Launch Day for Swift's Rescue, ISS Spacewalk, and Unraveling the Secrets of the Cosmos

0:00 Anna: Good morning and welcome to Astronomy Daily.

0:02 I'm Anna.

0:03 Avery: And I'm avery. It's Tuesday, June

0:06 30, 2026, and today is

0:09 launch day.

0:10 Anna: After weeks of watching this story build, we

0:12 finally get to say it. A rescue mission for

0:15 NASA's Swift observatory is heading to the

0:18 launch pad, or rather the launch aircraft

0:20 today.

0:21 Avery: Plus a spacewalk happening live on the iss.

0:24 A galaxy cluster that's breaking cosmology's

0:27 rulebook. A quiet nursery hidden in the most

0:30 violent part of our galaxy. A newly

0:33 confirmed fossil galaxy near Andromeda. And

0:35 why today is Asteroid Day.

0:38 Anna: Vic stories one very busy Tuesday.

0:41 Let's get into it.

0:43 We've been tracking this one for weeks. And

0:45 Today's the day NASA's Neil Gerald

0:47 Swift, observatory, 22 years old, still

0:50 hunting gamma ray bursts, has been losing

0:53 altitude faster than expected thanks to solar

0:56 activity.

0:57 Avery: Without help, Swift faced a real chance of an

1:00 uncontrolled re entry by the end of this

1:02 year. So NASA contracted a m small

1:04 Arizona company, Catalyst Space Technologies,

1:07 to build a robotic rescue spacecraft called

1:10 Link in under nine months, a job that

1:13 would normally take two years.

1:15 Anna: Link is about the size of a, uh, fridge.

1:18 Three robotic arms, lidar sensors, ion

1:21 thrusters. Today it launches from Kwadrilin

1:23 Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Carried under

1:26 the belly of Stargazer, the last aircraft

1:29 worthy Lockheed, Lockheed Tristar in the

1:31 world been dropped and lit on a Northrop

1:34 Grumman Pegasus xl, the very last

1:36 Pegasus XL ever to fly.

1:39 Avery: Launch window opened at 6:23am Eastern.

1:42 That's this evening here in Australia. As of

1:45 our recording, NASA and Northrop Grumman have

1:48 the mission status listed as go.

1:50 Anna: If it works, Link will spend months gently

1:53 grappling and nudging Swift back up to a safe

1:55 altitude. Swift was never built for being

1:58 serviced. No docking port, no handholds.

2:01 So this will be delicate historic work.

2:03 Avery: Rat Kranko, the Swift principal Investigator

2:06 at Goddard, put it Simply. Swift is

2:09 NASA's multi tool for studying the cosmos.

2:12 Today we find out if that multitool gets a

2:15 second life.

2:16 Anna: Fingers crossed for a clean release and a

2:18 good first signal from Link. We'll keep you

2:20 posted as uh, this story develops.

2:23 Avery: Story two takes us to the International Space

2:25 Station, where NASA astronauts Chris Williams

2:27 and Jessica Meir are stepping outside today

2:30 to fix a wrist joint on KANADRM2.

2:33 Anna: KANADRM2 is the station's big robotic

2:36 arm. It's been doing the heavy lifting,

2:38 literally since 2001. Capturing

2:41 cargo ships, repositioning modules, helping

2:44 with spacewalks. But one of its wrist joints

2:46 has been giving controllers trouble.

2:48 Avery: The spacewalk kicked off at around 8:35am

2:51 Eastern today. Williams and Meir will

2:54 replace the faulty joint mechanism so the arm

2:56 can keep operating with its full range of

2:58 motion.

2:59 Anna: It's not the flashiest of stories, but it

3:02 matters enormously. Without a fully

3:04 functioning Canat Arm 2, a lot of station

3:06 operations get a lot harder, from cargo

3:09 capture to external

3:11 Avery: maintenance routine, and the sense that NASA

3:13 has done dozens of these repairs over the

3:15 decades. But every spacewalk still carries

3:18 real risk, and this crew is doing

3:21 precise, fiddly work in a pressurized

3:23 suit 400km up.

3:26 Good luck to them.

3:28 Anna: Story three is a genuine cosmological

3:30 puzzle. A team led by Kyle Finner at

3:33 Caltech's IPEC has used the James Webb

3:36 Space Telescope to study a, uh, galaxy

3:38 cluster called

3:39 XLSSC122.

3:42 Avery: That distance puts it in an era astronomers

3:44 call cosmic noon, when the universe was only

3:47 about 3 billion years old and forming stars

3:50 faster than at any point before or since.

3:53 Galaxy clusters from that era are supposed to

3:56 look young, loose, scattered, still pulling

3:58 themselves together.

4:00 Anna: XLSSC122 doesn't

4:02 look like that. JWST caught it acting

4:05 as a gravitational lens, bending the light of

4:08 background galaxies into arcs, and it's now

4:11 the most distant, strong lensing galaxy

4:13 cluster ever found.

4:15 Avery: When the team measured how concentrated the

4:18 cluster's core mass is, the number

4:20 came back higher than current cosmological

4:23 models say it should be allowed to be. The

4:26 visible matter stars gas barely

4:29 accounts for any of it. The rest is

4:32 dark matter, packed in tighter than expected

4:34 for something this early in cosmic history.

