Bow and Arrow Galaxy Discovered, Hayabusa2's Daring Asteroid Flyby, and Mars' Geological Secrets Unveiled

Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily.

I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm avery. It's Monday, June 29,

and the universe has been absolutely refusing

to take the weekend off.

Anna: Tonight is the full strawberry moon and

Mercury just went retrograde, so we have the

sky watching angle covered.

But there is so much more.

Avery: A galaxy that baffled 25 years of

professional expertise, spotted first by a

citizen scientist. Uh, a Japanese spacecraft

about to attempt one of the closest asteroid

flybys in history. And new evidence that

Mars was geologically far more complex than

anyone imagined.

Anna: Plus, new data from ESA's Juice

spacecraft that reveals what interstellar

comet 3i Atlas was doing just

days after it rounded the Sun. And a

candid NASA audit that puts some very large

numbers on the Artemis program's canceled

hardware.

Avery: It is a packed Monday. Stay with us.

Anna: Our first story today is one of those

discoveries that makes you stop and think

about the sheer scale of the universe and

also about who gets to discover it.

Avery: A citizen scientist, not a professional

astronomer, not a research institute, was the

first person to spot one of the most unusual

radio galaxies ever recorded. And the

lead researcher who followed up the find says

it is unlike anything he has seen in 25

years of studying these objects.

Anna: The object is called RAD Barg. That

stands for radio bow and arrow,

Radio Galaxy. And the name tells you

almost everything because when you look at

this thing in radio light, it genuinely looks

like a drawn bow and arrow glowing in space.

Avery: The discovery was published on June 22 in the

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical

Society, and it was made by an international

team working with the RAD at Home Astronomy

ah collaboratory in India. Uh, a

citizen science program that gives volunteers

access to telescope data to look for

unusual features that professional surveys

might miss.

Anna: The volunteer who found it was scanning

images from the LOFAR radio telescope,

the Low Frequency Array based in the

Netherlands, and flagged an asymmetric

structure that simply didn't look like any

known radio galaxy.

Avery: And when the scientists looked closer, they

saw something remarkable. Radbarg

stretches nearly 1.8 million light

years across. For scale, our entire

Milky way is about 100,000 light years

wide. This structure is roughly 18

times that.

Anna: What makes it so unusual is its shape.

Most radio galaxies follow a familiar

A supermassive black hole at the center

fires two jets of charged particles

outward in opposite directions, creating a

symmetric dumbbell shaped structure.

Rad Barg doesn't look like that at all.

Avery: Instead, one of the jets appears to have

slammed into something, a vast front of

compressed plasma, and lit it up in

radiolight. That glowing arc, shaped like

the curve of a bow, spans nearly

560 kiloparsecs in the radio

data.

Anna: On the opposite side, the other jet bends and

twists into an S shaped structure with a

faint offset tail. The leading

explanation is a bow shock. The host

galaxy of Radbarg appears to be falling

supersonically into a nearby galaxy

cluster, plowing through the thin hot gas

that fills the space between galaxies.

Avery: And um, just like a supersonic aircraft,

produces a shock wave in front of it, a

galaxy moving faster than the speed of sound

in that gas can compress and heat it,

creating a giant shock front.

Anna: The radio emitting plasma from Rad Barg

appears to illuminate that shockwave, making

visible something that astronomers have long

predicted, but almost never directly

observed in radio light.

Avery: Lead author Dr. Ananda Hota of the University

of Mumbai said the structure is unlike

any radio galaxy he has seen in 25

years. His co lead, Dr. Pratik

Dabade of the national center for Nuclear

Research in Poland noted that the complex

multi halo environment makes this especially

exciting. We're seeing gas flows

infall and possible shocks reshaping

radioplasma over millions of light years of

space. And crucially, this discovery

came directly from the citizen science

community. The Data came from LOFAR's

2 Meter Sky Survey, whose third

data release, covering more than 80% of the

northern sky, came out earlier this year.

Rad Barg shows what might be hiding in that

massive dataset.

