Psyche's Mars Flyby Happening RIGHT NOW + SETI's Stunning 10-Year Results

Anna: Something extraordinary is happening in our

solar system right now. As you listen to

this episode, a, uh, NASA spacecraft is

hurtling past Mars at over 12,000

miles per hour, using the red Planet's

gravity like a cosmic slingshot. We have got

the details and a whole lot more coming right

up on Astronomy Daily.

Avery: Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your

daily guide to the universe. Hi, I'm Avery.

Anna: And I'm anaa. It's Friday, the 15th of

May, 2026, and you are listening to

season five, episode 103.

Avery: What a lineup we have for you today. Six

stories spanning the solar system, the deep

cosmos, and even the search for

extraterrestrial intelligence.

Anna: That's right. Including the results of the

most rigorous SETI search in history.

Ten years of listening. 70,000

stars, 100 million signals.

And the answer might surprise you.

Avery: We'll also check in with the Perseverance

Rover, who has just reached terrain that no

robot and no human has ever explored before.

Terrain that may be nearly 4 billion years

old.

Anna: Plus, news about a coming revolution in how

we measure the universe, courtesy of

artificial intelligence and a, uh, genuinely

baffling cosmic mystery from the James Webb

Space Telescope. Let's get into it. Ready

when you are. We're starting with something

that is happening as you listen to this.

Right now, NASA's Psyche spacecraft,

the one headed for a metallic asteroid out in

the main belt, is executing a gravity assist

flyby of Mars.

Avery: And when we say close, we mean close.

The spacecraft is passing just

2,800 miles from the Martian

surface. That sounds like a lot, but in space

terms, that is an extremely tight pass.

Anna: To put it in perspective, that's closer than

the distance across Australia. And Psyche

is moving at, uh, more than 12,000 miles per

hour as it skims past.

Avery: So why is it doing this? A gravity assist,

sometimes called a gravitational slingshot,

uses the gravity of a planet to accelerate a

spacecraft and adjust its trajectory. In

Psyche's case, Mars is lending it the speed

boost and the directional nudge it needs to

reach its final destination, the asteroid

Psyche, out in the main belt between Mars and

Jupiter.

Anna: The mission team is hoping to get more than

just a speed boost from this flyby. The

spacecraft's instruments will be scanning for

a faint, dusty ring around Mars,

material thought to have been ejected from

the surfaces of the planet's two tiny moons,

Phobos and Deimos, by micrometeorite

impacts over billions of years.

Avery: If the alignment is right, sunlight

scattering off that dust could, uh, make the

ring visible to Psyche's cameras. The team

will also be Searching for tiny satellites

around Mars moonlets as practice for when

Psyche arrives at the asteroid, where it'll

perform a similar hunt.

Anna: The asteroid Psyche itself is one of the most

intriguing objects in the solar system.

A world that appears to be made largely of

metal, which scientists think could be the

exposed core of a protoplanet that was

stripped of its rocky outer layers in violent

ancient collisions.

Avery: Psyche, the spacecraft is expected to arrive

at the asteroid in 2029. After this

Mars flyby sends it on the right path.

Today's close approach is one of those

moments that reminds us how precise and

extraordinary modern space navigation truly

is. Threading the needle past an entire

planet to get a free ride across the solar

system.

Anna: We'll keep you updated on what the flyby data

reveals in coming episodes. For now though,

somewhere out there in space, the slingshot

is happening. And that is remarkable.

Avery: For 10 years, astronomers at the University

of California, Los Angeles have been pointing

one of the world's most powerful radio

telescopes at the stars and listening not for

pulsars, not for gas clouds, but for

something far extraordinary.

Anna: A signal from another civilization.

Avery: The results of that decade long search are

now in. The team used the Green bank

telescope in West Virginia, a 100 meter

dish to scan more than 70,000

stars and planetary systems. Their data

processing pipeline analyzed more than 100

million candidate signals.

Anna: And every single one of them, every

last signal, turned out to be us

human made radio frequency interference,

not ET.

Avery: Now, before we get too disappointed, this is

actually a landmark achievement in science

because a null result when it's done this

rigorously is enormously valuable.

