Space Mechanic | Today's Space News - Astronomy Daily: The Latest Space News

Anna: Somewhere above your head right now, about

36,000 km up,

there is a graveyard shift going on.

Hundreds of satellites still working,

still useful, and slowly running out of

fuel.

Avery: And as of last night, there is finally a

mechanic on the way.

Anna: Good evening and welcome to Astronomy Daily.

I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm Avery. Coming up, a spacecraft

with arms launches on a mission to keep other

spacecraft alive. A rocket stage is two

weeks out from hitting the moon and

astronomers have just put out a call to arms

about it.

Anna: We've got two stars that were born together,

lived together and then died in sequence,

leaving behind the first pair of

supernova remnants ever traced back to

a single binary.

Avery: The first complete magnetic map of a galaxy

cluster, an asteroid breakup that may have

bombarded three worlds and helped freeze our

own.

Anna: And a sky watching window that is closing

faster than you'd like.

Avery: Let's get into it.

Anna: So Avery, here's a problem that has quietly

bothered the satellite industry for about

60 years. You build a satellite, you

spend hundreds of millions of dollars on it.

You put it in geostationary orbit

35,786

km up where it hovers

over the same patch of ground forever. And

it works beautifully for 15 years

and then it runs out of fuel.

Avery: And um, that's, uh, it. The hardware is fine.

Anna: The hardware is often perfectly fine. The

cameras work, the transponders work, the

solar panels work. But without propellant,

it can't hold its position. So it drifts

and it becomes junk. You throw away a

working satellite because the tank is empty.

Avery: That is a spectacularly wasteful way to run

an industry.

Anna: It is. And last night, Northrop

Grumman launched the most serious attempt yet

to fix it. At 05:15 in the

evening Eastern Time on Tuesday 21st

July, the Falcon 9 lifted

off from Space Launch Complex 40 at

Cape Canaveral carrying the Mission Robotic

Vehicle plus three Mission Extension

pods.

Avery: Mission robotic vehicle. What does it

actually look like?

Anna: Picture a satellite bus with two

arms, two robotic arms, each

about 3 meters long,

built by the United States Naval Research

Laboratory and supplied through DARPA's

Robotic Servicing of Geostationary

Satellite program.

Avery: So this is a genuinely dexterous machine, not

just the tug that bolt on.

Anna: That's the distinction that matters. The MRV

can inspect, it can relocate, it can

repair, it can upgrade. And its

headline job on this mission is to pick up

those three mission extension pods and

install them on client satellites that are

running low on propellant.

Avery: So the pods are the actual fuel solution.

Anna: Think of them as jetpacks. Each pod

clamps onto a satellite and takes over orbit

control and momentum management. Using

electric propulsion, each one can handle a

satellite of about 2,000kg.

That's a typical big geostationary bird

and give it up to eight more years of life.

Avery: Eight years on a satellite that was

otherwise finished.

Anna: Eight years. And the MRV M itself

carries something called a ah, Passive

Refueling Interface, which is the first

refueling interface approved by the US

Space Force. So the servicer is

itself designed to be refueled later.

Avery: Now, Northrub have done a version of this

before, haven't they?

Anna: They have, and this is why they're the ones

doing it. Mission extension vehicle 1

launched in October 2019, the

first commercial satellite servicing

spacecraft ever. And four months later, it

docked with communications satellite

Intelsat 901 in geostationary

orbit. MEV 2 followed in

August 2020.

Avery: So what's different this time?

Anna: Those earlier vehicles were one to one.

One servicer went to one satellite, docked

with it, and stayed there doing the work

itself. The MRV is one to

many. It carries pods, installs them,

and moves on. It's the difference between a

tow truck that has to stay attached to your

car forever and. And a mechanic who fits a

new part and drives off to the next job.

Avery: That scales.

Anna: That scales. And there's a nice detail on

the launch itself. The Falcon 9 booster

B1069 was flying its

32nd mission and it was

deliberately expended. No landing.

Avery: Why give up a booster with 31 flights on it?

