Moon Rocket, Lost Spacecraft, and a Comet That Fell Apart on Camera

0:00 Speaker 1: Hey, they're stargazers, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily

0:04 Speaker 1: dose of what's happening out there in the cosmos.

0:06 Speaker 2: I'm Anna, and I'm Avery. Today is Saturday, March twenty first,

0:11 Speaker 2: twenty twenty six, and honestly, Anna, we've got another busy show.

0:15 Speaker 1: Today, We really do. A moon rocket has arrived at

0:19 Speaker 1: the launch pad for the first time in over fifty years,

0:22 Speaker 1: carrying astronauts. We've got a pair of weird, dying stars

0:25 Speaker 1: behaving in ways nobody's ever seen before. And a comment

0:29 Speaker 1: that basically fell apart while Hubble happened to be watching accidentally.

0:33 Speaker 2: Plus fifteen brand new moons in our Solar system, a

0:37 Speaker 2: growing garbage problem on our own moon, and the genuinely

0:41 Speaker 2: dramatic spacecraft story one lost, one found.

0:45 Speaker 1: It's a big one. Let's get into it.

0:47 Speaker 2: We're going to start with NASA's Artemis two, and this

0:50 Speaker 2: one feels different. After months of delays, repairs, and anxious waiting,

0:55 Speaker 2: the rocket is finally on the pad.

0:57 Speaker 1: At eleven twenty one am Eastern Time on Friday, March twentieth,

1:02 Speaker 1: NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Oryan spacecraft arrived at

1:06 Speaker 1: launch pad thirty nine b at Kennedy's Space Center in Florida,

1:10 Speaker 1: after an eleven hour overnight journey from the vehicle assembly

1:13 Speaker 1: building hauled by the Giant Crawler transporter at less than

1:17 Speaker 1: one mile per hour.

1:18 Speaker 2: A three hundred and twenty two foot tall moon rocket

1:21 Speaker 2: creeping through the night at jogging pace. And honestly, that's

1:25 Speaker 2: exactly how it should be.

1:27 Speaker 1: It really is, And the current target launch date is

1:30 Speaker 1: no earlier than Wednesday, April first, which means we could

1:34 Speaker 1: be watching the first humans leave Earth's orbit in over

1:37 Speaker 1: fifty years in less than two weeks.

1:40 Speaker 2: So who's on board the Artemis two crew is Commander

1:43 Speaker 2: Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Coach,

1:48 Speaker 2: all from NASA, along with Canadian Space Agency mission specialists

1:52 Speaker 2: Jeremy Hansen.

1:53 Speaker 1: And this mission is full of historic firsts. Victor Glover

1:57 Speaker 1: will become the first person of color to travel be

2:00 Speaker 1: yond Earth orbit, Christina Coach will be the first woman

2:03 Speaker 1: to do so, and Jeremy Hansen will be the first

2:06 Speaker 1: non American citizen to leave Earth orbit.

2:09 Speaker 2: They'll fly a free return trajectory around the Moon and

2:12 Speaker 2: back to Earth in approximately ten days, no landing. This

2:16 Speaker 2: is a test flight, but it's a crucial one now.

2:19 Speaker 1: The road to the pad was not smooth. Earlier this year,

2:22 Speaker 1: a helium flow problem in the rocket's upper stage forced

2:26 Speaker 1: the team to roll the whole stack back to the

2:28 Speaker 1: vehicle assembly building. That pushed the launch from February, then March,

2:32 Speaker 1: and now April.

2:33 Speaker 2: But the team fixed when needed fixing, including replacing batteries

2:37 Speaker 2: on the flight termination system, and now PAD teams are

2:40 Speaker 2: moving into final countdown preparations.

2:43 Speaker 1: The last time humans flew beyond Earth orbit was Apollo

2:46 Speaker 1: seventeen in December nineteen seventy two. That was over fifty

2:51 Speaker 1: three years ago. April first cannot come come soon enough.

2:55 Speaker 2: We will absolutely be following this one. Let's move on,

2:58 Speaker 2: all right.