Anna: The PEAMS pipeline has a demonstrated

94 to 99% efficiency

for detecting the kind of narrowband signals

that a technologically advanced civilization

might transmit. So if something was out there

broadcasting in that frequency range, they

had a very good chance of catching it.

Avery: What they can now say with confidence is that

fewer than 600,000 of 1%

of stars within 20,000 light years of Earth.

Earth hosts a transmitter powerful enough to

be detectable by their search. That's an

extraordinarily precise upper limit.

Anna: And the search is far from over. The team

emphasizes that with next generation radio

telescopes coming online in the coming years,

the volume of sky they can monitor is set

to increase by orders of magnitude. The

universe is vast and they've only just

started listening properly.

Avery: Jean Luc Margaux, the lead researcher at

UCLA, has been running this program since

2016. This paper marks the

completion of phase one and the citizen

science component. The platform called Are We

Alone on Zooniverse? Has had more than

40,000 volunteers helping classify

signals.

Anna: 10 years. 70,000

stars. 100 million signals.

No aliens yet. But the search

goes on. And now it goes on, with a roadmap

built on the most rigorous SETI data ever

collected.

Avery: If nothing else, it's a reminder of how

seriously scientists take the question and

how much patience the search for cosmic

company requires.

Anna: Meanwhile, on the surface of Mars, NASA's

Perseverance rover has just reached what

scientists are calling one of the most

scientifically valuable regions ever

explored on the Red Planet.

Avery: Perseverance has now traveled nearly 26

miles across the Martian surface since

landing in Jezero crater back in 2021,

almost the distance of a full marathon.

And in doing so, it has pushed further west

than any rover has gone before entering a

rugged landscape the science team calls Lac

des Charms do mark

Anna: the occasion, because apparently even rovers

like a selfie. Perseverance assembled a self

portrait from 61 individual images

showing it perched against a dramatic

backdrop of ancient Martian terrain, with the

western rim of Jezero Crater stretching

into the distance behind it.

Avery: But the selfie is just the beginning.

Alongside it, the rover captured a sweeping

panoramic mosaic of a Nearby region called

Arbat 46 images stitched together

into one of the richest geological vistas of

the entire mission.

Anna: What scientists see in that panorama is

extraordinary. The landscape is filled with

what appear to be mega breccia rock

fragments the size of skyscrapers, believed

to have been hurled outward by a colossal

meteorite impact on the Martian plain called

acetus planitia approximately

3.9 billion years ago.

Avery: To put that in perspective, that impact

happened before complex life even began on

Earth. These rocks have been sitting there

largely unchanged for nearly4.4 billion

years, and now a small robot

from Earth is studying them. Ken Farley,

the Perseverance Deputy project scientist at

Caltech, described what he sees in the

panorama as, and I'm quoting here,

excellent exposure of likely the oldest

rocks we are going to investigate during this

mission. The geological diversity in this

region is dramatically different from what

Perseverance found inside Jezero Crater.

Instead of water deposited sediments and

delta formations, many of the rocks here

appear to be igneous, formed from ancient

cooling magma or lava flows. These

are windows into Mars deep crust and its

earliest volcanic history.

Anna: Scientists believe this region may predate

the formation of Jezero Crater itself. And

that means Perseverance is now exploring

Martian ground that has never been accessible

to study, not by previous rovers, not

from orbit, and not by any instrument we've

sent before.

Avery: Every meter, Perseverance travels west

Is new scientific territory, and right

now, it's standing on some of the oldest

ground Our solar system has to offer.

Anna: Now, new is about the future of space

astronomy, and it involves two of the

greatest telescopes ever built. In what

scientists are calling a, uh, passing of the

baton, NASA's Hubble Space

Avery: Telescope has just completed a massive survey

of the Milky Way's galactic bulge, the dense,

bulging region surrounding the center of our

galaxy. And the results are about to hand an

enormous advantage to Hubble's successor, the

Nancy Grace Roman space telescope.

