First Frenchwoman in Space Steps Outside

0:00 Anna: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Astronomy AstroDailyPod. I'm Anna. Avery: And I'm, um, avery. It's Wednesday, August 19th, series five, episode 171. Anna: We've got a genuinely historic one to lead with today. A spacewalk outside the space station that didn't go entirely to plan, but still made history. Avery: First French woman to ever walk in space. Then it got complicated. Anna: Then a trillion mile river of gas that's been quietly bending a baby solar system out of shape. An update on a storey we thought we'd closed last episode.

0:35 And SpaceX quietly cruising past a satellite milestone that would have sounded like science fiction a decade ago. Avery: Plus tonight. Well, actually tomorrow morning before dawn. One of the best reasons all year to drag a telescope outside. Anna: Lots to get through. Let's get into it. Avery: So yesterday, August 18, ESA astronaut Sophie Edeno, uh, became the first French woman ever to conduct a spacewalk, which is Anna: worth sitting with for a second. France has had astronauts in space since the 1980s, and women astronauts too.

1:06 But nobody from France had actually stepped outside and worked in a suit until yesterday. Jean Luc chretien did France's first spacewalk, all the way back in 1988 on Mir. It took almost 40 years for a French woman to get that chance. Avery: Who was she out there with? Anna: NASA's Anil Menon. This was actually his second EVA. His first back on August 6th got a bit tense when his suit flagged an unexpected carbon dioxide sensor reading. It came back to normal. But out of caution, the follow up spacewalk got pushed from August 13th to the 18th while they double checked everything.

1:43 Avery: Good call, given what suits are for. So what were they actually out there to do? Anna: Replace one of the station's space to ground antennas. NASA calls it a scant. It's a critical communications link that lets mission control in Houston talk to the station at high speed. The ISS carries two for redundancy. You only strictly need one working, but managers like having a spare. Avery: So this was meant to be a fairly routine swap. Anna: That was the plan. Six and a half hours were budgeted.

2:12 They got the old failed antenna disconnected, freeing the power and data cables working in the locking pins, unbolting the whole assembly. But every one of those steps took longer than expected. A lot of it came down to just brute physical effort with a ratchet wrench in a pressurised suit. Avery: And, um, they ran out of time. Anna: They ran out of time. 6 hours 23 minutes in the 282nd spacewalk in Station history. For the record, flight controllers made the call not to push for the full task Though the failed antenna is secured near its mounting boom rather than fully stowed, and the replacement antenna is still sitting on its storage platform uninstalled.

2:53 Avery: So it's a historic spacewalk with an asterisk on the actual job list. Anna: Pretty much. The good news is nothing about this is urgent. The working antenna is still doing its job, so the station isn't missing any communication capability. NASA's already got another spacewalk scheduled next Tuesday and controllers are figuring out whether to prioritise finishing this antenna swap then or push it to a later EVA in favour of other planned work. Avery: Uh, but the headline stands. Regardless of how the antenna paperwork shakes out, it does.

3:24 Anna: First, French woman outside the station doing real hands on maintenance work in a suit that's basically its own spacecraft. That's the storey antenna or no antenna. Next up, a storey about why some planetary systems end up lopsided instead of neat and orderly like ours. Avery: Neat and orderly is relative, but sure, go on there. Anna: So there's a young triple system called GW Orionis, about 1300 light years away in the constellation Orion. It's a favourite target for astronomers because it's got a genuinely strange warped protoplanetary disc, the ring of gas and dust where planets are forming, split into several misaligned rings instead of one flat disc like you'd expect.

4:11 Avery: And now we know why. Anna: We've got a, uh, very strong new answer. A team led by Maria M. Galloway Spritsma, a PhD student at the University of Florida, working with her advisor Jehan they and collaborators from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, University of Galway and Queen Mary London University, used the ALMA Telescope Array in Chile to trace a stream of gas flowing into the system from outside. Avery: How big a stream are we talking about? Anna: 1.2 trillion miles long. That's roughly 0.2 light years, or 12,600 astronomical units, feeding in from well beyond the system itself.

4:53 They traced it using carbon monoxide, because the molecular hydrogen that actually makes up most of the gas is invisible at radio wavelengths. CO acts as a stand in tracer Avery: and this stream is what's warping the disc. Anna: That's the finding when the team modelled how the streamer's gas falls into the system. The angle it comes in at lines up closely with the tilt of the disc's outer ring, the one furthest out roughly 31.6 billion miles from the centre, well beyond the two inner rings at, uh, 4.1 and 17.4 billion miles.

5:29 The streamer is essentially shoving the outer edge of the disc out of alignment with the rest of the so this Avery: isn't just a quirky one off storey about one weird system. Anna: That's exactly the bigger point. Bay put it. If these gas streamers turn out to be common around young stars, they'd naturally explain why planets don't always end up in neat, orderly orbits like our solar systems. They can come out with, in his words, much, much more random orientations. Avery: So this could be a piece of the puzzle for all those exoplanets we found with weirdly tilted or even backwards orbits.

