No Course Correction Needed: Artemis II Day 3 Update + Comet MAPS Perihelion Report

0:00 Speaker 1: Welcome back to Astronomy Daily, the show that gets you

0:03 Speaker 1: caught up on the Cosmos every single day. I'm Anna, and.

0:06 Speaker 2: I'm Avery and friends. What a day to be a

0:09 Speaker 2: space fan.

0:10 Speaker 1: It is day three of the Artemis two mission. Four

0:13 Speaker 1: humans are right now hurdling toward the Moon and we

0:17 Speaker 1: have a lot to cover. A record breaking rocket launch,

0:21 Speaker 1: brand new lunar science, a stunning discovery about dead stars,

0:26 Speaker 1: and the best chance all year to spot the planet

0:29 Speaker 1: Mercury with your naked eye.

0:31 Speaker 2: Plus we promise you an update on comment maps yesterday,

0:34 Speaker 2: and we are delivering the solar plunge has happened, the

0:38 Speaker 2: verdict that's still coming in. Stay with us, let's get

0:41 Speaker 2: into it. Projectory so perfect, NASA canceled its own burn.

0:45 Speaker 1: We are now into day three of the Artemis two mission,

0:48 Speaker 1: and the headline today is honestly almost too good to believe.

0:53 Speaker 1: ASA had planned a trajectory correction burn for this evening,

0:56 Speaker 1: a small engine firing to nudge Oryan onto the path

1:00 Speaker 1: to the Moon, and they didn't need it.

1:03 Speaker 2: Flight controllers in mission control at Johnson's Space Center looked

1:06 Speaker 2: at the data and made the call cancel the burn.

1:10 Speaker 2: Orian is already on the precise trajectory it needs. As Howard, who,

1:14 Speaker 2: the Orion Spacecraft program manager, put it, it's really good

1:18 Speaker 2: to see that we don't need these minor correction burns.

1:21 Speaker 2: It shows that our navigation performance and our ability to

1:23 Speaker 2: get ranging has been outstanding.

1:26 Speaker 1: This was the first of three planned trajectory correction burns.

1:30 Speaker 1: The others are still on the schedule if needed, but

1:32 Speaker 1: this is a genuine vote of confidence in the precision

1:35 Speaker 1: of the entire mission so far.

1:38 Speaker 2: Meanwhile, what were Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cock, and

1:42 Speaker 2: Jeremy Hansen actually doing today? Mission Control woke them up

1:46 Speaker 2: playing in a day Dream by the Freddie Jones Band,

1:49 Speaker 2: which is a great alarm clock choice, and then they

1:51 Speaker 2: got to work.

1:52 Speaker 1: Day three was all about medical readiness. The crew demonstrated

1:56 Speaker 1: CPR procedures in weightlessness and checked out Ryan's onboard medical kid,

2:02 Speaker 1: a thermometer, blood pressure monitor, a steposcope, and otoscope. They

2:06 Speaker 1: also tested Orion's optical communication system, successfully transmitting high definition

2:12 Speaker 1: video back to ground stations in the United States.

2:15 Speaker 2: But the really exciting part, the lunar science team back

2:19 Speaker 2: on Earth is already building what they call the Lunar

2:22 Speaker 2: targeting plan. They're selecting specific geological features on the Moon's surface, craters,

2:28 Speaker 2: ancient lava flows, ridges that the crew will observe and

2:32 Speaker 2: photograph during their six hour fly by window on Monday.

2:36 Speaker 1: And Avery has been doing the math on what Monday

2:39 Speaker 1: actually means.

2:40 Speaker 2: Well, it's history. On Monday, April sixth, the Artemis two

2:44 Speaker 2: crew will swing around the far side of the Moon,

2:47 Speaker 2: briefly out of contact with Earth entirely, and at their

2:50 Speaker 2: farthest point they will be two hundred and fifty two thousand,

2:54 Speaker 2: seven hundred and fifty seven miles from home. That breaks

2:57 Speaker 2: the all time human spaceflight distay since record set by

3:01 Speaker 2: the crew of Apollo thirteen back in April nineteen seventy

3:05 Speaker 2: fifty six years. We've been waiting fifty six years to

3:09 Speaker 2: break that record, and it gets better.