Anna: The team is hoping that AI and machine

learning tools can now be applied to find

similar systems. And the next generation

Square Kilometer Observatory, currently under

construction, will be able to survey the sky

with even greater sensitivity. Rad Barg

may turn out to be

Avery: just the beginning, a triumph for citizen

science and a reminder that the universe is

still hiding things from us until an alert

volunteer spots them from a hillside data

center.

Next up, Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft

has been on an extended mission for several

years now after it already delivered what

many consider the most scientifically

valuable asteroid sample ever returned to

Earth. And next Sunday, July 5th,

it's about to attempt something

extraordinary.

Anna: A flyby of an asteroid called tori fune,

designated 2001 CC21,

at a closest approach distance of somewhere

between 1 and 10 kilometers at a

speed of 5.3 kilometers per second.

That is roughly 19,000 kilometers

per hour. And the spacecraft's cameras were

not designed for this kind of encounter.

Avery: For some context, Hayabusa2, launched in

December 2014, traveled to the

asteroid Rigu, deployed rovers and landers

onto Its surface fired an impactor to

create an artificial crater, collected

samples from below the surface and returned

that material to Earth in December 2020.

Five grams of Rigu, but an extraordinary

five grams.

Anna: After releasing this sample capsule over

Australia, the spacecraft still had fuel

remaining. Rather than decommission it, JAXA

approved an extended mission, now called

Hayabusa2, and redirected it

toward two new targets. Tori Fune

is the first.

Avery: Jaxa Satoshi Tanaka presented the mission

status at the 35th NASA Small Bodies

Assessment Meeting on June 11, describing the

Torifune flyby as one of the closest

asteroid encounters ever attempted by a

mission of this class.

Anna: What makes it so challenging is the geometry.

At uh, that speed and that distance, the

window of observation is extremely short. The

spacecraft will sweep past in a matter of

seconds. The navigation cameras have to be

precisely aimed, the timing has to be right,

and the whole sequence has to execute

autonomously because there is no time for

ground control corrections.

Avery: Tori fune is roughly 450 meters

wide, a mid sized near Earth asteroid.

Scientists believe it may be an L type

asteroid, potentially containing calcium

aluminum inclusions, some of the oldest

primitive material in the solar system. But

that classification is uncertain and the

flyby data will help pin it down.

Anna: After Terephone, Hayabusa2

continues on a long arc toward its second

target, asteroid

1998

KY26, a fast spinning

micro asteroid just 30 meters across,

with which it will rendezvous in July

2031. That will be the first ever

close encounter with an asteroid of that

size.

Avery: But for now, next Sunday, July 5,

one of the closest asteroid flybys ever

attempted. A spacecraft that was never

designed to do this. Doing it anyway.

Hayabusa2 has already exceeded its mission

objectives once. It is about to do it again.

Anna: Mars is often described as a dead planet.

No plate tectonics, no active volcanism,

a frozen core, a thin atmosphere.

And for a long time, scientists assumed its

geological history was correspondingly

simple. Isolated volcanoes, simple

basaltic crust. Nothing like the complex

churning geology that made Earth habitable.

Avery: A new study published on June 26 in the

journal Nature Astronomy suggests that

picture is fundamentally wrong.

Researchers from the University of Oxford, in

collaboration with the University of Bristol,

have found seismic evidence that Mars once

hosted enormous Earth like magmatic

systems spread across potentially hundreds or

even thousands of kilometers of its northern

hemisphere.

Anna: The key is a boundary layer about 24

km below the Martian surface.

Scientists already knew this boundary

existed. What they didn't know was what it

meant. The new analysis, based on

seismic data from NASA's InSight mission,

which recorded marsquakes and meteoroid

impacts before being retired suggests

this boundary marks a zone of melt

depleted rock, rock that has already had

magma extracted from it.

Avery: That's a signature of what geologists call

transcrustal magmatism, a process

where molten rock rises from the mantle,

pools within the crust, differentiates,

gets mixed and reprocessed, and slowly

builds up complex crustal material over

millions of years. On Earth, this process

is driven by plate tectonics. The key

finding here is that Mars appears to have

done it without plate tectonics.

