Nuclear Moon Power, Mars Ocean Evidence, and Brains in Space

Anna: Hello, everyone and welcome to Astronomy

Daily. I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm Avery. Thanks for joining us this

Tuesday, January 14, 2026.

We've got a fantastic lineup of space news

for you today.

Anna: We really do. We're covering everything

from nuclear reactors on the moon to

ancient Martian oceans, plus some

fascinating discoveries about how spaceflight

affects astronaut brains.

Avery: And we'll be talking about a major ISS

update, a new privately fund space

telescope and scientists finally solving a

six decade old mystery about the moon's two

faces.

Anna: It's going to be an exciting episode, so

let's dive right in.

Avery: Anna.

Uh, let's start with some big news from NASA

and the Department of Energy. The United

States is getting serious about putting a

nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030.

Anna: That's right, Avery. This isn't just talk

anymore. Last week, NASA Administrator

Jared Isaacman and U.S. secretary of Energy

Chris Wright signed a memorial memorandum of

understanding that reaffirms their commitment

to meet that ambitious deadline.

Avery: And this comes on the heels of President

Trump's executive order from December calling

for construction to begin on a lunar base by

2030 with a nuclear reactor ready to

launch by that same year.

Anna: Isaacman said something really interesting in

the announcement. He said achieving this

future requires harnessing nuclear power.

This agreement enables closer collaboration

between NASA and the Department of Energy to

deliver the capabilities necessary to usher

in the golden age of space exploration and

discovery.

Avery: It makes sense when you think about it.

Nuclear power can generate electricity

continuously for years without refuelling.

And it's not affected by the moon's two week

long nights or changing weather conditions

like solar panels would be.

Anna: And this isn't the first time NASA and the

Department of Energy have worked together on

space nuclear systems. They've been

collaborating for more than half a century.

Right?

Avery: Many of NASA's deep space robotic explorers

have used radioisotope thermoelectric

generators, or RTGs, as a power

source. We're talking about missions like the

Cassini Saturn orbiter and the Curiosity and

Perseverance Mars rovers.

Anna: But this lunar reactor would be something

different entirely. It would be designed to

power one or more bases on the lunar

surface. As part of NASA's Artemis programme,

Secretary.

Avery: Wright made a connection to America's

historic achievements. He said history shows

that when American science and innovation

come together, from the Manhattan Project to

the Apollo mission, our nation leads the

world to reach new frontiers once thought

impossible. This agreement continues that

legacy.

Anna: For NASA's Artemis programme, having a

reliable long term power source on the Moon

is absolutely critical. If we're going to

establish a permanent presence there and use

it as a stepping stone to Mars. We need

infrastructure that can operate reliably.

Avery: For years, and the 2030 timeline

is really aggressive. We're talking about

just over four years from now. That's

incredibly fast for a project of this

magnitude.

Anna: It is. But with the renewed focus on

lunar exploration and the competition with

other spacefaring nations, particularly

China, there's definitely motivation to move

quickly.

Avery: Speaking of space developments, we have an

important update on the Crew 11 situation at

the International Space Station. Mission

managers have officially given the go for the

crew's return to Earth tomorrow.

Anna: That's right. NASA astronauts Zena Cardman

and Mike Finke, along with JAXA astronaut

Kimia Yu and Roscosmos cosmonaut

Oleg Platanov, are scheduled to undock

from the harmony module at 5:05pm

Eastern Time on Wednesday.

Avery: And they're coming home aboard the SpaceX

Dragon crew spacecraft, with Cardman

commanding and Finke piloting. The weather

forecast is looking excellent for their

parachute assisted splashdown off the coast

of California, which is scheduled for

3:41am on Thursday.

Anna: Yesterday, the crew spent most of their time

preparing for departure. They packed cargo,

reviewed return to Earth procedures and

transferred hardware. Hardman and her

crewmates also trained on how to use

respirators during unlikely emergency

events like an ammonia Lee.

Avery: NASA is planning extensive coverage of the

event. NASA will begin live coverage at

3pm on Wednesday when the crew enters the

Dragon spacecraft and says goodbye to the

remaining crew on the station.

Anna: Coverage continues at 4:45pm

for the actual undocking, then

returns at 2:15am Thursday

for the descent, and finally at

5:45am for the post splashdown

news conference. You can watch all of this on

NASA, Amazon prime or

NASA's YouTube channel.

Avery: As we discussed yesterday, this is the first

medical evacuation in ISS history.