3:12 Speaker 1: During the lunar flyby, Oryan will enter a solar eclipse,

3:16 Speaker 1: the Sun moving behind the Moon from the crew's perspective.

3:20 Speaker 1: The crew will use that window to look for meteoroid

3:22 Speaker 1: impacts flashing on the lunar surface and to try to

3:26 Speaker 1: photograph the deep space sky without the Sun in the way.

3:29 Speaker 2: We'll have full Day four and Monday fly by coverage

3:32 Speaker 2: in Monday's episode. Right now four humans traveling toward the

3:36 Speaker 2: Moon and everything is going exactly to plan.

3:40 Speaker 1: Next the solar plunge has happened.

3:43 Speaker 2: Now we wait, all right, we promise you this and

3:46 Speaker 2: here it is your Comet Maps update.

3:49 Speaker 1: Yesterday we introduced you to Comet C twenty twenty six,

3:52 Speaker 1: a one known as Maps, a rare kreutz sungrazer, discovered

3:57 Speaker 1: in January by a team of French astronomers in Chile.

4:01 Speaker 1: We told you it was about to make one of

4:03 Speaker 1: the most dangerous journeys in the Solar System, a pass

4:06 Speaker 1: within one hundred and sixty one thousand kilometers of the

4:10 Speaker 1: Sun's surface, closer than most comets ever come. And we

4:14 Speaker 1: promise to bring you the latest today.

4:16 Speaker 2: So here's where we are at fourteen twenty two UTC today.

4:21 Speaker 2: That's right in the middle of the day in Australia.

4:24 Speaker 2: Comet Maps reached perihelion. It passed through the lower corona

4:29 Speaker 2: of the Sun. The plunge is done.

4:32 Speaker 1: And the verdict that is genuinely still coming in because

4:36 Speaker 1: right now Maps is in the Sun's glare, basically invisible

4:40 Speaker 1: to ground based observers. We're relying on spacecraft imagery, particularly

4:45 Speaker 1: from Soho's Lasco coronograph, to track what happened.

4:49 Speaker 2: The big question has shifted. It's no longer just did

4:53 Speaker 2: it survive, It's what kind of show will it put on?

4:57 Speaker 2: There are several scenarios. If the the nucleus survived intact,

5:02 Speaker 2: Maps could emerge in the next day or two as

5:04 Speaker 2: a stunning naked eye comet. Some predictions put its potential

5:08 Speaker 2: brightness at magnitude minus five brighter than venus. Others suggest

5:14 Speaker 2: it could reach magnitude minus fifteen, brighter than the full

5:18 Speaker 2: moon at perihelion. It may have even been briefly visible

5:22 Speaker 2: in daylight.

5:23 Speaker 1: Even if the nucleus broke apart, which is what happens

5:26 Speaker 1: to most sungrazers, the story isn't necessarily over. A post

5:31 Speaker 1: perihelian breakup can produce what astronomers call a headless wonder,

5:36 Speaker 1: a bright, glowing tale with no nucleus behind it. Sometimes

5:40 Speaker 1: those can be spectacular in their own right.

5:43 Speaker 2: Maps belongs to the Krutz sun Grazer family, the same

5:46 Speaker 2: family as comet ikeas Seki in nineteen sixty five, one

5:50 Speaker 2: of the brightest comets of the twentieth century, and comet

5:54 Speaker 2: Lovejoy in twenty eleven, which survived its own brush with

5:58 Speaker 2: the Corona and went on to da Southern Hemisphere observers, and.

6:02 Speaker 1: That is the key phrase, Southern Hemisphere. If Maps emerges

6:07 Speaker 1: from the glare as expected, the window to see it

6:10 Speaker 1: from the ground opens around April sixth to tenth. Look

6:13 Speaker 1: west after sunset low on the horizon in Australia and

6:17 Speaker 1: across New Zealand. You are perfectly placed for this. Venus

6:21 Speaker 1: will be your guide star bright in the western evening sky,

6:24 Speaker 1: and Maps, if it survived, should appear nearby.

6:28 Speaker 2: We will have the latest on Monday's episode. This story

6:31 Speaker 2: is very much not over.