Anna: Because geostationary transfer orbit is

demanding. Getting that much mass that

high needed every bit of performance the

rocket had, and there wasn't propellant left

for a landing burn. SpaceX made the trade.

Avery: So when does the actual servicing start?

Anna: Not for a while. The MRV and the three

pods each separate and then climb to

geostationary orbit under their own

solar electric propulsion. And that

climb takes up to a year. Servicing

operations are expected to begin in

2027. After the initial checkouts,

the RSGS program gets handed over to

the US Space Force.

Avery: A year of just going up slowly

and efficiently.

Anna: Electric propulsion is patient. And at the

end of it, for the first time, there's a

repair capability parked permanently in

the most valuable orbital real estate we

have.

Avery: Right from a machine built to preserve

spacecraft to a spacecraft that is about to

be very thoroughly destroyed.

Anna: This is one we've been tracking.

Avery: It is, and I want to be upfront about that.

We covered this back in June in episode

125. But there is a genuine reason

to come back to it, because the science

community has just done something about it.

The short version for anyone joining us

since. In January 2025,

a Falcon 9 launched two commercial

lunar landers, Firefly's Blue Ghost

and ispace's Hakuto R mission

2. It did its job, but the upper

stage, cataloged as

2025010 d

never came home. Instead of burning up in our

atmosphere, it ended up in a long looping

orbit through the Earth Moon system. And

somebody noticed.

Anna: The independent astronomer Bill Gray, who

runs Project Pluto and tracks this sort of

high orbit debris. His software flagged an

impact on the 5th of August. This year

that stage hits the Moon.

Avery: So what's new? Three things. First, a

new preprint has just gone up on Arxiv and it

is signed by 23 astronomers. It is

essentially a call to arms. They're asking

the scientific community, professional and

amateur, to point everything they've got at

the moon on the 5th of August.

Anna: Because this is a rare thing, because

Avery: we almost never get this. We get natural

impacts on the Moon all the time, but we

don't know when they're coming here. We know

the object, we know its mass, we know its

structure, we know its velocity and we know

the time to within about a second. That is an

artificial impact experiment we didn't have

to pay to set up.

Anna: And the timing has been tightened, hasn't it?

Avery: That's a second u, uh, thing. Gray's latest

published calculation, dated the 17th of July

puts the impact at 6, 34 and

32 seconds UTC. Earlier coverage

back in May was quoting 644.

So if you've got the old number written down,

update it am the third. The third is

the actual physics prediction and this is the

part I find genuinely interesting. The paper

models what happens on contact. This thing

is roughly 12 meters long and about

4,000 kilograms and crucially, it's

hollow. It's a tank. So the

prediction is that it crushes rather than

punching deep like a can

Anna: rather than a bullet.

Avery: Exactly like a can. And the result of

that is a relatively shallow crater. They're

estimating 20 to 30 meters across, but a

a very large ejecta plume,

kilometers of debris thrown up off the

surface.

Anna: So the plume might be the visible part.

Avery: That's the hope, and it's a subtle bit of

reasoning. The impact site is near the crater

Einstein right on the moon's western limb,

about the 10 o' clock position on the disk.

As you look at it now, that's awkward because

it's on the sunlit part of the surface and no

impact Flash, artificial or natural,

has ever been recorded on the lit face of the

Moon.

Anna: The glare defeats you, but being on the limb

helps.

Avery: Being on the limb might save it, because

rocks thrown up from a site that close to the

edge rise off the Moon entirely. And

once they're off the limb, they're

silhouetted against black sky, catching

sunlight. So you might not see the flash, but

you might see the plume.

Anna: Who else is watching?

Avery: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will

image the site before and after, which gives

a clean comparison. And South Korea's

Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter is going to attempt

to observe as well. There's precedent for the

afterimage too. When a Chinese rocket stage

hit the far side in 2022, LRO

found the site and it had made not one

crater, but two.

Anna: And there's a longer term payoff to

Avery: all this, and this is why the paper matters.

Beyond the spectacle, they want to test a

method for pinpointing exactly where an

object strikes the Moon using the

observations. If you can nail that down

against a known impact, you've validated a

technique. And that feeds directly into

planning seismic experiments on the lunar

surface for future missions.