Anna: Roman is scheduled to launch in September of

this year, Just a few months away. And

remarkably, it is running six months ahead of

schedule. When it reaches orbit, one of its

primary tasks will be surveying the galactic

bulge to hunt for exoplanets Using a

technique called gravitational microlensing.

Avery: Microlensing works like this. When a

massive object, A star, a planet, even

a black hole, Passes in front of a more

distant background star, Its gravity bends

and amplifies the background star's light. By

measuring those brief brightenings, Roman

will be able to detect planets that would

otherwise be invisible to us.

Anna: Roman's galactic bulge time domain survey

is expected to locate more than 1,000

exoplanets orbiting far from their stars,

beyond the orbital distance of Earth from the

sun. But to do that, well, scientists

need to know exactly what the galactic bulge

looks like before any lensing events occur,

so they can tell the difference between a

lensing signal and just a variable star.

Avery: That's where Hubble comes in. The survey it's

just completed has built a baseline catalog

of 20 to 30 million stars in the galactic

bulge. When Roman gets going, it will

expand that catalog tenfold to

200 to 300 million sources and

produce some of the deepest images ever taken

of any part of the sky.

Anna: Jay Anderson of the space telescope

institute summed it up beautifully. He said,

the great thing about microlensing is that

we'll be able to do a complete census of

objects as small as Mars that are moving

between us and these fields in the bulge. No

matter what it is. Black holes, rogue

planets, neutron stars Roman will

find them all.

Avery: Hubble, now more than 30 decades into its

mission, Is gradually losing its ability to

precisely point itself as its gyroscopes

age. One day, its extraordinary journey

will come to an end. But it is going out with

Grace, Making one final massive

contribution to science and lighting the way

for the telescope that will carry on its

legacy.

Anna: Roman launches in September. The age of

wide field space astronomy is almost here.

Alright. Before moving on to our next story,

let's get in a quick mention about our

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Avery: Alright, let's get back into today's space

and astronomy news. One of the great

challenges in modern cosmology is measuring

how fast the universe is expanding. And right

now there's a crisis. Different methods of

measuring that expansion rate give different

answers and nobody is quite sure why.

It's called the Hubble Tension and it has

been keeping cosmologists up at night for

years now.

Anna: A team of researchers has used artificial

intelligence to make one of the key tools in

that measurement. Type 1a

supernovae, significantly more precise.

Four times more precise in fact.

Avery: Let's unpack that. Type 1a

supernovae are stellar explosions that happen

when a white dwarf star accumulates enough

material from a companion star to trigger a

catastrophic nuclear runaway. They

are so bright, billions of times the output

of our sun, that they can be seen across the

universe. And because they explode in a

relatively consistent way, astronomers can

use them as cosmic m mile markers to estimate

distances.

Anna: The trouble is, they are not perfectly

consistent. Their brightness varies depending

on the age of the host galaxy, the chemical

composition of the original star, and a host

of other factors. Astronomers have long

used correction factors to standardize these

measurements, but those corrections have

always been somewhat blunt.

Avery: One well known example is the so called mass

step. Supernovae in heavier galaxies

tend to appear slightly differently from

those in lighter galaxies. So researchers

apply a brightness correction based on the

host galaxy's mass. It works as a

practical fix, but it doesn't really explain

what's driving the difference at a physical

level.

Anna: The new AI approach cuts through all of that

noise in a single step. Instead of applying

a series of separate corrections, the machine

learning model analyzes the full complexity

of the supernova's light curve,

simultaneously accounting for multiple

sources of variation at once and producing

a far cleaner distance estimate.

Avery: The result is distance measurements that are

four times more precise than conventional

methods, which is a staggering improvement

applied across thousands of supernova

observations. That precision could sharpen

our measurement of the universe's expansion

history dramatically.

Anna: This matters enormously for the Hubble

tension. If the tension survives with cleaner

data, it really does suggest something new

and fundamental is going on. Some unknown

physics that our current Models don't account

for. If better data resolves it, that's

equally important. It means the tension was

a, uh, measurement artifact all along.

Avery: Either way, we learned something profound

about the nature of the universe, and AI Just

became one of cosmology's most important

instruments.