6:33 Speaker 1: Atlas five lifts its heaviest payload ever, twenty nine Amazon

6:38 Speaker 1: Leo satellites.

6:39 Speaker 2: While all eyes were on the Moon this morning, there

6:42 Speaker 2: was a rocket launch happening simultaneously that setter record of

6:46 Speaker 2: its own.

6:46 Speaker 1: In the early hours of this morning one forty five

6:49 Speaker 1: am Eastern time, a United Launch Alliance Atlas five rocket

6:54 Speaker 1: lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space for station in Florida.

6:58 Speaker 1: Its cargo twenty nine Amazon Leo satellites, and that payload,

7:03 Speaker 1: twenty nine satellites packed into one rocket, made history.

7:08 Speaker 2: It is the.

7:08 Speaker 1: Heaviest single payload the Atlas five has ever flown.

7:12 Speaker 2: This is Mission LA zero five for Amazon LEO, the

7:16 Speaker 2: satellite Internet constellation, previously known as Project Cooper. Amazon renamed

7:23 Speaker 2: the constellation in November last year, and they're building it

7:26 Speaker 2: at pace. With today's launch, they now have around two

7:30 Speaker 2: hundred and forty one satellites on orbit out of an

7:33 Speaker 2: eventual constellation of more than three thousand, two hundred.

7:37 Speaker 1: The Atlas five flew in its most powerful configuration, the

7:41 Speaker 1: five to five to one variant, with five solid rocket

7:44 Speaker 1: boosters strapped on and Ula engineers made specific modifications to

7:49 Speaker 1: the Centaur upper stage and its dispenser system to carry

7:53 Speaker 1: the extra load. These twenty nine satellites went up on

7:57 Speaker 1: a northeast trajectory to a low Earth orbit of around

8:01 Speaker 1: four hundred and fifty kilometers.

8:03 Speaker 2: Amazon has an FCC deadline looming. They need to have

8:07 Speaker 2: half of their constellation operational by July twenty twenty six,

8:11 Speaker 2: which puts them in a serious race. Multiple Atlas five

8:15 Speaker 2: and Vulcan Centaur launches are planned this year, plus missions

8:19 Speaker 2: on Arion six, New Glen and Falcon nine.

8:22 Speaker 1: The Atlas five is one of the most reliable rockets

8:26 Speaker 1: ever built. This was its one hundred and second mission,

8:29 Speaker 1: and while the Vulcan Centaur is taking over as the

8:31 Speaker 1: primary heavy lift vehicle going forward, today proved the old

8:35 Speaker 1: workhorse has still got it okay.

8:38 Speaker 2: Our next story, Moon's Hot Cold Divide may be wrong.

8:42 Speaker 2: Blue Ghost rewrites lunar science with the.

8:46 Speaker 1: Artemis two crew heading toward the Moon right now. This

8:49 Speaker 1: next story feels especially timely because new data from the

8:53 Speaker 1: Moon's surface is challenging something scientists thought they understood for decades.

8:58 Speaker 3: Firefly Aerospace's Blue ghosts lander touched down in the Moon's

9:01 Speaker 3: Mari Chrisium, the Sea of Crises, back in March of

9:05 Speaker 3: twenty twenty five. It operated for a full lunar day,

9:08 Speaker 3: drilling into the surface and sending back over one hundred

9:11 Speaker 3: and ten gigabytes of data. And now a year on,

9:15 Speaker 3: scientists are presenting the first major scientific results, and they

9:19 Speaker 3: are surprising.

9:20 Speaker 1: The long standing view of the Moon has been this

9:23 Speaker 1: The near side, the face we always see from Earth,

9:26 Speaker 1: is geologically hot. It's dominated by ancient volcanic planes, and

9:32 Speaker 1: beneath the surface there's a concentration of heat producing radioactive elements,

9:37 Speaker 1: particularly thorium. In a region called the Prosilarum creep terrain.

9:42 Speaker 1: The far side, by contrast, is cooler, older, more heavily cratered.

9:47 Speaker 2: Blue Ghost was specifically sent to land outside that hot

9:51 Speaker 2: region in mare Chrisium, well away from the creep zone,

9:55 Speaker 2: precisely to test whether the temperature difference was as dramatic

9:59 Speaker 2: as scientistics pres affected. The answer has upended the model.