The crew was originally scheduled to stay

until after Crew 12 arrived in mid February,

but an undisclosed medical condition

affecting one of the four crew members

prompted NASA to bring them home early.

Anna: After Crew 11 leaves, Expedition

74 will be commanded by

Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey

Kudzverchkov, leading flight engineers

Sergei Mikayev and NASA's Chris

Williams. That's a skeleton crew of just

three people running the entire station.

Avery: Yesterday, Kuts, Verchkov and Mikhayev

participated in a study assessing how crews

make decisions and work together in space,

which is especially relevant given they'll be

operating with a reduced crew for a while.

Anna: BASA is still evaluating whether they can

move up the Crew 12 launch date to replenish

the station crew sooner than originally

planned.

Avery: Now let's talk about Mars. Anna. There's

exciting new evidence that an ancient ocean

once covered half the planet.

Anna: This is really fascinating research, Avery.

A team led by Ignatius

argadestia, a, uh, PhD student at the

University of Bern, has identified features

in Mars Valles Marineris that

look remarkably similar to river deltas here

on Earth.

Avery: Valles Marineris is that massive canyon

system on Mars, right? The largest in the

solar system.

Anna: Exactly. Along with Olympus Mons,

it's one of Mars's most defining features.

This research focused specifically on the

southeast part of a sub canyon called

Copratus Chosma.

Avery: The researchers used images from multiple

orbital Cameras, CTX and

HiRISE on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance

Orbiter and CASSIS

on the ESA Roscosmos

Trace Gas Orbiter. They also worked with

digital elevation models to examine what they

call scarpa fronted deposits.

Anna: These scarp fronted deposits, or

SFDs, are fan shaped

sediment deposits that form where a river

empties into a body of standing water.

The team identified three of these features

in Copratus Chasma and they're almost

identical to river deltas we see on Earth.

Avery: Professor Fritz Schlundjugger put it really

clearly. He said, the structures that we were

able to identify in the images are clearly

the mouth of a river into an ocean.

Anna: What's particularly compelling is that all

three SFDs are at the same

elevation. That suggests they were all

deposited at the same water level,

essentially marking an ancient coastline.

Avery: The researchers believe these deposits were

formed sometime between the late Hesperian

period and the early Amazonian period.

That's roughly between 3.7 billion and

3 billion years ago.

Anna: Reid author R. Ghedestia said something

interesting in the press release. He said,

when measuring and mapping the Martian

images, I was able to recognise mountains

and valleys that resemble a, uh, mountainous

landscape on Earth. However, I was

particularly impressed with the deltas that I

discovered at the edge of one of the

mountains.

Avery: Previous research had suggested Mars had a

large ocean, but this study provides much

more concrete evidence. Slunjugger noted

that earlier claims were based on less

precise data and sometimes indirect

arguments.

Anna: But their reconstruction of the sea level is

based on clear evidence of an actual

coastline. Thanks to these high resolution

images, the paleo shoreline they

identified extends from Valles Marinus

all the way to the northern lowlands.

Avery: Argadestia summed it up nicely. With

our study we were able to provide evidence

for the deepest and largest former ocean on

Mars to date, an ocean that stretched across

the northern hemisphere of the planet.

Anna: This has huge implications for Mars

past habitability. As the authors write,

their findings will impact research on the

evidence for potential life on Mars. Since

this represents a period when Mars had the

highest water availability, it's amazing.

Avery: To think that billions of years ago, Mars

might have looked very different from the

cold, dry desert we see today.

Anna: Speaking of things changing, Avery, let's

talk about a fascinating new study on how

spaceflight literally changes astronauts

brains.

Avery: This is wild. Ana um. A team led by Rachel

Seidler at MIT took MRI scans of

26 astronauts and 24 non

astronaut participants. And they found that

spaceflight causes astronauts brains to shift

position inside their skull.

Anna: The study was published just yesterday. The

researchers found a consistent pattern of the

brain shifting backward and upward and

rotating upward after time in

microgravity. And here's the kicker.

Some of these positional changes were still

detectable months after astronauts returned

to Earth.

Avery: Instead of looking at the brain as one whole

unit, they divided it into 130

separate regions and examined each one

individually. This regional analysis

showed many areas with significant

displacement across two spatial axes.

Anna: The data set included astronauts with

different mission lengths, roughly two weeks,

six months and one year. They found

significant positional shifts across large

portions of the brain, with some

displacements measured as high as

2.52 millimetres in

subjects with the most time in space.