Anna: Now the practical question, who actually gets

to see this?

Avery: And, um, this is where our North American

listeners want to pay attention, because this

one is squarely yours.

6:34 UTC on the 5th of August

is 29 minutes past 2 in the morning, Eastern

Time. 1:34 Central,

12:34 Mountain. And on the west coast

it's still the night before. 11:34 in the

evening on the 4th,

Anna: middle of the night, but the Moon is well up.

Avery: The Moon is well placed across the continent,

and the paper specifically identifies

observers in the Americas as the ideal group.

If you have a telescope and you've ever

wanted to contribute to something real, this

is the night they are explicitly asking

amateurs to take part.

Anna: And for those of us further around the globe,

less kind.

Avery: And I'll be straight about it. For us In

Australia, that's 4:34 in the afternoon,

broad daylight, New Zealand early evening,

no good either. The UK and Europe get half

past seven in the morning, which is also

daylight. So the live event belongs to the

Anna: Americas, but the aftermath belongs to

everyone.

Avery: The aftermath belongs to everyone. The

LRO before and after imagery, the crater

measurements, the analysis of how well the

predictions held up, and frankly, the

question sitting underneath all of this is

global. We are about to start putting people

back on the Moon and we are currently hitting

it with our own rubbish by accident, without

warning.

Anna: Alright, Avery, moving on to our next story.

More than Half of all stars are in multiple

systems, two or more suns orbiting each

other. And for the really massive stars, the

ones destined to explode, that fraction is

even higher.

Avery: So most supernovae should have had a sibling.

Anna: That is exactly the implication. And yet,

until this week, astronomers had never found

a single case where both stars in a binary

exploded and both left behind remnants we

can still see

Avery: not one out of how many.

Anna: We've cataloged around 300 supernova

remnants in our galaxy. Not one confirmed

sibling pair. And the reason is a bit

embarrassing, actually. One of them was

probably sitting in plain sight the whole

time.

Avery: Go on.

Anna: The Jellyfish Nebula

IC443 in the

constellation Gemini, about 6,000

light years away. It is one of the best

studied supernova remnants in the sky and

one of the brightest gamma ray sources of its

kind. If you could see it with your eye, it

would look bigger than the full Moon.

Avery: And, um, something was hiding behind it.

Anna: Next to it, there's a much fainter object

called G189 6

3. It was first picked up in

1994 by the German ROSAT

satellite as a faint X ray glow.

And later the Russian German spectrum

Rontgen Gamma Observatory saw shell like

structures in it, which suggested it was also

a supernova remnant. But it sits right

up against the glare of the jellyfish, and

that glare drowns it.

Avery: So how did they finally separate them?

Anna: 16 years of data from NASA's Fermi

Gamma Ray Space Telescope. The team led

by Miltiades Michaelides, a

postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, essentially

subtracted the jellyfish out, isolated

its gamma ray emission and looked at what was

left underneath.

Avery: And, um, there was something left.

Anna: There was G

189.63 is

independently producing gamma rays. Which

matters enormously because gamma rays mean

particle acceleration, and particle

acceleration is what a supernova remnant

does. It's the shock wave doing work.

Avery: Mikhail Adiz had a nice way of putting that,

didn't he?

Anna: He compared it to a drop of water falling on

a still lake. The ripples spread out from

the point of contact. A supernova remnant

does exactly the same thing. And if you can

see the ripples, you know, something dropped.

Avery: So we have two remnants next to each other.

How do we know they're related rather than

just an accident of line of sight?

Anna: This is the elegant part. There's a filament

of gas arcing between them. And that

filament is where the shock wave from

G189.6 3

has slammed into the same molecular cloud

that the jellyfish is pushing against.

Avery: Same cloud so same distance, same

cloud.

Anna: Same distance, same neighborhood. They're not

one in front of the other. They're genuinely

next door to each other. And that's what

makes the shared origin story credible.

Avery: So walk me through the story they're

proposing.

