker 2: Director of Human and Robotic Exploration, Daniel Neinschwunder, confirmed at

2:53 Speaker 2: a press conference following the three hundred and forty fifth

2:56 Speaker 2: ESA Council meeting that member states had, in hit words,

3:00 Speaker 2: asked for the cancelation of the Earth Return Orbiter mission.

3:04 Speaker 1: For those unfamiliar, the Earth Return Orbiter was the spacecraft

3:08 Speaker 1: designed to travel to Mars intercept a small rocket launched

3:12 Speaker 1: from the surface carrying Perseverance's sample tubes, and bring those

3:16 Speaker 1: samples back to Earth. ESA had awarded a four hundred

3:20 Speaker 1: and ninety one million euro contract to Airbus Defense and

3:23 Speaker 1: Space back in October twenty twenty to build it.

3:27 Speaker 2: The mission had been in trouble for a while. An

3:29 Speaker 2: independent NASA review board back in September twenty twenty three

3:33 Speaker 2: describe the budget and schedule expectations as and this is

3:37 Speaker 2: a direct quote unrealistic. Then in January this year, the

3:41 Speaker 2: US Senate voted to cut funding for the mission entirely,

3:45 Speaker 2: effectively killing it on the NASA side.

3:47 Speaker 1: Now ESA has followed suit. Noin's Fonder said the agency

3:51 Speaker 1: is working with Airbus to manage the transition and where possible,

3:55 Speaker 1: salvage technology that can be repurposed. The electric propulsion system

3:59 Speaker 1: was specifically mentioned as a candidate for reuse.

4:02 Speaker 2: It's a genuinely difficult moment for planetary science. The Mars

4:06 Speaker 2: samples Perseverance has been collecting for years were always seen

4:10 Speaker 2: as potentially the most scientifically valuable material ever returned from

4:14 Speaker 2: another world, with the potential to answer questions about whether

4:18 Speaker 2: Mars ever hosted life. That ambition hasn't gone away, but

4:22 Speaker 2: the pathway to getting those tubes back to Earth is

4:25 Speaker 2: now very unclear.

4:26 Speaker 1: It's a story about funding, about priorities, and about just

4:30 Speaker 1: how difficult and expensive doing science across interplanetary distances really is.

4:36 Speaker 2: On a brighter note, quite literally, this morning, SpaceX pulled

4:39 Speaker 2: off another remarkable feat of small satellite logistics with the

4:43 Speaker 2: launch of the Transporter sixteen mission.

4:46 Speaker 1: Transporter sixteen lifted off from Space Launch Complex for East

4:49 Speaker 1: at Vandenberg Space Force Space in California in the early

4:53 Speaker 1: hours of this morning, March thirtieth. The Falcon nine rocket

4:56 Speaker 1: carried one hundred and nineteen separate payloads to sun Sink

5:00 Speaker 1: in his orbit. That's a polar orbit that keeps the

5:02 Speaker 1: spacecraft in constant sunlight, ideal for Earth observation satellites.

5:07 Speaker 2: One hundred and nineteen payloads let that sync in the

5:11 Speaker 2: manifest included CubeSats, microsatellites, hosted payloads, a re entry vehicle,

5:18 Speaker 2: and eight payloads riding along on orbital transfer vehicles that

5:21 Speaker 2: will deploy them at a later time to their final orbits.

5:25 Speaker 2: This is the sixteenth transporter right share mission SpaceX has run,

5:29 Speaker 2: and it represents the company's third largest small SAT right

5:32 Speaker 2: share ever by payload count.

5:34 Speaker 1: And true to form, the Falcon nine's first stage flying

5:37 Speaker 1: for its twelfth mission landed successfully on the drone ship

5:40 Speaker 1: of course, I Still Love You in the Pacific Ocean

5:43 Speaker 1: about eight and a half minutes after launch. SpaceX has

5:46 Speaker 1: now launched more than sixteen hundred payloads through its ride

5:49 Speaker 1: share program in total.

5:51 Speaker 2: What these right share missions represents is something genuinely transformative

5:56 Speaker 2: affordable access to space for small organizations, university, these research institutions,

6:01 Speaker 2: and startups that simply couldn't afford a dedicated launch. The

6:06 Speaker 2: democratization of orbit continues at pace.

6:09 Speaker 1: Now to the search for life beyond Earth. With the

6:11 Speaker 1: Project Hail Mary film fresh in everyone's minds, this next

6:15 Speaker 1: story feels extraordinarily well timed.