Avery: To put that in perspective, that's about a

uh, tenth of an inch. It might not sound like

much, but when we're talking about the brain

inside your skull, that's actually quite

significant.

Anna: The researchers also compared astronauts with

people who participated in a long duration

head down tilt bed rest experiment which

is used to simulate some effects of

microgravity on Earth.

Avery: And they found some interesting differences.

Astronauts showed stronger upward movement,

while the bed rest participants showed

stronger backward movement. Only some of the

brain shape changes observed after

spaceflight appeared in the bedrest group.

Anna: This tells us that head down bed rest, while

useful, doesn't perfectly replicate what

happens to the brain in actual microgravity.

There are unique effects that only real

spaceflight produces.

Avery: One of the most important findings was the

connection to balance problems. The study

found that displacement affecting sensory

related brain regions correlated with larger

declines in astronauts balance after

spaceflight, Right.

Anna: We know that when astronauts return from

space, they often experience balance issues

because their inner ear's sense of direction

isn't immediately restored. This study

helps explain why that happens.

Avery: And while astronauts normally find their

footing within a week or so, the physical

shifts in their brains persisted for up to

six months post spaceflight. That's quite

remarkable.

Anna: The authors note that this underscores the

long lasting effects of spaceflight on

neuroanatomy. They recommend future

studies with larger astronaut crews on a

broad range of mission lengths to better

understand how quickly these shifts begin

and how they evolve.

Avery: This research is crucial as we plan longer

missions to the moon and eventually to Mars.

Understanding how extended spaceflight

affects the brain will help us better prepare

astronauts and develop countermeasures.

Anna: Avery, let's shift gears and talk about a

really exciting development in space

telescope technology. There's a new

privately funded observatory called Lazuli

that could change how we build flagship class

telescopes.

Avery: This is fascinating, Anna. Uh, the Lazuli

Space Observatory is being funded by Eric

Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and his

wife Wendy, through their philanthropic

organisation, Schmidt Sciences. We're talking

about a $500 million investment.

Anna: The whole premise is applying the new space

philosophy to space telescopes. You know that

Silicon Valley mindset of move fast and

don't break things. The idea is to prove that

you don't need decades and billions of

dollars to build a flagship level space

observatory, right?

Avery: Compare this to the James Webb Space

telescope, which cost $10 billion, or the

upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope,

which is on track for $3 billion. These

huge costs come from using completely de

risked flight proven technology to ensure

taxpayer dollars don't literally go up in

flames.

Anna: But schmidt has a $36 billion

fortune, so even if Lazulli fails, he can

afford the loss. And that's kind of the

point. This is an experiment to see if the

approach even works for expensive flagship

level observatories.

Avery: To keep costs down, up to 80% of the

telescope will use off the shelf components.

And operating under Schmidt Sciences

alleviates a lot of the bureaucratic and

political decision making that inevitably

delays government funded programmes.

Anna: So where does Lazuli fit in the bigger

picture? Webb is obviously already

operational, sending back spectacular images.

Roman is next scheduled to launch in May

2027. But both have weaknesses when

tracking transient phenomena.

Avery: Exactly. Events like kilonovae or

gravitational wave producing black hole

mergers happen on timescales of hours, not

days. They require almost immediate response

from observatories to catch them before they

end.

Anna: And Webb just can't slew. That's the term

for rotating to a new target fast enough.

It captures extremely high resolution images,

but it takes too long to get into position.

Avery: On the other hand, Roman is a survey

telescope that looks at white swaths of sky,

but doesn't have the resolution to examine

individual systems like Lazuli will.

Anna: So Lazuli's sweet spot is Target

of opportunity tracking. It's designed to

slew within an hour and a half to observe

short lived events. It'll work in concert

with ground based observatories like ligo,

the Gravitational Wave Detector.

Avery: But it has the advantage of being in space

so no cloud cover or daylight to worry about.

Lazuli will also have a wild Field context

camera with 23 separate CMOS sensors,

kind of like Roman, to detect things like

exoplanet transits.

Anna: And here's something really cool it should be

able to directly image exoplanets using a

vector Vortex coronagraph along with

deformable mirrors to suppress starlight by

up to 10 million times.

Avery: This same technology is planned for NASA's

Habitable Worlds Observatory which won't

launch for decades, so Lazuli will actually

serve as a technology demonstration platform

well before the taxpayer funded mission.

