India Reaches Orbit — Privately — Today's Space News - Astronomy Daily: The Latest Space News

Anna: Good day and welcome to Astronomy Daily.

I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm, um, avery. It's Monday, the 20th of

July, 2026, and here's a lovely bit of

timing to start us off. 57 years ago

today, two human beings first set their boots

down in the dust of another world.

Anna: Apollo 11, 20

July 1969. And on the very

anniversary of that first arrival, our

lead story today is about an arrival of a

different kind. A young private company half

a world away announcing itself to the cosmos

for the first time.

Avery: Plus a spacecraft that swung past Mars and

came away with a scientific treasure chest.

A, uh, Mars rover reading a 4 billion year

old diary of cosmic violence. A nearby

world that looks like it's holding onto an

atmosphere, shrimp learning to

Anna: eat in weightlessness, and black holes

that ring like bells. Quite the menu.

Let's get into it.

So our lead On Saturday morning,

18 July, a rocket called

Vikram 1 lifted off from the Satish

Dhawan Space center at Sri

Harikoda on India's east coast.

And 17 minutes later, mission Control could

say the words everyone had been holding their

breath for brand success.

Avery: And the reason that matters, Anna, is who

built it. Bikram 1 was developed by

Skyroot Aerospace, a private company out of

Hyderabad founded back in 2018 by two

former ISRO engineers. This wasn't a

government launch. This was India's first

ever private orbital rocket reaching space.

Anna: Which puts India in a very small club.

With this flight, India becomes just the

third nation on Earth with a private orbital

launch capability alongside the United States

and China. That's the whole company on that

list. 3.

Avery: The rocket itself is a neat piece of

engineering. It's about 22 meters tall, four

stages, three solid, one liquid, and

it can put around 350 kilograms into

low earth orbit. The mission was named

Agaman, which is Sanskrit for arrival,

hence our episode titled Today.

Anna: And it delivered a genuinely charming

payload. Multiple technology demonstration

satellites went up to about

450km, including a

satellite from G' Raha Space, a debris

capture robotic arm from a company called

cosmoserve, and Sky Root's own

scope satellite.

Avery: But my favorite bits are the symbolic ones.

There was a handwritten postcard from Prime

Minister Modi carried to orbit. There was

a floral artwork called Cosmic Bloom.

And then there's this. An 18 karat

gold micro rocket carrying

microscopic sculptures of three giants of

Indian science. Sivi Raman, Bikram

Sarabhai and A.P.J. abdul

Kalam.

Anna: Each sculpture smaller than a grain of rice.

Avery: Smaller than a grain of rice. I love that

you launch your first orbital rocket and you

find room to honor the people whose shoulders

you're standing on. The rocket is even named

after Sarabhai, often called the father of

India's space program.

Anna: It's a beautiful gesture, and it caps a

journey that began with Sky Roots suborbital

Vikram s back in 2022.

This is the moment they graduate from reached

space to reached orbit. One Sky Root

commentator called it the dawn of a new space

era. And for India's commercial sector, that

doesn't feel like hyperbole.

Avery: Now, meanwhile, on the other side of the

launch world, we're all still waiting on a

rather larger rocket.

Anna: We are Starship Flight 13.

Longtime listeners know we've been tracking

this one. SpaceX tried to fly it on Thursday,

but the countdown aborted right at T0

when a few of the 33 Raptor engines

engines on the super heavy booster didn't

light, the vehicle safely detanked, no harm

done.

Avery: And Elon Musk said afterwards that to be

confident of a clean flight, two Raptors

would be pooled and replaced. So the target

has been sliding around. But as we record,

the working date is no earlier than the 23rd

to 24th of July.

Anna: So keep your eyes on this space literally

later this week, when Flight 13 does

fly, it's aiming to deploy the first batch of

the big new V3 Starlink satellites

and eventually to attempt catching the upper

stage with the launch tower. But, uh, for

today, the launch success story belongs to

Skyroot.

Avery: Small rocket, huge milestone.

Sometimes that's exactly how history arrives.

Story two takes us out into the solar system

with NASA's Psyche spacecraft. The mission on

its way to that strange metal rich asteroid

on also called Psyche, out in the main belt.