10:03 Speaker 2: Blue Ghosts heat probe found that the underground temperature at

10:07 Speaker 2: mari Chrissium is not significantly different from what Apollo astronauts

10:11 Speaker 2: measured at their landing sites deep inside the supposed hot zone.

10:15 Speaker 1: As Saichi Nagihara, the principal investigator of Blue Ghost's heat

10:21 Speaker 1: probe at Texas Tech University, put it, we may have

10:24 Speaker 1: to abandon that binary.

10:26 Speaker 2: What does this mean? Heat producing elements like thorium may

10:29 Speaker 2: be more widely distributed beneath the lunar surface than anyone thought,

10:34 Speaker 2: and one possible explanation is that volcanic activity in some

10:37 Speaker 2: regions wasn't driven by those radioactive elements at all. It

10:41 Speaker 2: may have simply been easier for magma to break through

10:44 Speaker 2: in places where the crust was thinner.

10:46 Speaker 1: It's a fundamental rethink of how the Moon formed and evolved,

10:50 Speaker 1: and it has direct implications for where future crude missions

10:54 Speaker 1: might land and what they'll find. Blue Ghost Mission I,

10:58 Speaker 1: expected to launch later this year, will land on the

11:01 Speaker 1: lunar far side, giving scientists the next data point in

11:05 Speaker 1: this evolving picture.

11:07 Speaker 2: Onwards the story five. Let's simply call this one stellar science.

11:12 Speaker 2: Pulsars are broadcasting from the edge of their magnetic.

11:15 Speaker 1: Reach down to a discovery that overturns decades of thinking

11:19 Speaker 1: about some of the most extreme objects in the universe,

11:23 Speaker 1: and it has an Australian fingerprint on it.

11:26 Speaker 2: Pulsars are the class remnants of dead stars. They're among

11:31 Speaker 2: the densest objects we know of. A teaspoon of pulsar

11:34 Speaker 2: material would weigh around ten million tons on Earth. As

11:38 Speaker 2: they spin, they sweep beams of radio waves across the cosmos,

11:42 Speaker 2: like cosmic lighthouses, and a special class called millisecond pulsars

11:48 Speaker 2: spins hundreds of times per second, so regularly that they

11:52 Speaker 2: rival atomic clocks in their precision.

11:55 Speaker 1: For decades, the textbook answer to where those radio pulses

11:58 Speaker 1: come from was simple. Near the surface, close to the

12:01 Speaker 1: magnetic poles. That's where scientists assumed all the action happened.

12:06 Speaker 2: A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal

12:09 Speaker 2: Astronomical Society has just rewritten that. Professor Michael Kramer from

12:14 Speaker 2: the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and

12:17 Speaker 2: doctor Simon Johnson from Australia's own CSIRO analyzed radio observations

12:23 Speaker 2: of nearly two hundred millisecond pulsars and compared them with

12:28 Speaker 2: gamma ray data from NASA's Fermi Space telescope.

12:31 Speaker 1: What they found, about one third of millisecond pulsars are

12:35 Speaker 1: broadcasting radio waves from two completely separate regions at once,

12:40 Speaker 1: not just the magnetic poles, but also from a distant

12:44 Speaker 1: swirling zone of charged particles called the current sheet right

12:48 Speaker 1: at what's called the light cylinder. That's the boundary where

12:52 Speaker 1: the pulsar's magnetic field would need to travel faster than

12:56 Speaker 1: light just to keep pace with the spinning star.

12:58 Speaker 2: As doctor Johnston it, these tiny, fast binning stars are

13:02 Speaker 2: even more complex and surprising than we thought, broadcasting from

13:06 Speaker 2: both their surfaces and from the very edge of their

13:09 Speaker 2: magnetic reach.

13:11 Speaker 1: The practical consequences are significant because the radio signals are

13:16 Speaker 1: spreading out over a wider range of directions than previously understood.

13:21 Speaker 1: More pulsars should be detectable than scientists thought, and that's

13:25 Speaker 1: good news for projects like pulsar timing arrays, networks of

13:29 Speaker 1: pulsars used as detectors for gravitational waves rippling across the universe.