2:59 Speaker 1: Story two is pure stellar science, and it's one of

3:02 Speaker 1: those discoveries that makes you realize how much of the

3:05 Speaker 1: universe we still haven't seen yet.

3:07 Speaker 2: Astronomers have found something that until now nobody was sure

3:11 Speaker 2: could even exist. A pair of brown dwarf stars orbiting

3:15 Speaker 2: each other so closely that one is actively pulling material

3:19 Speaker 2: from the other.

3:20 Speaker 1: Let's back up slightly, so, what is a brown dwarf?

3:24 Speaker 1: So Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars, They're bigger

3:28 Speaker 1: than giant planets, but not massive enough to ignite and

3:31 Speaker 1: sustain hydrogen fusion the way our Sun does. They sort

3:35 Speaker 1: of sit in a strange no man's land between planet

3:38 Speaker 1: and star.

3:39 Speaker 2: And we know many of them exist in binary pairs,

3:42 Speaker 2: but this system, designated ztf J one two three nine

3:47 Speaker 2: plus eight three four seven, is something else entirely. These

3:51 Speaker 2: two brown dwarfs are in an incredibly tight orbit, completing

3:55 Speaker 2: a full loop around each other in fifty seven minutes.

3:58 Speaker 1: Fifty seven minutes, for context, our moon takes about twenty

4:02 Speaker 1: seven days to orbit Earth. These two are practically on

4:06 Speaker 1: top of each other.

4:07 Speaker 2: And because they're so close, the gravity of one is

4:10 Speaker 2: pulling material from the surface of the other, a process

4:13 Speaker 2: called mass transfer. This kind of behavior has been seen

4:17 Speaker 2: before in binary white dwarfs, the dense remnants of dead stars,

4:21 Speaker 2: but never in brown dwarfs. This is a first.

4:25 Speaker 1: The research team, led by Caltech graduate student Samuel Whitebook,

4:29 Speaker 1: actually had colleagues who didn't believe the finding at first.

4:32 Speaker 1: One co author said, and I love this. We've told

4:35 Speaker 1: some of our colleagues about them, and they didn't believe

4:38 Speaker 1: such a thing exists.

4:39 Speaker 2: Which is the best kind of science discovery. The system

4:43 Speaker 2: is only about a thousand light years away, which is

4:46 Speaker 2: close enough that follow up observations with the James Webbs

4:49 Speaker 2: telescope are being planned.

4:51 Speaker 1: And what's the eventual fate of these two Either they

4:54 Speaker 1: merge into a single brighter star or the one that's

4:57 Speaker 1: gaining mass eventually becomes massive and enough to trigger nuclear

5:01 Speaker 1: fusion and become a proper star. Either way, a fascinating, ending.

5:06 Speaker 2: Incredible stuff story. Three on a and this one involves

5:09 Speaker 2: Hubble being very, very lucky.

5:12 Speaker 1: So this story starts with a mishap and ends up

5:15 Speaker 1: as one of the most extraordinary observational luck stories in

5:19 Speaker 1: recent astronomy.

5:20 Speaker 2: Tell us all about it.

5:22 Speaker 1: Okay, So, researchers at Auburn University had won telescope time

5:26 Speaker 1: on the Hubble Space Telescope to study a specific comment,

5:30 Speaker 1: but then new technical constraints meant their original target wasn't viewable,

5:34 Speaker 1: so they quickly found a replacement, a different comment designated

5:38 Speaker 1: C slash twenty twenty five K one slash at lisk

5:42 Speaker 1: or just comment K one for short.

5:44 Speaker 2: Routine. Enough, so far.

5:46 Speaker 1: Routine until one of the team, co investigator John Nonan,

5:49 Speaker 1: sat down to look at the data the next morning,

5:52 Speaker 1: and he found not one comment in the images. He

5:55 Speaker 1: found four because Comment K one was falling apart right

5:59 Speaker 1: in front of Hubble's cameras.