Anna: A tale of two massive stars

born together, gravitationally bound,

orbiting extremely closely, perhaps

only a few times the Earth's sun distance

apart. Close enough that material was likely

flowing from one to the other. And then the

bigger one runs out of fuel and detonates.

Avery: And, um. The explosion breaks the

partnership.

Anna: The explosion breaks the partnership. The

binary is disrupted and the surviving

companion is essentially kicked flung

off through the galaxy on its own. It keeps

traveling, and tens of thousands of years

later, it explodes too.

Avery: How far apart did they end up?

Anna: The centers of the two explosions are now

somewhere between 30 and 50 light years

apart. Two stars that were once close enough

to be exchanging material, now separated

by that gap. And each marked by its own

expanding shell.

Avery: What were they?

Anna: The jellyfish's progenitor is thought to have

been something like 15 to 25 times

the mass of the Sun. Its companion at

least 20. Both were probably tens

of thousands times more luminous than the

sun. And both may now be neutron

stars.

Avery: And, um, publication status because I know

this was previewed at a conference.

Anna: Good flag. Miltiais presented the results at

the American Astronomical Society meeting in

Pasadena back in June. What's happened this

week is the peer reviewed paper. It's in

Nature communications with the Stanford

release. And wider coverage landing on the

21st.

Avery: And one for our listeners. Can we go and look

at any of this?

Anna: Not this month. Wherever you are. Gemini

is close to the sun at the moment. So it's

lost in the glare globally. But it comes

back. And this is one where Northern

hemisphere listeners get the better deal.

From North America and Europe, Gemini

rides high overhead through winter

December into March. And the jellyfish

sits. Beautifully placed for a telescope or a

long exposure.

Avery: And from down here we still get it.

Anna: Just lower from Australia and New Zealand,

Gemini comes up in the northern sky through

our summer. Visible, worth hunting,

but closer to the horizon. Either way, put

it on the list for the end of the year. And

bear in mind the jellyfish is faint. It would

be bigger than the full moon if your eye

could pick it up. But it needs photography or

a decent aperture to show itself.

Avery: Anna, uh, here's something we know exists but

have never actually been able to draw.

Galaxy clusters. The largest

gravitationally bound structures in the

universe. Hundreds or thousands of

galaxies plus enormous clouds of hot gas,

plus dark matter Are threaded through

with magnetic fields.

Anna: We've known that for decades.

Avery: What we have never done is map the shape of

one across an entire cluster from the

middle right out to the edge.

Anna: And now somebody has.

Avery: A team led by Andrea, uh, Boton at innaf,

Italy's National Astrophysics institute, Has

reconstructed the magnetic field of Galaxy

cluster Abell 2255. And I

want to be precise about that name because at

least one outlet has got it wrong this week

and called it Abell 2142.

It is Abell 2255,

about a billion light years away.

Anna: Why that cluster?

Avery: Because it's famously messy in radio.

Abell 2255 has long been known for

its complexity. It's full of strange, diffuse

radio structures, Halos and filaments, which

is exactly what you want if you're trying to

trace magnetic fields, because those

structures are made by energetic electrons

spiraling along magnetic lines.

Anna: So the radio emission is the field

effectively made visible.

Avery: It's the tracer. Electrons corkscrewing

along magnetic lines give off radio waves.

So if you can see the emission finely enough,

you can work backwards to the field. The

problem has always been that these signals

are extraordinarily faint.

Anna: What did they observe with lofar, the

Avery: low frequency array, the European radial

telescope spread across a continent. And

these are the deepest radio observations ever

made of a galaxy cluster that was combined

with a new data analysis technique. And

between them, that's what cracked it.

Anna: And what does the map show?

Avery: This is defining in some regions of the

cluster, the magnetic field lines are

strikingly coherent. They follow very

specific directions stretching radially

outward along the extended radial structures.

Anna: They're not random, which tells you something

made them that way, which tells you

Avery: something is organizing them. And Boton's

conclusion is that the shape of the field is

intimately linked to the motion of the gas it

sits in. The field gets stretched and

compressed by the movements associated with

the cluster's own formation.

Anna: So the cluster assembling itself is what

shapes the magnetism?