Anna: Bead author Dr. Tobramori Mackay

Champion put it traditionally,

complex silica rich crust was thought to

require plate tectonics and subduction.

This study suggests Mars can build complex

crust through long lived transcrustal

magmatic systems where mantle derived

magma is stored, differentiated, mixed

and assimilated within the crust. Plate

recycling is not the only route.

Avery: Professor John Wade of Oxford added a

striking application. If Mars could develop

this kind of complex crust without plate

tectonics, then maybe the conditions needed

for habitability can emerge on more planets

than we realized, including those we've

previously dismissed because of their

apparent lack of tectonic activity.

Anna: There are also more practical implications.

Systems like these on Earth are known to

generate large mineral and metal deposits.

The study suggests Mars may hold

significantly more near surface mineral

wealth than previously assumed, something

that could matter greatly for any future

human presence on the Red Planet.

Avery: Mars is not a simple, geologically boring

world. It just did its geology differently.

And the universe, it turns out, has more than

one way to build a complex planet.

Time for your sky watching update. And

tonight is genuinely worth stepping out for

because the full Strawberry Moon reaches its

peak at ah, 2358 UTC. That

that's just before midnight in Universal

Time, which means most of our listeners will

see it at its fullest either late tonight or

early tomorrow morning, depending on your

time zone.

Anna: The Strawberry Moon gets its name from early

Native American traditions. It marked the

time of year when wild strawberries began to

ripen. It's also been called the Rose Moon

and the Honeymoon, giving us the phrase

honeymoon since June was historically

considered an auspicious time for weddings.

Avery: Tonight the moon rises in Sagittarius near

the well known teapot asterism. For

observers across Australia and New Zealand,

the teapot will be reasonably well placed in

the northern sky. After dark, the moon will

be brilliantly bright, so fainter stars will

wash out. But the bright stars of Sagittarius

should still be visible around it.

Anna: One thing to note for our Southern Hemisphere

listeners, in winter, the Full Moon

rises higher in the sky for you, which

actually gives you better viewing conditions

for this kind of event than our friends in

the Northern Hemisphere get during their

summer full Moons.

Avery: And there's an astronomical event today that

you won't actually be able to see with your

eyes, but is worth knowing about. Mercury

begins its retrograde motion today, June

29th. This is the apparent reversal

of Mercury's movement against the background

stars caused by the geometry of Mercury's

faster orbit relative to Earth.

Anna: You won't see Mercury move backward in

real time. It's far too subtle for that. But

if you track its position night by night over

the coming weeks, you'll see it trace a small

loop against the background stars before

resuming its normal eastward motion.

It's a lovely demonstration of orbital

mechanics if you have the patience to follow

it.

Avery: Mercury is currently a challenging target

anyway, sitting low in the western sky after

sunset and getting lower. But Venus

is blazingly bright and easy to find in the

west after dark. And the crescent Moon

earlier in the month created some lovely,

lovely conjunctions that astrophotographers

took full advantage of.

Anna: Tonight, though, the Strawberry Moon is the

star of the show. Get outside, look up,

and enjoy it.

Time now to revisit an old friend. We've

covered interstellar comet 3I ATLs

extensively on this show from its discovery

last July through its perihelion pass, its

chemistry, its ancient isotopic signature.

But the data from that encounter is still

coming in. And this week, ESA published the

results from one of the most unusual

scientific opportunities of the entire 3i

ATLAS mission.

Avery: ESA's JUICE spacecraft, the Jupiter

Icy Moons Explorer, was in the right place

at the right time with the right instruments.

In November 2025, just days

after 3i ATLs made its closest approach

to the Sun, JUICE turned 5 of its

science instruments towards the comet. The

data took months to arrive on Earth, but it

has now been analyzed, and the early results

are fascinating.

Anna: Here are five things Juice revealed.

First, the water output. On November 2,

2025, just four days after perihelion,

JUICE's Magis spectrometer

detected 3i ATLAS was releasing

approximately 2,000 kilograms

of water vapor every single second.

That is equivalent to filling 70 Olympic

swimming pools every day.

