China's Groundbreaking Rocket Catch, Cosmic Quasars, and Remembering Wally Funk | A Weekend Wrap

Anna: Happy Saturday space fans. I'm

Anna.

Avery: And I'm Avery. Welcome to Astronomy Daily's

weekend space and astronomy news wrap.

Anna: It's been another big week out there.

Ancient quasars, mystery spheres on an

Australian beach, and a solar system mystery

hiding in plain sight on two very different

worlds.

Avery: And today we've also got two brand new

stories, including a genuine world first from

China and a tribute to one of the true

pioneers of space flight.

Anna: So settle in, let's get into it.

Avery: Let's start with today's headline story.

Yesterday morning, Friday, July 10,

China made genuine space flight history.

Anna: The Long March 10B rocket lifted off from

the Hainan Commercial space launch site its

very first flight and successfully placed a

satellite into orbit.

Avery: Nothing unusual about that bit. But about

six minutes after the first and second stages

separated, that first stage came back

down out of the sky and FL itself

directly into a giant net sitting on a

ship at sea.

Anna: A, uh, net, not legs. Like SpaceX's

Falcon 9 or Blue Origin's New Glenn, the

Long March 10B has no landing legs at

all. Instead it deploys four

lightweight hooks that snag onto a

huge cross shaped cable tensioned net

mounted on a purpose built recovery

vessel called the Linghong Zhe, or

Navigator.

Avery: And here's the bit that makes engineers sit

up. This was the rocket's maiden flight.

No one has ever nailed a first stage booster

recovery on the very first attempt before.

Not SpaceX, not Blue Origin.

Anna: China's other reusable contenders, The Long

March 12A and the Commercial Zhuque 3,

both reached orbit on their debut flights

last December. But neither one stuck the

landing. This is the one that finally worked.

First try.

Avery: The recovery ship itself is no small thing

either. 144 meters long, 50

meters wide, over 25,000

tons, fully loaded. MHM uses LiDAR at

each corner to track the falling booster's

position and attitude in real time. And the

net's cables absorb all that kinetic energy.

So the rocket ends up just hanging there

motionless, dead center.

Anna: Casc, the state owned China

Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation,

says the net approach actually has real

advantages over the SpaceX style vertical

leg landing. It simplifies the booster's

structure, cuts weight and is more forgiving

of landing position errors because the net

system can adjust to catch it.

Avery: This makes China only the second nation on

Earth to achieve controlled recovery of an

orbital class rocket booster. And The Long

March 10B becomes the sixth launch system

in history to pull it off after the space

Shuttle Falcon 9, Electron

Starship and New Glenn.

Anna: There's a bigger picture here, too. The Long

March 10B is a commercial cousin of the

Long March 10A and 10, the

Rocket family being built to carry Chinese

astronauts to the moon before 2030.

So every piece of reusable technology proven

here feeds directly into that crewed

lunar program.

Avery: CASC says they're aiming to actually reuse

this very booster by the end of the year.

Shares in Chinese aerospace firms jumped on

the news with a couple of them hitting daily

trading limits.

Anna: A genuinely big moment for global

spaceflight, and a reminder that the reusable

rocket club, once a club of exactly

one, just got a lot more interesting.

Now into our weekly highlights, the biggest

stories from the past five days, starting

with one we told you about earlier this week.

A genuinely staggering haul of ancient

quasars

Avery: ESA's Euclid Space Telescope has

discovered 31 previously unknown

quasars from the universe's first billion

years, and two of them are the most ancient

ever recorded. Full stop.

Anna: A ah, quasar happens when huge amounts of gas

and dust spiral into a

supermassive black hole at a galaxy's center.

The friction and gravity heat that material

to millions of degrees, and the result can

outshine its entire host galaxy by

a factor of a thousand.

Avery: These two record breakers, catchily named

Euclid

J17.29.027

56410.18.1

and Euclid

J1253.0.8.557

054.3.2.3

were shining when the universe just

670 million years old

that's about 5% of its current age.

Their light has been traveling towards us for

roughly 13 billion years.

Anna: The previous redshift record, set back in

2021, was 7.64.

These two come in at 7.77 and

7.69, both beating it.

Avery: But honestly, the record breakers aren't even

the most important part of this story. Lead

researcher Demeng Yang of Leiden University

points out that finding the first 10 or so

quasars this old took astronomers

more than a decade of painstaking work.

Euclid found more than that in about

Anna: a year, which means for the first time,

scientists have something like a real

population to study a true census of the

early universe's quasars, rather than just a

handful of freakishly bright outliers that

happen to be easy to spot.

Avery: And that matters, because how these monster

black holes got so big so fast

so early in cosmic history remains one

of the biggest open puzzles in astrophysics.

Highlight number two takes us to home turf

here in Australia, and it's a story that had

a lot of listeners messaging us this week.

Anna: Dick's Large, metallic spherical

objects washed ashore at Forest beach north

of Townsville in Queensland. And

understandably, that triggered a HAZMAT

response. While authorities worked out

exactly what they

Avery: were dealing with, speculation ran wild

for a bit. Everything from weather balloons

to something rather more exotic. But the

answer turned out to be space related after

all, just not alien. They were

identified as pressure vessels, remnants of a

rocket that had re entered the atmosphere and

broken apart.

Anna: These composite overwrapped pressure vessels,

COPVs for the acronym lovers, are used

to store gases like helium or nitrogen under

high pressure aboard rockets. They're built

tough, specifically so they can survive

extreme pressure differentials, which

unfortunately also means they're pretty good

at surviving RE entry.

Avery: It's not actually the first time debris like

this has turned up in Australian shores, but

six at once, all in one spot,

definitely got people's attention up in North

Queensland.