13:36 Speaker 2: A great piece of science and a proud moment for CSIRO,

13:40 Speaker 2: Australia's National Science Agency.

13:43 Speaker 1: And finally, today an invitation to go outside and look up,

13:48 Speaker 1: because right now Mercury is putting on its best performance

13:52 Speaker 1: of the entire year, and we have the best seats

13:55 Speaker 1: in the house.

13:56 Speaker 2: Mercury reached what astronomers call greatest elongation on April third,

14:01 Speaker 2: the point where it appears farthest from the Sun in

14:04 Speaker 2: our sky. This is the year's greatest elongation for Mercury,

14:08 Speaker 2: full stop, the best it will get all of twenty

14:11 Speaker 2: twenty six.

14:12 Speaker 1: Here's the key thing about Mercury. It's always close to

14:16 Speaker 1: the Sun in our sky, which makes it genuinely difficult

14:19 Speaker 1: to spot. Most people have never actually seen it. Greatest

14:24 Speaker 1: elongation is your best window. The planet pulls as far

14:28 Speaker 1: from the Sun's glare as it ever gets, giving you

14:31 Speaker 1: a brief clear opportunity before it slips back.

14:35 Speaker 2: Right now, Mercury is sitting about twenty eight degrees from

14:38 Speaker 2: the sun rising in the eastern sky before dawn. Look

14:42 Speaker 2: east about thirty to forty minutes before sunrise. You're looking

14:46 Speaker 2: for a steady point of light magnitude around zero point four,

14:49 Speaker 2: which is bright enough to see with the naked eye

14:52 Speaker 2: under decent conditions. It's sitting low on the horizon, just

14:55 Speaker 2: above Mars and the constellation Aquarius.

14:58 Speaker 1: And here's the Southern Hemisphere advantage. This is specifically the

15:03 Speaker 1: best morning apparition of mercury for the Southern Hemisphere in

15:07 Speaker 1: twenty twenty six from Australia and New Zealand. The geometry

15:12 Speaker 1: of the ecliptic gives us a steeper angle to the horizon.

15:15 Speaker 1: Mercury climbs higher and stays out of the murk longer

15:19 Speaker 1: than it does for Northern hemisphere observers.

15:22 Speaker 2: If you have binoculars or a small telescope, there's a bonus.

15:26 Speaker 2: Mercury is currently showing a half illuminated face what astronomers

15:30 Speaker 2: call a quarter phase. You can see it going through

15:33 Speaker 2: phases just like the moon, which is something a lot

15:35 Speaker 2: of people don't realize about. Mercury and keep.

15:38 Speaker 1: Watching the eastern sky over the next couple of weeks,

15:42 Speaker 1: because Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune will gather in a

15:46 Speaker 1: tight cluster on the morning of April eighteenth. Three of

15:50 Speaker 1: those four will be visible to the naked eye, close

15:53 Speaker 1: enough to cover with three fingers held at arm's length.

15:56 Speaker 1: A lovely little planetary alignment to chase.

16:00 Speaker 2: So this week, look east before sunrise for Mercury, look

16:04 Speaker 2: west after sunset for any sign of comet maps emerging

16:07 Speaker 2: from the Sun's glare, and keep an eye on Monday's

16:10 Speaker 2: episode for everything you need to know about the Artemis

16:13 Speaker 2: two lunarflyby.

16:14 Speaker 1: And that is your Astronomy Daily for Saturday, the fifth

16:18 Speaker 1: of April twenty twenty six. A crew heading to the Moon,

16:22 Speaker 1: a comment that may be putting on the sky show

16:25 Speaker 1: of the decade, a record breaking rocket launch, science from

16:29 Speaker 1: the lunar surface, a pulsar discovery out of Australia, and

16:33 Speaker 1: Mercury waiting for you in the dawn sky.

16:36 Speaker 2: We'll be back Monday with day four and five of

16:38 Speaker 2: Artemis two and the latest on comet maps. If you're

16:42 Speaker 2: heading outside tonight, clear skies. Everyone from all of.

16:45 Speaker 1: Us at Astronomy Daily, keep looking up Sunday.

16:51 Speaker 2: Stars Stars so Stories, The Soul m