Avery: Second, um. Despite its interstellar origin,

three I ATLs behaved like a typical

solar system comet during its close approach

to the sun. JUICE's Janus camera

showed a coma and activity consistent with

what you would expect from a comet formed

right here in our own system. The universe

appears to make comets using broadly Similar

rules.

Anna: Third, JUICE's navigation camera was

pressed into unexpected scientific service.

NAVCAM is designed to help Juice navigate

around Jupiter's icy moons when it arrives in

2031. But during the Three Eye

Atlas encounter, it captured images from a,

uh, novel vantage point, different from Earth

based telescopes. At times when the comet

wasn't even visible from Earth. That gave

ESA's planetary defense team a better

fix on the comet's trajectory than they could

have obtained.

Avery: Fourth, the encounter revealed how well

prepared JUICE's instruments actually are for

their primary mission. The same tools built

to study Europa, Ganymede and Callisto,

icy moons with complex chemistry,

turned out to be remarkably well matched to

studying an interstellar icy comet. The

team says the data has made them more excited

than ever about what Juice will find at

Jupiter in the2030s.

Anna: And fifth, the overall picture emerging from

JUICE, combined with the JWST

isotopic data we discussed last week,

paints a, uh, consistent portrait. Three I

ATLS is very old. Formed

possibly 10 to 12 billion years ago

in a stellar system that predates our Sun.

It spent billions of years in the cold

darkness of its home system before being

ejected on a journey that would eventually

bring it briefly through ours.

Avery: Juice itself has one more Earth gravity

assist coming in September 2026,

when its instruments will be switched on

again before the long cruise to Jupiter. The

common encounter was a remarkable bonus for a

mission with a very different primary

purpose.

Anna: 3i ATLAS is gone, heading out

of the solar system, never to return. But

it has left behind a remarkable scientific

legacy.

Avery: Our final story today takes us from the

science of space to the economics of it, and

it involves some large numbers.

Anna: A memo from NASA's Office of Inspector

General published this past week has found

that the total value of NASA hardware

contracts that were canceled as part of the

Artemis Program restructuring came to

$5.9 billion.

5.9 billion.

Avery: Now, for context, the Artemis program is

NASA's flagship effort to return humans to

the moon. With Artemis 2 having

already carried four astronauts around the

moon earlier this year, the program has been

hugely ambitious, hugely expensive, and

has gone through significant changes,

particularly around which contractors build

which components and what the architecture

looks like.

Anna: The Inspector General's review found that

canceled hardware contracts included items

that had experienced cost increases and

extended timelines before being cut. The

audit highlights the scale of the program's

evolution and the real financial cost of

changing direction in large scale space

programs.

Avery: To be clear, this doesn't mean $5.9

billion was simply lost. Some

of that work will have produced useful data

technical knowledge or partially completed

hardware. And program restructuring of this

kind is not unusual in aerospace development.

The Space Launch System itself went through

years of design evolution before its first

flight.

Anna: But it is a significant figure, and it

arrives at a moment when NASA is navigating a

complex budget environment and Preparing for

Artemis 4, the first crewed lunar

landing currently targeting 2028.

Avery: The ODA is a reminder that returning to the

Moon is not just a scientific and

engineering challenge. It is also a program

management challenge, one that involves

billions of dollars, hundreds of contractors,

and years of decision making under conditions

of political, technical and financial

uncertainty.

Anna: The numbers are sobering, but the program

continues, and the end goal humans on

the moon and eventually beyond, remains one

of the most ambitious endeavors in human

history.

And that is a wrap on Astronomy daily for

Monday, June 29th. What a lineup.

A galaxy shaped like a bow and arrow, a

spacecraft hurtling toward an asteroid, a

new picture of ancient Mars, tonight's full

strawberry moon, the last data from our

interstellar visitor, and a candid look at

the cost of going back to the moon.

Avery: The universe never disappoints. And, um,

neither do you, our listeners. Thank you for

joining us.

Anna: If you're enjoying Astronomy Daily, please

subscribe wherever you're listening and leave

us a review. It genuinely helps more people

find the show.

Avery: Until tomorrow. Clear skies.

Anna: Clear skies, everyone.

In this episode