Anna: Uh, a good reminder that as launch rates

climb worldwide, this kind of re entry debris

story is only going to become more common.

And it's exactly the sort of local angle we

love bringing you here on the show.

Avery: ILI3 is one of our favorite kinds of

story. A, uh, genuine unsolved scientific

mystery. New analysis of James Webb

Space Telescope data has turned up an

unexplained absorption feature. A specific

field fingerprint in the light at

5.11 micrometers, showing up

on the surfaces of both Titan, Saturn's

big hazy moon, and Pluto, way out

at the solar system's edge.

Anna: Two worlds that could hardly be more

different. Titan has a thick nitrogen methane

atmosphere and lakes of liquid

hydrocarbons. Pluto is airless, well,

near enough bitterly cold and covered in

nitrogen and methane isis. And yet this

same unexplained signature shows up on both.

Avery: Researchers have already ruled out the usual

suspects. The known ices, the known

hydrocarbons. Nothing quite

matches.

Anna: The leading candidate at the moment is a

class of molecules called Allenes, but that's

not confirmed, and scientists are the first

to say so.

Avery: What's exciting is what it might mean if it

does turn out to be something new. Uh, a

shared chemical process happening

independently on two very different distant

world could tell us something fundamental

about the kind of chemistry that's possible

out at the cold, dark edges of a solar

system.

Anna: We'll definitely be keeping an eye on this

one as more analysis comes in.

Avery: And our final highlight from the past week

takes us out to the true edge of the solar

system, where an old friend has just opened

its eyes again.

Anna: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, the

mission that gave us our first close up look

at Pluto back in 2015 and then

flew past the Kuiper Belt object arrokaph uh

in 2019, has emerged from a

321 day hibernation period.

Avery: It's currently around 5.9 billion

miles from Earth out in the Kuiper Belt, well

beyond Pluto's orbit. Putting a spacecraft

into hibernation between observation

campaigns is standard practice for these

ultra long durations. It

conserves power, reduces wear on the systems

and honestly gives the ground team a breather

too.

Anna: Now that it's awake, the team can resume New

Horizons ongoing science campaign,

including its unique measurements of the

solar wind and the heliosphere from m a

vantage point no other operating spacecraft

can match.

Avery: It's a lovely reminder that some of our most

valuable space explorers are the ones that

just keep going decade after

decade, quietly rewriting what we know about

the outer solar system.

Anna: And to wrap things up today, we wanted to

take a moment for something a little

different. A tribute.

Avery: Wally Funk, full name Mary Wallace

Funk, passed away this week in her home in

Grapevine, Texas at the age of 87.

Anna: If that name doesn't immediately ring a bell,

her story absolutely should. Back in

1961, Funk volunteered for a

privately run program that tested whether

America's best female pilots could pass

the same rigorous physical and mental tests

NASA gave its male astronaut candidates.

Avery: She was the youngest of the group that became

known as the mercury 13. And by every

account, she was extraordinary at it. She

outperformed, uh, many of the men on the very

same tests.

Anna: But in 1961, NASA

simply wasn't selecting women as astronauts.

None of the mercury 13 ever flew for the

agency. Funk applied to NASA four

times over the following decades and was

turned down every time, at one point being

told she didn't have the right engineering

degree. So she went out and started working

toward one anyway.

Avery: She never stopped flying. Over her lifetime,

she logged more than 19,600

flight hours, became the first female

civilian flight instructor at a US military

base, the first woman inspector for the

FAA, and personally trained more than

3,000 pilots.

Anna: And then, 60 years after that first round

of astronaut testing, she finally got her

ride. In July 2021, Blue

Origin founder Jeff Bezos invited her

aboard as an honored guest on the New

Shepard NS16 flight alongside

himself and his brother Mark.

Avery: At 82 years old, Wally

Funk became the oldest woman ever

to fly to space. A record she

still holds 11 minutes, a

few precious moments of weightlessness, and

six decades of waiting finally

answered.

Anna: Blue Origin posted a tribute, calling her a

pioneer in every sense of the word, and

NASA's own administrator, Jared Isaacman

wrote that her passion for flight and

exploration will keep inspiring generations

of Americans.

Avery: A friend and caregiver in Grapevine described

her as the most eternally optimistic person

she'd ever met, someone who was told

no more times than most of us could bear

and simply never let it stick.

Anna: Fly Wally Clear skies always

now, just

Avery: before we go, let's lighten the mood and send

you outside this weekend because there's a

lovely little sky show on offer.

Anna: Before dawn today, July 11, early

risers got treated to a beautiful lineup. Low

in the east northeast, a, uh, slender

crescent moon joining Mars, the bright orange

star Aldebaran, and the Pleiades and Hyades

star clusters all in the same patch of sky.

Avery: If you missed it this morning, the wider

grouping is still worth a look over the next

few mornings. Get out about 90 minutes

before sunrise, find a clear eastern

horizon and bring binoculars if you've got

them for a closer look at the Pleiades.

Anna: Southern Hemisphere viewers. That's an easy

one for us here at home. No special gear

required, just a decent horizon and a bit of

patience.

Avery: A gentle, pretty way to close out the week.

Anna: And that's this week's weekend space and

astronomy news wrap A world first rocket

recovery, a farewell to a true space

pioneer, ancient quasars mystery M

Spheres, an unsolved mystery on two

worlds and an old spacecraft waking back

up.

Avery: If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit

subscribe wherever you're listening and leave

us a review. It genuinely helps new listeners

find the show.

Anna: I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm Avery. We'll see you next time on

Astronomy Daily.

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