6:18 Speaker 2: Astronomers at Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute have published what

6:22 Speaker 2: they're calling a roadmap for finding life elsewhere in the galaxy.

6:26 Speaker 2: Out of more than six thousand confirmed exoplanets, the team

6:29 Speaker 2: has identified just forty five rocky worlds as the most

6:33 Speaker 2: promising candidates, the best bets for potentially hosting life.

6:37 Speaker 1: The study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Mastrological Society,

6:42 Speaker 1: was led by Professor Lisa Caltngeger and her students. They

6:45 Speaker 1: used updated measurements from ESA's Guya mission, combined with data

6:49 Speaker 1: from the NASA Exoplanet Archive to identify planets sitting in

6:53 Speaker 1: the habitable zone of their stars, the band of distances

6:57 Speaker 1: where surface temperatures could allow liquid water to exist.

7:00 Speaker 2: Some of the names on the list will be familiar

7:02 Speaker 2: to regular listeners Proximus and Tari b our nearest stellar

7:06 Speaker 2: neighbor at just four point twenty five light years away.

7:09 Speaker 2: Multiple worlds in the Trappiest One system about forty light

7:12 Speaker 2: years distant, specifically Trappist one D E, F and G

7:18 Speaker 2: and LHS one one four B, a dense super earth

7:22 Speaker 2: about forty eight light years out that some researchers consider

7:26 Speaker 2: the strongest current candidate for a habitable ocean world now.

7:29 Speaker 1: The team was deliberate about not just listing the most

7:32 Speaker 1: obviously habitable worlds. They also included planets that push the limits,

7:37 Speaker 1: like worlds with elliptical orbits, to help scientists understand just

7:41 Speaker 1: how much variation life can tolerate.

7:43 Speaker 2: And the practical application. This list is essentially a prioritized

7:48 Speaker 2: target list for future telescopes, including the James Webb's based Telescope,

7:52 Speaker 2: and future ground based giants like the extremely Large Telescope,

7:56 Speaker 2: helping researchers focus limited observation time on the place is

8:00 Speaker 2: most likely to yield biosignatures. Professor Kultingeger put it beautifully.

8:05 Speaker 2: She said, if we ever built a ship like the

8:07 Speaker 2: one in Project Hail Mary, this is where you'd point it.

8:10 Speaker 1: Forty five worlds. The universe suddenly feels both vast and

8:14 Speaker 1: strangely specific.

8:16 Speaker 2: From the search for life to the physics of some

8:18 Speaker 2: of the most extreme objects in the universe. Pulsars, those

8:22 Speaker 2: rapidly spinning, intensely magnetized remnants of dead stars, have been

8:27 Speaker 2: studied for decades, but a new study has just overturned

8:31 Speaker 2: a piece of pulsar science that astronomers thought they had

8:34 Speaker 2: figured out.

8:35 Speaker 1: For as long as we've been studying pulsars, the assumption

8:37 Speaker 1: has been that their radio signals are generated close to

8:40 Speaker 1: the star's surface, near the magnetic poles. These cosmic lighthouses

8:44 Speaker 1: were thought to beam their energy out from a relatively

8:47 Speaker 1: compact region close to home. A new study published in

8:51 Speaker 1: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society says that's only

8:55 Speaker 1: part of the story, and for a specific class of pulsars,

8:58 Speaker 1: we've been missing something big.

9:00 Speaker 2: The research was conducted by Professor Michael Kramer from the

9:04 Speaker 2: Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and doctor

9:08 Speaker 2: Simon Johnston from Australia CSIRO. They analyzed radio observations of

9:13 Speaker 2: nearly two hundred millisecond pulsars, a special class that spends

9:17 Speaker 2: hundreds of times per second, making them among the most

9:20 Speaker 2: precise clocks in the known universe.

9:23 Speaker 1: What they found was striking. About one third of these

9:26 Speaker 1: millisecond pulsars show radio signals coming from two or more

9:30 Speaker 1: completely separate regions, with gaps of silence in between and

9:34 Speaker 1: the key insight. Many of those isolated pulses line up

9:37 Speaker 1: perfectly with gamma ray flashes detected by NASA's Fermi Space telescope,

9:42 Speaker 1: suggesting both types of signal originate from the same extreme

9:46 Speaker 1: region of space far beyond the stars surface.

9:49 Speaker 2: That region is called the current sheet, a swirling zone

9:53 Speaker 2: of charged particles just beyond what's known as the light cylinder,

9:57 Speaker 2: the theoretical boundary where the magnetic field would need to

10:00 Speaker 2: spin at the speed of light to keep up with

10:02 Speaker 2: the pulsar's rotation. Radio waves have never been confirmed as

10:06 Speaker 2: originating from this far out before.

