Lucky 13 | The Weekend Wrap - Astronomy Daily: The Latest Space News

Anna: It aborted at zero. It got scrubbed

by the weather, and then on the third try,

it flew and came down in the Indian

Ocean softer than it ever has before.

Avery: Starship's 13th test finally left the

pad. That's our lead then, the strongest

sign yet of a moon beyond our solar system.

A robot mechanic heading for the graveyard

belt of dead satellites. And what the

far side of our own moon has been quietly

recording about the Earth.

Anna: It's the weekend wrap. I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm Avery. This is Astronomy Daily.

Anna: So we have been living with this one for

weeks and I want to give it the room it

deserves because the story of Flight 13

is really the story of persistence.

Let's rewind. For anyone just joining US Back

on 16 July, SpaceX counted all

the way down to zero, and the rocket's own

flight computer said no. 4 of the

33 Raptor engines on the booster didn't

come up to healthy starting conditions and

the vehicle aborted, uh, itself on the pad.

That's not a failure, by the way. That's the

safety system doing exactly what it's built

to do.

Avery: Right? An abort at uh T0 is the

rocket protecting itself and the pad. Elon

Musk said afterwards two Raptors would be

pulled and replaced to be confident of a good

flight. They swapped the engines, rolled back

out. And then last week, the weather turned.

Thursday's attempt got scrubbed because

SpaceX wanted clear skies, not just for the

launch, but to actually see the vehicle and

photograph the heat shield under high stress

on the way up.

Anna: And that brings us to Friday, the 24th

liftoff from Starbase in Texas, just

before quarter to seven in the evening

Eastern time. So prime time viewing across

North America and the small hours of Saturday

morning for us here in Australia. This was

the second flight of the bigger, more

powerful version 3 Starship. And this

time it went, let's walk

Avery: the flights because there's real nuance here.

Not everything was perfect. And, um, that's

okay. First, the good news that matters most

for the program. The heat shield basics

and Musk both flagged a, uh, marked

improvement in how the shield held up during

re entry. And that is the single hardest

problem standing between Starship and genuine

reusability. If you can't bring the ship home

intact, none of the rest works.

Anna: The booster, super heavy, separated

cleanly a few minutes in and flew itself back

for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of

Mexico about six minutes after launch.

But here's the honest on that

final landing burn, it looked like only about

five of the 13 planned engines lit,

so it came down harder and faster than

SpaceX wanted.

Avery: Now, important context, so nobody mishears

this. That booster was always going to be

thrown away in the water. This wasn't the

catch attempt. So a rough splashdown on an

expendable booster is a data point, not a

disaster. And crucially, it still made a

controlled landing, which means they appear

to have fixed whatever caused them to lose

the booster outright. On Flight 12 back in

May, that one lost engines after separation

and just fell into the Gulf. This one

flew the profile. That's progress.

Anna: Then the star of the show, the ship itself.

Ship 40 sailed through its burn,

coasted on a suborbital arc. This was never

going all the way to orbit and did something

lovely on the way. It relit one of its

Raptor engines in space. That in space

relight is a rehearsal for the maneuvers a

future orbital starship will need to come

home. And then came the splashdown west

of Australia in the Indian Ocean.

Avery: And this is the bit I keep replaying.

SpaceX's Dan Huat called it live,

the softest splashdown they have ever had

with Starship for the first time. After the

ship did its flip and settled onto the water

and tipped over, it did not explode.

It sat there bobbing, still sending back

telemetry and video floating in the Indian

Anna: Ocean, which, if you've watched these tests,

is genuinely new. We are used to the

fireball as the full stop at the end of the

sentence. This time the sentence just

kept going.

Avery: There's one more first, and it's a big one

for the Starlink side of the business. On the

way up, the ship deployed 20 real Starlink

V3 satellites, the first V3s ever to

fly. Every previous flight that tested

deployment used dummy mass simulators. These

were the real thing, big flat satellites with

laser links and large solar arrays. And

SpaceX says they successfully talked to all

of them by radio and laser and pulled

telemetry down, which six of

Anna: those 20 carried cameras specifically to

scan Starship's own heat shield tiles and

beam the pictures back. A clever way to

inspect the shield in flight. The satellites

then follow the ship's path back down. So

they're not staying up there. It's a test

appointment, not a Constellation launch.

Avery: So how do we score Flight 13 overall?

SpaceX and Musk both called it a success.

And I think the fair read is a strong

flight with one soft spot. The heat

shield improved. The ship flew its whole

profile and relit in space. The softest

ever splashdown first real V3

deployment set against a booster landing

burn, uh, that underperformed on an

expendable stage.

Anna: And a lovely piece of timing to close on the

original Launch date. The 16th was the

57th anniversary of the Apollo 11

launch. Friday's launch date. The 24th

of July is the 57th anniversary

of the day the Apollo 11 crew splashed back

down on Earth in 1969. A

splashdown anniversary for a rocket that's

meant to help carry the next crew to the

moon.