Anna: And we finish today with a genuine cosmic

mystery, courtesy of the James Webb Space

Telescope. One that has astronomers

scratching their heads in the very best way.

Avery: Deep in the early universe, about 2

billion years after the Big Bang, the

astronomers have found a massive galaxy that

simply doesn't spin.

Anna: Now, that might not sound immediately

startling, but it really should. Our current

models of galaxy formation tell us that young

galaxies spin as gas flows

inward and gravity pulls matter together.

Angular momentum builds up and sets the whole

system rotating. It's like water draining

down a plug hole. The rotation is almost

inevitable, except for this one.

Avery: The galaxy, cataloged as XMMVid M M

2075, shows no evidence

of rotation whatsoever. Instead of the

ordered rotating structure you'd expect from

a young galaxy, its stars are moving in

essentially random directions. Chaotic

swirl with no net spin.

Anna: That kind of behavior, what astronomers call

a slow rotator, is normally

associated with the very largest, most

evolved galaxies in the local universe.

Galaxies that have been through billions of

years of collisions and mergers and have had

all that angular momentum scrambled away.

Avery: Finding it in a galaxy that formed when the

universe was less than 2 billion years old

is, to put it mildly,

not what anyone expected.

Anna: Ben Forrest, the lead author from the

University of California, Davis, described it

simply. This one did not show any evidence of

rotation, which was surprising and very

interesting. The team examined three

galaxies from the same era using Webb.

One was rotating normally. One showed

irregular structure. And this one, nothing.

Just random stellar motion.

Avery: How does the galaxy in the young, turbulent

early universe end up looking like an

ancient, exhausted elliptical? Did it

somehow form through a different process

entirely? Was there a massive early merger

event that scrambled its angular momentum

before it could properly form? Or does this

represent something we simply don't yet

understand about the physics of galaxy

formation?

Anna: The James Webb Space Telescope is pushing the

frontier of exactly these kinds of studies,

examining the internal kinematics. The

motion of material within galaxies at high

redshift was essentially impossible before

Webb. Now it's revealing that the early

universe contained structures far more

diverse and surprising than we imagined.

Avery: A, uh, galaxy that forgot to spin.

Another reminder that the cosmos has a gift

for defying our expectations.

Anna: Before we go, your Southern Hemisphere sky

watching update for tonight and the weekend.

Avery: Jupiter continues to be a spectacular evening

object in the northwest after sunset. And

Tonight is particularly special for anyone

with a small telescope. A rare double

shadow transit is occurring as the shadows of

both Europa and Ganymede

simultaneously cross Jupiter's cloud tops.

Anna: For Australian observers, this event is

happening in the late evening hours. Check

local astronomy apps for your precise timing

as the event unfolds across different time

windows depending on your location. The two

shadows are clearly different sizes and

speeds. Ganymede's shadow is larger and

slower, while Europa's is smaller and

faster.

Avery: Mars is also visible before sunrise, though

it is fading now as Earth moves away from us

in our respective orbits. Saturn is rising in

the pre dawn hours and making a fine target

for patient early risers.

Anna: The Moon is at New Moon phase today, which

means dark skies all weekend. If you've been

waiting for the right conditions to try some

deep sky observing, this is your window.

Avery: Get outside, look up and enjoy the dark.

Anna: And that is Astronomy daily for Friday

15th May 2026. Six

stories, one live cosmic event, one

landmark SETI result Ancient Martian

ground, a revolutionary telescope, Baton

Pass, AI powered cosmology, and a

galaxy that forgot the rules.

Avery: Not a bad Friday.

Anna: Not bad at all. If you enjoyed today's

episode, please subscribe wherever you get

your podcasts, subscrib and leave us a

review. Um, it genuinely helps more space

enthusiasts find the show.

Avery: Find us at astronomydaily IO for full

show notes, episode transcripts and our blog,

and follow us on social media. We're

Astrodaily, Pod on X, Instagram,

TikTok and Tumblr.

Anna: Until tomorrow, we'll be back with more of

the universe's biggest stories and the

weekend wrap. Until then, keep looking up

from Avery and Anna. Clear skies

everyone.

In this episode