10:09 Speaker 1: And the implications go beyond pure physics. Millisecond pulsars are

10:13 Speaker 1: used as ultra precise cosmic clocks in pulsar timing arrays

10:17 Speaker 1: networks that scientists use to detect gravitational waves. Understanding exactly

10:22 Speaker 1: where their signals come from matters for calibrating those detections.

10:26 Speaker 1: These tiny, fast spinning stars, it turns out, are even

10:29 Speaker 1: more complex and surprising than we thought.

10:32 Speaker 2: We're ending today with Mars, and with a discovery that

10:35 Speaker 2: has literally been decades in the making. Scientists have confirmed

10:39 Speaker 2: the first direct evidence of lightning like electrical activity on

10:43 Speaker 2: the red planet.

10:44 Speaker 1: Lightning has been detected on Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune, but

10:48 Speaker 1: Mars has been a persistent mystery. Its thin carbon dioxide

10:52 Speaker 1: atmosphere and the absence of a global magnetic field made

10:55 Speaker 1: scientists suspect that lightning like discharges could occur, particularly during

11:00 Speaker 1: dust storms, but no direct electromagnetic evidence had ever been

11:03 Speaker 1: captured until now.

11:05 Speaker 2: The detection came from NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, the Mars Atmosphere

11:10 Speaker 2: and Volatile Evolution Mission, which studied the Martian atmosphere from

11:14 Speaker 2: twenty fourteen until NASA lost contact with it in December

11:18 Speaker 2: twenty twenty five. Scientists sifting through more than a decade

11:22 Speaker 2: of data found one single extraordinary signal, a frequency dispersed

11:27 Speaker 2: whistler wave, detected in the Martian ionosphere on June twenty first,

11:31 Speaker 2: twenty fifteen.

11:33 Speaker 1: A whistler wave is a low frequency radio signal generated

11:36 Speaker 1: by lightning on Earth, they're well understood. What makes Mars

11:40 Speaker 1: special is that the planet lacks a global magnetic field,

11:43 Speaker 1: so these waves can only propagate under very specific conditions

11:47 Speaker 1: through localized, crustal magnetic fields, mostly in the southern hemisphere.

11:51 Speaker 1: The Maven spacecraft had to be at exactly the right altitude,

11:55 Speaker 1: in the right observation mode over exactly the right location

11:59 Speaker 1: at that one moment.

12:00 Speaker 2: Out of more than one hundred eight thousand measurements in

12:03 Speaker 2: the data set, researchers found one clear event. It lasted

12:07 Speaker 2: er point four seconds and spans frequencies consistent with what

12:11 Speaker 2: you'd expect from a powerful lightning like dis charge at

12:14 Speaker 2: the surface. The team, led by Czech researchers from Charles

12:18 Speaker 2: University modeled the propagation through the Martian ionosphere and confirmed

12:22 Speaker 2: it matched theory.

12:24 Speaker 1: Now scientists are careful not to call it definitively lightning.

12:29 Speaker 1: The Martian version is more likely a static electrical discharge

12:33 Speaker 1: from charged dust grains colliding in dust storms, rather than

12:38 Speaker 1: the dramatic bolts we see in thunderstorms on Earth, but

12:42 Speaker 1: the electromagnetic fingerprint is the same.

12:45 Speaker 2: And the significance goes beyond the novelty understanding electrical activity

12:51 Speaker 2: in the Martian atmosphere has implications for atmosphere chemistry, for

12:55 Speaker 2: the safety of future surface missions and equipment, and for

12:58 Speaker 2: our broader picture of just how earth like in some

13:02 Speaker 2: ways Mars truly is.

13:04 Speaker 1: And that brings us to the end of today's Astronomy Daily,

13:09 Speaker 1: Season five, episode seventy six.

13:12 Speaker 2: What a line of today. We're three days from humanity's

13:16 Speaker 2: return to lunar distance, watching the Mars sample return dream

13:20 Speaker 2: quietly end, and still finding lightning and new worlds in

13:24 Speaker 2: the data base never stops delivering.

13:27 Speaker 1: If you're enjoying the show, please do subscribe, leave us

13:31 Speaker 1: a review, and tell a fellow space enthusiast to tune in.

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13:39 Speaker 1: there's more at Astronomydaily dot io.

13:42 Speaker 2: We'll be back tomorrow with more from the universe. Until then,

13:46 Speaker 2: keep looking.

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