Anna: Perhaps the most impressive aspect is the

timeline. Schmidt Sciences is planning a

three to five year development cycle for this

massive space observatory that's

exponentially faster than any comparable

government led system.

Avery: Though to be fair, new space leaders do have

a tendency to underestimate timelines. Even

if it takes twice as long though, we'd still

get another flagship level observatory within

a decade.

Anna: And here's something amusing. If Schmidt just

leaves his remaining $36 billion in an

S&P 500 index fund, he'd make back

around 40 times what the entire project cost

over a five year period. So financially

this is barely a blip for him.

Avery: Either we get an amazing new space telescope

or we get a $500 million lesson in what can

go wrong when applying speed to large scale

astrophysics projects. Either way, the

scientific community learned something.

Anna: Valuable for our final storey today.

Avery scientists may have finally

solved a mystery that's puzzled them for over

60 years. Why does the moon

look so different on its near and far

sides?

Avery: This is based on analysis of dust collected

from the lunar far side by China's Chang' e

6 mission, which returned the first ever

samples from the moon's hidden hemisphere in

2024.

Anna: The material came from the south pole

Aitken Basin, which is believed to be the

site of the largest impact in the solar

system. This colossal crater spans

nearly a quarter of the lunar surface.

Avery: A team letter by Heng Si Tan from the Chinese

Academy of Sciences conducted isotopic

analysis of potassium and iron found in the

far side dust and compared it with samples

from the moon's near side collected during

the Apollo missions and by China's Chang'

E5 spacecraft.

Anna: The results showed a significant difference

near side Samples contained more light

isotopes, while the far side material

was richer in heavier isotopes,

particularly of potassium.

Avery: This type of isotopic separation couldn't be

explained by normal volcanic activity.

Instead, the researchers suggest the south

pole Aitken impactor generated such

extreme heat that lighter isotopes were

vaporised and lost, leaving behind a

heavier chemical fingerprint.

Anna: The researchers wrote this feature

most likely resulted from potassium

evaporation caused by the south pole

Aitken basin forming impactor,

demonstrating the profound influence of this

event on the Moon's deep interior.

Avery: What's particularly interesting is that the

study suggests the impact may have punched

through the crust and into the mantle,

permanently changing the Moon's inner

composition.

Anna: The sample analysis revealed that

potassium isotopes on the far side

appear to originate from a mantle source

distinct from that of the near side. This

implies widespread internal melting

and chemical redistribution.

Avery: The team even proposes that the impact might

have triggered hemisphere wide mantle

convection, a process that could reshape a

planet's crust and inner layers over time.

Anna: As they noted in their study, this finding

also implies that large scale

impacts are, uh, key drivers in shaping

mantle and crustal compositions.

Avery: So planetary impacts leave far more than just

visible craters. They can set off long

lasting internal transformations that remain

detectable billions of years later.

Anna: Heng Si Tian summed it up nicely.

With our study, we were able to provide

evidence for the deepest and largest former

ocean on Mars today date. Wait,

that's the wrong quote.

Avery: Wrong planet.

Anna: Anna, uh, oh my goodness, let me get that

right. Pyeon said. With the Chang' e

6 samples, scientists now have their

first hard evidence from the Moon's far side,

an area once entirely out of reach.

Avery: This discovery is particularly timely as

multiple nations gear up for lunar

exploration missions, including NASA's

Artemis programme and China's continuing

Chang' E missions.

Anna: Understanding the Moon's geological history

and internal structure will be crucial

as we plan to establish permanent bases

there. Each new sample and discovery

helps us piece together the storey of how

our nearest celestial neighbour formed and

evolved.

Avery: Well, that brings us to the end of today's

episode of Astronomy Daily. What an

incredible day of space news.

Anna: From nuclear reactors on the moon and the

crew 11 undocking tomorrow to

ancient Martian oceans and shifting

astronaut brains, plus a uh, privately

funded space telescope and solving the

Moon's two faced mystery, we've covered a

lot of ground today.

Avery: If you enjoyed today's episode, please

subscribe to Astronomy Daily wherever you get

your podcasts. And don't forget to leave us a

review. It really helps other space

enthusiasts discover.

Anna: The show you can find us on social media and

at our website for more space news and

updates. Um, on the socials search for

Astro Daily Pod and our website can be

found at astronomydaily.IO

thanks so much for listening everyone.

Avery: Until, um, next time, keep looking up Clear

skies.

Sam.

In this episode