6:01 Speaker 2: The commet had fragmented into at least four distinct pieces,

6:05 Speaker 2: each with its own coma that fuzzy envelope of gas

6:08 Speaker 2: and dust around the commentary nucleus, and Hubble's sharp eyes

6:12 Speaker 2: could clearly resolve each fragment separately, something ground based telescopes

6:17 Speaker 2: could barely make out as blurry blobs.

6:20 Speaker 1: The timing was extraordinary. The comet had passed closest to

6:25 Speaker 1: the Sun its perihelion just about a month before. That's

6:30 Speaker 1: the most intense heat and gravitational stress a comet experiences,

6:35 Speaker 1: and for long period comets like Cone, it's when they're

6:39 Speaker 1: most vulnerable to breaking up, and.

6:41 Speaker 2: Hubble just happened to be watching. The team was able

6:44 Speaker 2: to trace the history of each fragment back in time,

6:48 Speaker 2: essentially reconstructing exactly how and when the breakup happened. This

6:53 Speaker 2: is the first time Hubble has captured a comment this

6:56 Speaker 2: early in the fragmentation process.

6:58 Speaker 1: There's also an intriguing mystery buried in the data. There

7:02 Speaker 1: was a delay between when the comet broke up and

7:04 Speaker 1: when bright foutbursts were seen from the ground. Normally, when

7:08 Speaker 1: a comet fragments and exposes fresh ice to sunlight, you'd

7:11 Speaker 1: expect it to brighten almost immediately, but this one didn't. Why.

7:16 Speaker 1: Nobody knows yet, and.

7:17 Speaker 2: The initial analysis shows that comet K one is unusually

7:21 Speaker 2: depleted in carbon, which gives us new clues about the

7:24 Speaker 2: primorial chemistry of our early Solar system, all from a

7:28 Speaker 2: comet that wasn't even the intended target.

7:31 Speaker 1: Best accidents in science, honestly, onwards. Story four is a

7:35 Speaker 1: numbers came So.

7:37 Speaker 2: How many moons to Saturn have.

7:39 Speaker 1: As of this week two hundred and eighty five.

7:42 Speaker 2: Two hundred and eighty five and Jupiter.

7:45 Speaker 1: One hundred and one. The Minor Planet Center of the

7:48 Speaker 1: International Astronomical Union announced on March sixteenth that four new

7:53 Speaker 1: moons have been confirmed around Jupiter and eleven new moons

7:56 Speaker 1: around Saturn.

7:58 Speaker 2: Fifteen new moons just like that. I love this recurring story.

8:02 Speaker 2: It feels like somebody keeps going around the back of

8:04 Speaker 2: these planets and finding more hiding.

8:06 Speaker 1: There, sort of exactly what's happening. Actually, the Saturn moons

8:10 Speaker 1: were found by a team led by Edward Ashton from

8:13 Speaker 1: the University of British Columbia who combed through data from

8:17 Speaker 1: the Canada, France Hawaii telescope going back to twenty nineteen,

8:21 Speaker 1: and the Jupiter moons were spotted by a team led

8:23 Speaker 1: by Scott Shephard at the Carnegie Institution.

8:26 Speaker 2: All of these newly confirmed moons are tiny, barely a

8:30 Speaker 2: couple of miles across, with magnitudes around twenty five to

8:33 Speaker 2: twenty seven, meaning they're far too faint to see without

8:37 Speaker 2: some of the world's most powerful telescopes.

8:39 Speaker 1: Far what astronomers call irregular moons, captured objects orbiting far

8:45 Speaker 1: from the planet, often going the wrong way in retrograde.

8:48 Speaker 1: Most of the new Saturnian moons are doing just that,

8:52 Speaker 1: moving in the opposite direction to the planet's rotation, which

8:55 Speaker 1: is a strong sign they were probably captured from somewhere else,

8:59 Speaker 1: either asteroids snagged by Saturn's gravity or fragments from a

9:03 Speaker 1: collision that broke up a larger moon in the distant past.

9:07 Speaker 2: And this count is only going to keep climbing. The

9:10 Speaker 2: Veric Reuben Observatory went fully online last year, and it's

9:14 Speaker 2: going to be detecting these tiny, faint moons at a

9:17 Speaker 2: rate we haven't seen before.