Anna: Right, and to get there, Psyche needed a

gravitational boost. Back on 15

May, it swung past Mars for a gravity assist

dealing a little of the planet's orbital

momentum to slingshot itself onward. And

this week, JPL released the full science hall

from that flyby, which is

Avery: really a dress rehearsal that turned into a

bonus science session. Because a flyby like

this is the perfect chance to switch on your

instruments against a real planetary body and

check that everything works before you arrive

at your actual target in 2029.

Anna: And everything did work. The gamma ray and

neutron spectrometer got its first proper

workout measuring a real world. But the

headline for me is the magnetometer. Because

during the Mars pass, it made its first ever

measurement of the magnetic environment

around another body.

Avery: And that instrument really matters for the

mission's big question. When Psyche reaches

the asteroid, one of the things scientists

most want to know is whether it has or once

had magnetic field, because that would be a

fingerprint of a molten metal core, a clue

that this object might be the exposed heart

of a shattered baby planet.

Anna: So proving the magnetometer works cleanly at

Mars gives the team real confidence. For

2029, JPL also released a, uh,

lovely timelapse of Mars growing and then

shrinking in the spacecraft's view as it

swept past.

Avery: It's a good reminder that, um, on these long

cruises, the journey itself does science. You

don't just coast to the destination, you

rehearse, you calibrate. And sometimes you

get a free look at a neighbor along the way.

Anna: Story three keeps us at Mars, but on the

surface with the Perseverance Rover, which

has been climbing the rim of Jezero Crater.

Avery: And it's found something remarkable up there.

A new study in the Journal of Geophysical

Research Planets, led by researchers at

Imperial College London, describes a

75 meter thick stack of rock on the crater

rim that they're calling the Broom Point

member.

Anna: And this stack is essentially a diary,

layer after layer of what geologists call

breccia rock that's been smashed,

melted and welded back together by repeated

asteroid impacts. And the timing is the

astonishing part. This terrain is older than

Jezero Crater

Avery: itself, which makes it some of the oldest

ground any Mars rover has ever laid its

instruments on. We're talking roughly 4

billion years back in a chapter of solar

system history, sometimes called the era of

heavy bombardment, when impacts were

relentless.

Anna: So perseverance is effectively reading a

weather report from the most violent period

the inner solar system has known. Each

layer records another blow. And because

Earth's surface has been endlessly recycled

by plate tectonics and erosion, we've lost

almost all of our own rocks from that age.

Avery: That's the quiet profundity of it. Mars kept

the receipts that Earth threw away to

understand the bombardment that shaped our

own young planet, the very era when life may

have been getting started here, we may have

to read the story off the rocks of Mars.

Anna: And these are exactly the kinds of samples

Perseverance has been caching for a future

return to Earth. Imagine getting a four

billion year old page of that diary into a

laboratory.

Avery: Story four is a big one for the exoplanet

hunters. And Ana, Uh, I want to flag

something right up front for our regular

listeners.

Anna: Please do, because this could sound familiar

and it isn't exactly.

Avery: A few days ago, in Friday's episode, we led

with a story about the first detection of an

atmosphere on a rocky world. This is a

completely different planet, a different

research team, and a different paper. So

don't adjust your sets. This is fresh news

about a different world.

Anna: The world in question is LHS

1140 B, a super Earth about

49 light years away, orbiting a small

red dwarf star. And it's long been one

of the most tantalizing planets we know

because it sits in the habitable zone where

liquid water could in principle exist.

Avery: And in a new paper in the journal Science

published on 16 July, a team

led from Harvard detected helium

escaping from the planet. They used the

Magellan Clay telescope in Chile to catch it.

Anna: Now, on its own planet, losing gas might

sound like bad news for an atmosphere, but

here's the clever twist. Given how old this

system is, the planet should have lost all

its primordial helium long ago. The

fact that we can still detect it escaping

means something must be replenishing it.

Avery: And that points to a substantial actively

maintained atmosphere, rather than a bare

airless rock, which is exactly the property

you need if a habitable zone planet is going

to be genuinely habitable. An atmosphere

regulates temperature, shields the surface,

and can hold onto water.

Anna: This has been one of the great open questions

for planets around red dwarf stars. Those

stars are prone to flares that can strip a,

uh, planet's air away. So finding strong

evidence that LHS 1140 B

is holding onto and refreshing an

atmosphere is a genuinely significant step.

Avery: It moves this world from promising a dress

toward address. Worth a very close look.

And you can bet the James Webb Telescope's

name is already on the waiting list.