Avery: The road ahead is still steep. SpaceX has to

dramatically raise the flight rate, prove

they can catch the ship on the tower like

they catch boosters and crack an orbit

refueling before starship can land Artemis

astronauts. But after weeks of near misses,

Flight 13 is exactly the kind of day the

program needed.

Anna: Alright, let's move on to other news from the

past in space.

Avery: From our own backyard to 70 odd light

years away and a discovery with a southern

hemisphere fingerprint all over it.

Astronomers using the European Southern

Observatory's Very Large Telescope up in

the Chilean desert have reported the

strongest evidence yet for a moon outside

our solar system. It's in a system called

CD35 20072 2.

And it is, in the lead author's own words,

super weird.

Anna: Weird how? Well, we've found more than

6,000 planets around other stars, but

never once confirmed a moon out there. Every

candidate so far has been contested. So what

makes this one different?

Avery: This is the twist. It didn't turn up the way

exomoon hunters expected. A little moon

crossing in front of a planet. Instead, the

team led by Kevin Hoy, an um ESO

student based in Chile with Alice Zurlo and

colleagues, published in Nature, watched a

brown dwarf and caught it wobbling. Something

is tugging on it. And that something is a gas

giant about the mass of Jupiter orbiting the

brown dwarf.

Anna: So let me get the nesting doll right, because

it's genuinely strange. There's a star

about half the mass of our own sun. Around it

orbits a brown dwarf bigger than a planet,

too small to be a star, around 30 times

the mass of Jupiter. And around the brown

dwarf orbits this Jupiter mass object.

Avery: Exactly. And that's why nobody quite knows

what to call it. It's the size of a planet,

but it doesn't orbit a star. It orbits an

object that orbits a star. So is it a moon?

An exosatellite? The researchers

themselves say there's no officially accepted

definition of an exomoon. And this system

blurs every line between star, planet

and moon.

Anna: And the honest headline, because this

matters, is that the team calls it the first

plausible detection of an exosatellite.

Not confirmed plausible, the strongest

candidate we've had, but still one that needs

more observations to nail down.

Avery: The technique is the exciting part. For what

comes next. They used radial velocity,

the same wobble method that found the first

exoplanet around a sun like star back in the

90s, but applied it to a directly

imaged brown dwarf for the first time. Which

means, uh, every one of those directly imaged

giant worlds out there is now a fresh hunting

ground for moons.

Anna: A new door opened from a telescope under the

southern skies. We'll be watching CD

352722 closely.

Avery: Next up in our weekly roundup, Northrop

Grumman MRV MEP.

Anna: Here's a job title you don't hear every

satellite mechanic. On Tuesday evening, a

SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape

Canaveral carrying one of the more quietly

futuristic missions of the year. Northrop

Grumman's Mission Robotic Vehicle, plus

three of what the company literally calls

jetpacks.

Avery: I love this because it's so practical. We

put enormous expensive satellites up in

geostationary orbit. The ring about

36,000 km up, where a

spacecraft hovers over the same spot on

Earth. And historically, when one runs out of

maneuvering fuel, that's the end of it. A

perfectly good satellite, dead because the

tank's empty.

Anna: So what does the mechanic do about it?

Avery: The Mission robotic vehicle, the MRV,

carries two fully articulated robotic

arms, each about 3 meters long, built by

the U.S. naval Research Laboratory under a

DARPA program. Over the next year, it climbs

out to geostationary orbit. And then it

starts making house calls. It grabs one of

those mission extension pods, the jetpacks,

and bolts it onto an aging satellite. The

pod becomes a satellite's new propulsion,

buying it something like six extra years of

life.

Anna: And then it moves on to the next customer.

One robot, three pods, three rescued

satellites. Here's the local hook. Among the

named clients are SES in Luxembourg,

and this one's for our Australian listeners,

Optis. So there's a genuine chance an

Aussie communications satellite gets a new

lease on life from this robot.

Avery: This isn't coming out of nowhere either.

Northrop Space Logistics Arm did this before

with its mission extension vehicles. The

first one, back in 2019, was the first

commercial spacecraft ever to dock with a

live satellite in geostationary orbit. But

those were big. One to one. One

vehicle, one satellite for good.

Anna: Whereas the pods are smaller, cheaper and

reusable in the sense that the robot can keep

deploying them. It turns satellite servicing

from a one off rescue into something closer

to a routine a tow truck service for the

geostationary belt.

Avery: And, um, in an era we're all worried about

space junk keeping working satellites working

instead of abandoning them and launching

replacements is a genuinely good news story

about doing more with less up there.

Anna: Next. Chang' E6 Far Side Solar wind.

Avery: Our last highlight brings us home to our own

moon and a result that turns lunar soil

into a diary of the Earth. This is from

China's Chang' E6 mission, the one that

pulled off the first ever sample return from

the far side of the Moon. The findings are

published in Nature Geoscience.

