Lunar Landing Woes, Elon Musk's Spat, and the Discovery of Extreme Nuclear Transients

0:00 Anna: Hey there space enthusiasts and welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm your host, Anna, and I'm super excited to bring you the latest cosmic happenings. Today we're diving into a mixed bag of news from M, A Japanese lunar lander that, didn't quite stick the landing to a very public spat between Elon Musk and. Well, you know. We'll also be taking a look at what a maze is doing on M. Mars and get this, the biggest explosion scientists have seen since the Big Bang. So buckle up and let's get started.

0:30 So, first up, we have some updated news from Ispace, the Japan based company. And, well, it's not great. Their Resilience lander unfortunately didn't exactly nail its landing on the moon. Yeah, it seems they got to the finish line, but weren't quite successful in sticking the landing. Now this mission launched about four and a half months ago on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. As part of a rideshare with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander. The teams in Japan announced that sadly, they lost communication with Resilience, which probably means it suffered a hard landing.

1:04 Ouch. Takeshi Hakamada, the founder and CEO of Ispace, said that their top priority is to analyse the telemetry data they managed to get and figure out what went wrong. They're aiming to restore trust by providing a report to everyone involved. The mission actually seemed to be going smoothly at first. Resilience went through several phases, gradually lowering its orbit around the moon. But after it reached about 20 kilometres above the surface, things went south. They lost telemetry, and based on the data they have, the lander couldn't decelerate enough and it, well, crash landed.

1:41 This lander was carrying science payloads and even a rover from Ispace Europe named Tenacious. The plan was to land in a region called Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold. There was even a small model of a Swedish house on board, meant to be placed on the moon by the rover. Now, this is I Space's second landing failure in two missions. But their American subsidiary, Ispace US is still on contract with NASA for a mission in 2027 to deliver a larger lander to the far side of the moon. So hopefully they'll be able to turn things around.

2:15 Okay, next up, we've got a bit of a, ah, well, let's call it a situation brewing between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Yeah, you heard that right. So apparently these two aren't exactly seeing eye to eye anymore. After Musk served as a special government employee leading the Department of Government Efficiency, or doge. Things seemed fine. Trump even called Musk one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced. But things went downhill after Musk criticised Trump's big beautiful bill.

2:45 Trump fired back, suggesting the US could save money by cancelling government contracts with Musk's companies. And that's when things got spicy. Musk responded with a threat to begin decommissioning SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft immediately. Now, if Musk is serious, this could have some pretty big consequences for American spaceflight. I mean, think about it. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft have been crucial for NASA operations on the International Space Station, ushering in a new era of US spaceflight.

3:15 If Dragon gets decommissioned, that would basically end US based astronaut launches for a while. And Boeing's Starliner isn't quite ready to fill that gap yet. SpaceX has some pretty substantial government contracts, including NASA's Commercial Crew Programme, cargo resupply services for the ISS, and oh yeah, they're supposed to provide the lunar lander for NASA's Artemis moon programme. So if those contracts get cancelled along with the proposed cuts to NASA's budget, it could seriously impact NASA as we know it.

3:47 Now it's not clear what this would mean for SpaceX's private spaceflight endeavours. Axiom Space is about to launch its fourth private astronaut mission on a brand new Dragon. And SpaceX has been doing some cool stuff with private spacewalks and polar orbits. NASA's being pretty tight lipped about the whole situation, saying they'll continue to execute the President's vision for the future of space. So we'll have to wait and see how this all plays out. But yeah, stay tuned folks, because this could get interesting.

4:16 Alright, let's move on to something a little less dramatic. Have you ever looked at the raw images from NASA's Perseverance rover and wondered why it keeps snapping pics of this weird tiny maze? Well, it turns out there's a pretty cool reason. That maze is actually a calibration target. One of ten for Perseverance's Sherlock instrument. Yeah, that's short for scanning habitable environments with Raman and luminescence for organics and chemicals. Catchy, right? So Sherlock is basically a Sherlock Holmes inspired tool designed to detect organic compounds and other minerals on Mars that could indicate signs of, you know, ancient microbial life.

4:52 But to do that accurately, it needs to be carefully calibrated. And that's where our little maze comes in. Sherlock is Located on the rover's robotic arm and and uses spectroscopic techniques to analyse Martian rocks. To make sure its measurements are spot on, it routinely calibrates its tools using reference materials with specific properties. These are mounted on a plate attached to the front of the rover's body, which is called the Sherlock Calibration target. The maze helps calibrate the positioning of the laser scanner mirror and characterises the laser's focus.

5:23 It's made of chrome plated lines that are super thin, only about twice the width of a human hair, printed onto silica glass. And get this, if you look closely, there's even a tiny Sherlock Holmes portrait right in the centre. How cool is that? The calibration target also includes samples of materials used in spacesuits like Teflon, Gore Tex and Kevlar. These are being tested under Mars conditions to see how they hold up over time, which is crucial for planning future human exploration of the red planet.

5:53 And one last fun fact. Sherlock has a sidekick, a colour camera called Watson. Yep, just like Sherlock Holmes. Okay, now for something truly mind blowing. Astronomers have stumbled upon a new type of giant space explosion. And get this. They're calling them extreme nuclear transients, or ENTs. And, apparently they're the biggest bangs since the Big bang itself. These ents are like colossal flares of light from the hearts of distant galaxies. And they linger way longer than any flares we've ever seen before.

6:23 We're talking about blasts that release as much energy as 100 suns would over their entire lifetimes. I mean, wow. So what are they? Well, it turns out they're kind of like stars being torn apart by black holes, but on a scale we've never observed before. Each star is a massive one, at least three times as massive as our sun. And each black hole is a supermassive beast lurking in the centre of its host galaxy. Normally, these events are called tidal disruption events, or TDEs. But these ENTs are different.

6:55 They're, like, nearly 10 times brighter than normal TDEs. And they stay luminous for years, surpassing even the brightest supernova explosions. Gaia, the space telescope, whose mission was to map the Milky Way, actually accidentally captured these explosions while staring at the sky. Combing through Gaia data, scientists found two strange events from 2016 and 2018. After some digging, they figured out that these events were the same kind of event as something nicknamed Scary Barbie, which sounds absolutely terrifying.

7:31 Ents are super rare, like 10 million times less frequent than supernovae. But they give us a new way to study massive black holes in distant galaxies because they're so bright and we can see them across vast cosmic distances. So in astronomy, looking far away means looking back in time. By observing these prolonged flares, we can learn more about black hole growth during a key era when the universe was half its current age. It's like galaxies were forming stars and feeding their supermassive black holes like 10 times more vigorously than they do today.

8:05 Pretty wild stuff, huh? And that's all the space and astronomy news we have for you today. I've been your host, Anna, and I hope you enjoyed our journey through the cosmos. If you want to stay up to date with all the latest space happenings, be sure to visit our website at astronomydaily IO. There you can sign up for our free daily newsletter and catch up on all the latest space and astronomy news with our constantly updating newsfeed. Also, don't forget to follow us on social media. Just search for Astro Daily Pod on Facebook, X, YouTube, YouTube, Music, Instagram, Tumblr, and TikTok.

8:39 Thanks for tuning in, and we'll catch you next time on Astronomy Daily. In the meantime, keep looking up.