Anna: Dory5 is a little lighter and I have

to say, rather delightful.

Avery, we need to talk about

spacestream.

Avery: Words I did not expect to say today, but here

we are. Researchers at the Okayama University

of Science in Japan have published the first

results from something called the Space

Aquaculture Project. And the question they're

asking is deeply practical. Can we grow

seafood in space?

Anna: Because if we are serious about long stays on

the moon or Mars, we can't just keep shipping

up freeze dried meals forever. We need

closed loop food systems, little self

sustaining ecosystems that recycle nutrients.

And a food chain needs more than just plants,

right?

Avery: So the team built a clever device, a high

speed clinostat, essentially a rig that

spins at around 130 rotations per

minute to simulate the effects of

microgravity here on the ground. And into

that they placed juvenile shrimp along with

tiny brine shrimp Artemia as their food.

Anna: And the Key finding is, charmingly,

the shrimp could still feed. Catching and

eating prey when your body doesn't know which

way is down is not trivial. A lot of

feeding behavior relies on gravity cues. But

the shrimp managed what suggests

crustaceans

Avery: could be a viable link in a future space food

chain. And it's the published paper in the

journal Microgravity Science and Technology

that makes this more than a fun idea. It's an

actual first data point.

Anna: A prawn on the barbie Orbital edition.

Somewhere down the line, an astronaut's

dinner might start life spinning in a lab

like this one.

Avery: Clear skies and apparently clear water.

And for our last story, we go to the most

extreme physics in the universe. Because it

turns out, black holes ring.

Anna: They do. When two black holes spiral

together and merge, the newborn black hole

that results doesn't just settle down

quietly. It, for a fraction of a second,

wobbles, it vibrates, and it sheds

that energy as gravitational waves at very

specific frequencies. Scientists call it the

ring down.

Avery: And the analogy everyone reaches for is a

bell. Strike a bell and it rings at

particular tones that depend on its shape,

its size, its material. A black

hole is much simpler. Its ring depends on

essentially just two things, its mass and

its spin.

Anna: And that simplicity is the gift. A major

new review, bringing together researchers

from the University of Birmingham, Johns

Hopkins and the University of Lisbon in the

journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, lays

out how black hole spectroscopy is

maturing from a beautiful theory into a real

working experimental science.

Avery: And the reason it matters is that it's one of

the cleanest tests of Einstein we have.

General relativity makes a very precise

prediction for what those ring down tones

should be. If we listen carefully and the

tones match, Einstein passes another

brutal exam. If they don't quite match,

then we

Anna: might be hearing the first whisper of new

physics. A crack in the theory under the most

extreme conditions imaginable.

Avery: And we're on the cusp of hearing this

properly. Today's detectors catch hints of

the ring, but the next generation, the

Einstein telescope, cosmic explorer and the

space based LISA mission, will hear these

black hole bells with real clarity.

Anna: It's a wonderful thought. The most silent,

invisible objects in the cosmos, and we're

learning to listen to them chime before we

go, our sky watch. And this one's for our

friends down south, which is a lot of us.

Avery: There's a large coronal hole on the sun

that's rotated around to face Earth, and it's

sending a stream of fast solar wind our way.

The forecaster is expected to arrive around

the 21st to 22nd of July.

Anna: So midweek, which brings a chance,

and I'll stress chance of some minor

aurora australis activity for the fall far

southern latitudes. We're talking Tasmania,

the south of the south island of New Zealand,

and similar high magnetic latitude spots.

Avery: Let's keep expectations sensible. This is a

modest event, not one of the great storms

we've had this cycle. Geomagnetic activity in

the kp3.5 range, so no

guarantees of curtains of light. But if

you're somewhere dark and far south midweek,

it's worth a look toward the southern horizon

after dark.

Anna: And with solar maximum conditions still

lingering, these chances keep coming around.

Wrap up warm. It is winter down here after

all.

Avery: That's our lot for today. From India's first

private rocket reaching orbit. To shrimp

learning to dine in free fall. To black holes

ringing across spacetime. What a spread.

Anna: Thanks for spending part of your day with us.

You can find us at astronomydaily,

IO and on all the socials at

AstroDailyPod We're back tomorrow.

Avery: Um, until then, I'm Avery.

Anna: And I'm Anna. Clear skies everyone.

Avery: Mhm.

In this episode