9:19 Speaker 1: Poor Jupiter, though, still two hundred moons behind Saturn. It's

9:23 Speaker 1: like Jupiter just can't catch up.

9:26 Speaker 2: Jupiter just needs a try harder. Okay, story five, and

9:30 Speaker 2: this one's a little closer to home.

9:32 Speaker 1: So here's a question. What's on the Moon right now?

9:36 Speaker 1: Other than dust and rock, I mean.

9:39 Speaker 2: The flags, some rovers, U golf ball, I.

9:43 Speaker 1: Think more than one hundred metric tons of human made material,

9:48 Speaker 1: spacecraft parts, scientific instruments, cameras, landers, crash sites, and yes,

9:54 Speaker 1: actually bags of human waste left behind by Apollo astronauts.

9:59 Speaker 2: We left star rubbish on the Moon.

10:01 Speaker 1: We absolutely did. And that's just what's there now. We're

10:05 Speaker 1: on the verge of a completely new era of lunar activity,

10:09 Speaker 1: crude missions, commercial landers, scientific rovers, resource prospectors, and nobody

10:15 Speaker 1: has a comprehensive framework for what happens to all the

10:18 Speaker 1: stuff we're about to bring up there.

10:20 Speaker 2: There's no Lunar Environment Protection Agency, there's no international treaty

10:25 Speaker 2: specifically addressing lunar surface contamination. The Outer Space Treaty of

10:29 Speaker 2: nineteen sixty seven says countries are responsible for their national

10:33 Speaker 2: activities in space, but it doesn't get into the specifics

10:36 Speaker 2: of say a crash lander leaking propellant near a scientifically

10:40 Speaker 2: important site.

10:42 Speaker 1: And there are real concerns beyond aesthetics. Some of the

10:45 Speaker 1: most scientifically valuable areas of the Moon, like the permanently

10:49 Speaker 1: shadowed craters near the Poles, which may hold ancient ice deposits,

10:54 Speaker 1: could be contaminated by human activity before we've even finished

10:58 Speaker 1: studying them in their pristine style.

11:01 Speaker 2: Space policy researchers and planetary scientists are increasingly pushing for

11:05 Speaker 2: binding international agreements about lunar preservation zones, impacts, site protections,

11:10 Speaker 2: and responsible disposal of mission hardware.

11:13 Speaker 1: It's a conversation the space community needs to have urgently,

11:17 Speaker 1: because the missions are coming, whether the policy frameworks are

11:20 Speaker 1: ready or not. The Moon has been waiting four and

11:23 Speaker 1: a half billion years. The least we can do is

11:26 Speaker 1: think carefully before we trash it.

11:29 Speaker 2: All Right, We're ending today's show with a story that

11:31 Speaker 2: has two very different outcomes, one spacecraft recently lost and

11:36 Speaker 2: one spacecraft recently found.

11:39 Speaker 1: Let's start with the one that was found. ESA's Proba

11:43 Speaker 1: three mission, which we mentioned yesterday, has now been officially

11:46 Speaker 1: confirmed as recovered, and the details of how it happened

11:50 Speaker 1: are genuinely dramatic.

11:52 Speaker 2: So PROBA three is a fascinating mission. It uses two

11:56 Speaker 2: separate spacecraft flying in precise formation at an altitude of

12:00 Speaker 2: over sixty thousand kilometers to create an artificial solar eclipse.

12:05 Speaker 2: One satellite carries a disc that blocks the Sun, and

12:08 Speaker 2: the other carries a cornograph to study the faint outer

12:11 Speaker 2: atmosphere of the Sun, which is normally washed out by

12:14 Speaker 2: the Sun's blinding light.

12:16 Speaker 1: On February fourteenth, the Corona spacecraft, one of the two,

12:21 Speaker 1: suffered a chain of failures that caused it to lose

12:24 Speaker 1: its orientation. Its solar panels turned away from the Sun,

12:28 Speaker 1: its batteries drained, and it entered survival mode, tumbling silently

12:33 Speaker 1: through space for nearly a month.