Anna: And it starts with a question I'd never

thought to. Does the solar wind hit the

near side and the far side of the Moon the

same way?

Avery: Turns out, no. The solar wind is this

constant stream of charged particles pouring

off the Sun. The Moon has no real atmosphere

and no global magnetic field. So those

particles slam straight into the dust. And

over billions of years, that dust, the

regolith, becomes an archive, trapping

noble gases, helium, neon, argon,

krypton, xenon.

Anna: So the team compared the far side dirt that

Chang' E6 brought back from the South Pole

Aitken Basin with the near side samples from

the earlier Chang' e 5 mission. And the two

sides tell different stories.

Avery: They do. The far side samples show the

solar wind penetrating deeper and a

distinctly different neon fingerprint. And

the culprit they land on is us,

uh, the Earth. For part of every month,

the Moon's near side sits inside the Earth's

magnetosphere, our planet's magnetic shield.

And that shield actually slows the solar wind

down before it reaches the near side.

Anna: The far side, meanwhile, spends more of its

time fully exposed, taking the solar wind at

full speed. Though the Earth has, in effect,

been leaving its signature on one face of the

Moon and not the other for billions of years.

Avery: And that's the poetic bit. The far side of

the Moon, the side we never see from here,

has been keeping a record of the Earth's own

magnetic environment across deep time.

To be fair, the scientists say the neon

result is still a bit of a puzzle. More than

one process is probably at play. But the

headline stands. The Moon's two faces have

lived through different weather from the sun.

And the Earth is part of the reason.

Anna: A little over a gram and a half of farside

dust, rewriting how we think about the Sun,

Earth, Moon system. Not bad.

Avery: Finally today, our regular sky watch for

both hemispheres.

Anna: Well, that was the week that was. Which means

it's time to look up wherever you are. Lets

start with the moon itself because it's the

main character in the sky. Right now we're

heading toward a full moon, the buck moon on

the 29th. So tonight and over the weekend

you've got a big bright waxing gibbous moon

lighting up the evening sky, north and

Avery: south alike, which is beautiful to look at

and a nuisance if you're chasing meteors. So

let's set expectations. Honestly, the

southern Delta Aquariids are active right now

and they peak on the 29th into the 30th

southern hemisphere. Friends, this shower is

ours. The radiant near the star Skat in

Aquarius rides high overhead for us and

it's also a fine show from the southern

United States and the tropics.

Anna: But here's the catch. This year that peak

lands right on the full buck moon, so the sky

will be washed out at exactly the wrong

moment. My advice, don't pin your hopes on

peak night. Go out in the dark window before

dawn once the moon has set and look well away

from it. The Delta Aquariids are faint, so a

truly dark patch of sky is everything and

a nice the slow bright fireballs of the

Alpha Capricornids are peaking around the

same nights for both hemispheres.

Avery: And if the moon spoils this one, don't

despair because the big one is coming and the

timing is perfect. The Perseids are

already switching on and they peak on the

12th into the 13th of August on a new moon.

Dark skies, no interference. That's a

Northern Hemisphere favorite. The radiant

sits high in the north, but it carries down

to the Southern hemisphere's mid latitudes

too. So it's worth a look. From Northern

Australia bark that date because

Anna: it's a genuine double feature. On the very

same day as the Perseid peak, 12 August,

there's a total solar eclipse.

Avery: There is. Totality carves a narrow path

across Greenland, Iceland and Spain if

you're lucky enough to be under it. That's

the whole day sorted. Eclipse in the

afternoon, meteors overnight. For most of

North America and Western Europe, it's a

partial eclipse rather than total, but still

very much worth stepping out for.

Anna: And this is our uh, non negotiable reminder.

Never look at even a partial eclipse without

proper certified eye protection. Solar

viewers that meet the ISO

123122 standard

ordinary sunglasses will not protect your

eyes. No exceptions.

Avery: Please take care of your eyes safety first

and all of that. As for planets, step out

after sunset and brilliant Venus is climbing

back into the western evening twilight it

only gets better through August and if you're

an early riser the pre dawn sky is where

the action is Saturn is well up in the hours

before sunrise with Jupiter returning low in

the east southern hemisphere viewers get

these morning planets riding higher and

steeper one of the quiet perks of our

southern skies so a

Anna: bright moon this weekend patience on the

meteors and a spectacular double bill to

circle for the 12th of August that's

Avery: the weekend wrap Starship's 13th

finally flew and floated the strongest

hint yet of a moon around the distant brown

dwarf a robot mechanic on its way to the

satellite graveyard and the far side of our

moon cor quietly keeping the

Anna: earth's diary thanks for spending part of

your weekend with us you'll find every source

in the show notes and we're back tomorrow

with your daily space and astronomy news

until then from Anna and

Avery: uh Ivory clear skies.

The

toll.

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