4:37 Anna: Laid researcher Fenner was refreshingly

4:39 honest about it. This could just be one

4:42 extreme outlier in a normal distribution.

4:45 Or it could be a sign that something in our

4:47 models of how structure formed in the early

4:49 universe needs revising.

4:51 Avery: Either way, it's a reminder of just how much

4:54 JWST is rewriting the early chapters of

4:57 cosmic history, one impossibly

5:00 mature galaxy cluster at a time. From

5:02 the very distant universe to our own

5:05 backyard, the center of the Milky Way is one

5:08 of the most violent neighborhoods in the

5:10 galaxy, a churning storm of gas moving

5:12 faster than the speed of sound. It's about

5:15 the last place you'd expect to find a star

5:17 quietly being born.

5:19 Anna: And yet astronomers using the ALMA telescope

5:22 array in Chile have mapped that chaos in

5:24 detail and found exactly that a

5:27 small, almost accidental pocket where the

5:30 turbulent gas slows down, slowly settles, and

5:33 begins gathering itself into the seeds of new

5:36 stars.

5:36 Avery: It's a small, almost accidental discovery

5:39 with big implications. It suggests that

5:42 stars might take their very first steps the

5:45 same way everywhere in the galaxy, even in

5:47 the most hostile environments imaginable.

5:50 Anna: And that includes very possibly our own

5:53 Sun. Billions of years ago, the sun may well

5:55 have condensed out of just this kind of brief

5:58 island of stillness somewhere in the swirling

6:01 chaos of a young turbulent galaxy.

6:03 Avery: A nice thought for your next coffee break.

6:05 Somewhere in that storm at the galactic

6:07 center right now, the next generation of

6:10 stars may already be quietly getting started.

6:13 Anna: Dory 5 is a lovely one. Equal parts

6:16 cosmology and citizen science.

6:18 Astronomers have just formally confirmed in

6:21 the peer reviewed journal Astronomy and

6:23 Astrophysics the discovery of Andromeda

6:26 36, an ultra faint dwarf galaxy

6:29 orbiting our giant neighbor, the Andromeda

6:31 Galaxy.

6:32 Avery: This one was actually first spotted back in

6:34 March by an amateur astronomer, Giuseppe

6:37 Donatellio, visually combing through public

6:39 survey images. Not an algorithm, a person

6:42 scanning pictures by eye. Now, after

6:45 follow up observations with the Gran

6:47 Telescopio Canaris, the team has nailed down

6:50 the details.

6:51 Anna: And what details? Andromeda 36th

6:54 is roughly 12.5 billion years old,

6:57 extremely metal poor, and one of the

6:59 faintest, most compact dwarf satellites

7:01 ever found around Andro. It's essentially a

7:04 fossil from the universe's earliest stages.

7:07 Avery: Astronomers think Andromeda did host close to

7:10 a hundred of these tiny dwarf satellites, and

7:13 only about half are currently known. Lead

7:16 author Joanna Sakova made the point that even

7:18 now, careful visual inspection by a trained

7:21 eye is still finding things that automated

7:23 machine learning searches miss.

7:25 Anna: A nice reminder that in astronomy, sometimes

7:28 the best discovery tool is still a patient

7:30 human looking closely at the data.

7:33 Avery: And finally today, June 30th is asteroid

7:35 day. It's a UN sanctioned day of awareness

7:38 around planetary defense. And the date isn't

7:41 random.

7:41 Anna: It marks the anniversary of the Tunguska

7:44 event back in 1908, when an asteroid or

7:47 comet fragment exploded in the atmosphere

7:49 over Siberia, flattening more than 2,000

7:52 square kilometers of forest. No crater,

7:55 no warning. And to this day, it's the largest

7:58 impact event in recorded history.

8:00 Avery: Asteroid Day exists to make sure we don't

8:02 have to learn that lesson the hard way again.

8:05 Around the world today, observatories, space

8:07 agencies and science communicators are

8:09 running events on planetary defense, tracking

8:12 near Earth objects, deflection technology,

8:15 and what we'd actually do if something was

8:17 heading our way.

8:18 Anna: And we do have a real success story to point

8:21 to. NASA's DART mission already proved

8:24 by physically slamming into the asteroid

8:26 Dimorphos that we can measurably change an

8:28 asteroid's path. It's no longer just theory.

8:32 Avery: So today's less about any single new

8:34 discovery and, uh, more about the bigger

8:36 picture. Thousands of astronomers, amateur

8:39 and professional, quietly doing the

8:42 unglamorous work of mapping the sky for the

8:44 next Tunguska so that if it ever comes,

8:47 we'll see it coming. And that wraps up a

8:50 big Tuesday for Astronomy Daily. A rescue

8:53 mission lighting up the Pacific sky, a

8:55 spacewalk on the iss, and galaxies both

8:58 impossibly old and impossibly young.

9:01 Anna: If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit

9:03 subscribe wherever you're listening and leave

9:05 us a review. It genuinely helps new listeners

9:08 find the show.

9:09 Avery: We're Anna, uh, and Avery. This has been

9:12 Astronomy Daily, and we'll see you back here

9:14 tomorrow. Clear skies, everyone. And good

9:16 luck to Swift and Link tonight.

9:21 Mhm.

9:29 Anna: The stories.

9:38 Avery: Were told.