12:36 Speaker 2: Engineers tracked it and waited for an opportunity. That opportunity

12:40 Speaker 2: came when the tumbling spacecraft briefly turned its solar panels

12:44 Speaker 2: toward the Sun just enough to generate a small amount

12:47 Speaker 2: of power. Teams in Spain acted immediately and contact was

12:51 Speaker 2: re established.

12:52 Speaker 1: LISA Director General Joseph Ashbacker said they saw that some

12:57 Speaker 1: sunlight was actually hitting the solar panels, and that was

13:01 Speaker 1: their moment. The spacecraft has now regained stable orientation and

13:06 Speaker 1: is charging its batteries. Engineers are carefully running checks before

13:10 Speaker 1: resuming science operations.

13:13 Speaker 2: Relief all around now. Contrast that with the story of

13:16 Speaker 2: NASA's Maven spacecraft, currently orbiting Mars, or at least it

13:21 Speaker 2: should be.

13:22 Speaker 1: NASA lost contact with Maven on December sixth last year,

13:27 Speaker 1: after the spacecraft was expected to emerge from behind Mars

13:31 Speaker 1: after a routine pass on the far side of the planet.

13:35 Speaker 1: Two days before contact was lost, telemetry showed everything was normal,

13:40 Speaker 1: no problems whatsoever.

13:42 Speaker 2: But then a fragment of tracking data from the day

13:44 Speaker 2: contact was lost suggested Maven was rotating unexpectedly as it

13:49 Speaker 2: came out from behind Mars and was no longer in

13:52 Speaker 2: its planned orbit. NASA immediately began recovery efforts.

13:56 Speaker 1: Those efforts have now been ongoing for over three months.

14:00 Speaker 1: DASA has used its deep space network, the Green Bank Observatory,

14:05 Speaker 1: even the Curiosity rover pointed skyward on the Martian surface

14:10 Speaker 1: in attempts to detect a signal. So far nothing.

14:14 Speaker 2: At a conference this week, NASA's Planetary Science Director Louise

14:17 Speaker 2: Procter said, and I thought this was a poignant quote.

14:21 Speaker 2: We haven't officially said Mavin is lost, yet we're still

14:24 Speaker 2: looking for it.

14:25 Speaker 1: Mavin has been orbiting Mars since twenty thirteen, twelve years

14:30 Speaker 1: of science studying how Mars lost its atmosphere over billions

14:35 Speaker 1: of years and transformed from a potentially habitable world into

14:39 Speaker 1: the cold desert we see today. It also handles about

14:43 Speaker 1: twenty percent of communications between Earth and the Mars rovers.

14:48 Speaker 2: Other orbiters, including Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and issa's

14:53 Speaker 2: Trace Gas Orbiter, are taking up the relay duties for now,

14:56 Speaker 2: and NASA's exploring options for a replacement Telecommunicationations orbiter.

15:01 Speaker 1: One story of recovery one still unresolved. Will keep you

15:05 Speaker 1: posted on both.

15:07 Speaker 2: And that is your Astronomy Daily for Saturday, March twenty first,

15:10 Speaker 2: twenty twenty six. What a show today? A moon rocket

15:14 Speaker 2: on the pad, a comet in pieces, failed stars behaving unexpectedly,

15:19 Speaker 2: fifteen new moons, a moon covered in our junk, and

15:23 Speaker 2: two spacecraft with very different stories.

15:26 Speaker 1: As always, links to all our source articles are in

15:29 Speaker 1: the show notes. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave

15:33 Speaker 1: us a review wherever you get your podcasts. It genuinely

15:36 Speaker 1: helps more people find the show.

15:39 Speaker 2: You can find us at Astronomy Daily dot io and

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15:48 Speaker 2: for more great shows.

15:50 Speaker 1: Until next time, keep looking up clear skys.

15:53 Speaker 2: Everyone say, stars, Stars, the Soul, Stars, the Soul