6:08 Anna: Exactly that puzzle. The results were published August 6th in the Astronomical Journal, and the team's next step is a systematic survey of young stars to see just how common these streamers actually are. Avery: From, um. Why is this one system so messy to maybe messy is just normal Cosmic Anna: order might be the exception, not the rule. Avery: Quick follow up now, and a bit of a correction to how we left things last episode. Let's say we have some new information, right? Anna: On Tuesday's Show we said SpaceX had completed recovery of Starship's ship 40, which splashed down intact in the Indian Ocean and got towed towards Western Australia.

6:49 Turns out that wasn't quite the end of the storey. Avery: What have we got wrong? Or let's say, what's changed? Anna: Nothing we said was fabricated. The ship really was secured and under control, which is the initial reporting we had captured. But the fuller picture that's emerged since is that ship 40 wasn't parked at a mainland Australian port. It's been under a much longer tow and as of yesterday, August 18, it arrived in sheltered waters off Christmas island, the Australian territory, out in the eastern Indian Ocean.

7:22 Avery: After how long a drift? Total? Anna: 24 days and more than 400 kilometres of drift, all told, since that July 24th splashdown on Flight 13. Avery: So why stop at Christmas island instead of going straight to a mainland port? Anna: Sheltered water. It gives SpaceX's engineers, who are now travelling out to the site, a calm place to do a closer inspection and stabilise the vehicle for the next leg of the journey, which is transporting it all the way back to Starbase in Texas for full teardown and analysis.

7:55 Exactly how they'll move a 171 foot stainless steel rocket that far hasn't been detailed yet. Avery: And Musk's take on all this? Anna: He's framed the intact recovery as valuable data that would otherwise have been lost, and said it strengthens the case for attempting an actual tower catch of a returning ship as early as Flight 14. Avery: Though, uh, the saga isn't closed after all. Just entered a quieter chapter. Anna: Consider this the correction recovered and stable? Yes. Home free? Not yet.

8:28 We'll flag it again if there's a real resolution. Last storey and a quick one. SpaceX hit a couple of milestones at once on Tuesday night. Avery: Lay it on us. Anna: Tuesday night's Starlink 1750 mission lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, sending up 24 more broadband satellites. That launch was SpaceX's 97th Falcon 9 flight of the year and its 100th mission overall for 2026. All types of missions combined. Avery: Hundred missions with four months of the year still to go. Anna: And with those 24 new satellites, the Starlink Constellation is now sitting at nearly 11,000 operational satellites in orbit, a scale that genuinely didn't exist as a concept in spaceflight a decade ago.

9:18 Avery: What about the booster? Anna: Anna B1097, flying for the 12th time, targeted a landing on the drone ship. Of course I still love you. Out in the Pacific, about eight and a half minutes after liftoff, that booster's flown everything from The Twilight and Transporter 17 rideshare missions to Sentinel 6B and A batch of previous Starlink launches. Avery: At this point, a Starlink launch barely makes headlines on its own merits. But quietly approaching 11,000 satellites is the kind of number that sneaks up on you.

9:48 Anna: It really is one of those stats that's easy to lose track of because the launches themselves have become so routine, worth pausing on occasionally. Avery: Finally, a quick one before we go. And this one's worth setting an early Anna: alarm for if you're up before dawn tomorrow morning. Saturn is putting on one of the best views of the year. Its rings are unusually narrow and shallowly tilted right now, only about 7.5 degrees relative to us, which lines its major moons up almost in a straight row extending out from the planet's equator.

10:21 Astronomers have taken to calling it a moon parade. What can you actually pick out with a small telescope? Titan is easy. It's the brightest at magnitude 8.4. Step up to a 4 to 6 inch scope and you can pick out Rhea Thetis and Dione as well. If you've got an 8 to 10 inch instrument, IAPetus and Enceladus come into range too. Saturn itself sits in the south southeast in the hours before sunrise. Medium to high magnification, somewhere around 120-200x, gives you the best view of the whole lineup. Avery: And, um, if you're out earlier tonight Anna: before bed, you'll catch a waxing crescent moon in the evening sky.

11:03 Nothing dramatic, but a nice preview before the real show rolls around. Before dawn. Okay, that's today's episode. A history making slightly unfinished spacewalk from Sophie Adineau and Anil Menon, a trillion mile river of gas explaining why some planets end up tilted, an update on Starship ship 40 as it makes its way to Christmas island and SpaceX quietly closing in on 11,000 satellites in orbit. Avery: Plus Saturn's moon parade before dawn tomorrow. If you can drag yourself out of bed for it. Anna: If you enjoyed today's episode, the best thing you can do for us is leave a rating or review wherever you're listening and share it with a fellow space nerd.

11:44 Full Show Notes, sources and links for every storey we cover today are @astronomydaily IO and you can find us on social media. We're astrodaily pod pretty much everywhere. Avery: We'll be back tomorrow with more from the world of space and astronomy. Until then, keep looking up. Anna: See you next time. Clear skies everyone.

12:16 Avery: Mhm. Anna: Soul.