Avery: That's the argument, and it's the first

observational evidence of it. The same

violent process that builds a galaxy cluster,

Gas falling in, sloshing, colliding,

merging, is the process that combs the

magnetic field into the pattern we now see.

Anna: And that ties into the radio halos question.

Avery: It does. Bolton says they believe the

mechanism that switches on these gigantic

radio emissions is linked to the formation

process of the clusters themselves. So the

map isn't just a pretty picture. It's the

evidence for the engine.

Anna: The. It's a lovely Example of the thing radio

astronomy does best, showing you a

Avery: structure that is completely invisible, is a

billion light years away, is bigger than

anything else in the universe, and has been

sitting there the entire time. Published in,

uh, Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Anna: Every if you want to know what has hit the

Earth, don't look at

Avery: the Earth because the Earth keeps erasing it

constantly.

Anna: Plate tectonics, volcanism, weather,

water, erosion. Craters get buried,

distorted, subducted, destroyed. The

practical consequence is that geological

evidence for impacts older than about

650 million years is

extremely scarce here.

Avery: And the Moon doesn't do any of that.

Anna: No plate tectonics, no flowing water, no

meaningful atmosphere. The Moon just keeps

the receipts. And when you read those

receipts carefully, there's a spike. When,

uh, around 800 million years ago,

there's a surge in large lunar impacts. And

it shows up in two independent ways. One

is the estimated ages of big craters,

including copernicus, which is 93

kilometers across. The other is impact

glass.

Avery: Explain impact glass.

Anna: When something hits hard enough, the heat

melts. Rock that melt cools into

glass, and the glass locks in a, uh, chemical

timestamp. The Apollo missions brought a lot

of it home. And when you look at the age

distribution of that glass, you see the same

spike at 800 million years.

Avery: So two different methods agree that something

happened, but nobody knew what.

Anna: Nobody knew what. That's the puzzle that's

been sitting there for decades. And a new

paper led by Dr. William Bakke at the

Southwest Research Institute in Boulder

proposes a specific culprit, which is

an asteroid called Eulalia, or rather

the parent body of the family of asteroids we

now call Eulalia. Uh, because the object, its

no longer exists. It was catastrophically

broken apart in a collision in the main belt.

Avery: And the location of that breakup matters.

Anna: The location is everything. It happened right

next to what's called the J3 to one resonance

with Jupiter. And a resonance like that is

essentially a gravitational trapdoor.

Material that wanders into it, gets its

orbit, pumped up by Jupiter and flung into

the inner solar system.

Avery: So the shrapnel had a delivery mechanism

waiting right there.

Anna: It had an open door right next to it. And the

simulations show what happened in two phases.

Half the fragments reached the resonance

almost immediately. That's the prompt

bombardment Planetary shrapnel sprayed across

the inner solar system.

Avery: And, um, the other half, over the

Anna: following 100 to 150 million

years, another quarter of the fragments

drifted into the resonance more slowly,

pushed by something called the Yarkovsky

effect, which is what, in plain terms it's

sunlight doing work. A rotating asteroid

absorbs sunlight on one side and

reradiates that heat as it turns. That

reradiation gives an incredibly gentle

push. On a human scale, it's nothing. Over

a hundred million years, it can move an

asteroid's orbit enough to drop it into a

trapdoor.

Avery: So this wasn't one bad afternoon. This was a

long siege.

Anna: That's the reframing, I think, is genuinely

important here. Not an event, an episode,

a bombardment that opened suddenly and then

kept going for well over 100 million years.

Avery: And what does that mean for Earth?

Anna: Here's the number that changes the scale of

it. For every large impact recorded on the

moon, roughly 20 similar or larger

impacts hit the Earth, where a bigger target

with stronger gravity.

Avery: 20 to 1.

Anna: 20 to 1. So a spike on the Moon

means a barrage down here. And now look

at what else was happening around 800 million

years ago. That is the run up to one of the

most dramatic climate episodes in our

planet's history. Widespread global

cooling and major shifts in the biosphere.

Avery: Is he climbing a causal link?

Anna: He's careful. And I want to be careful too.

Bakke's phrasing is that given the peak of

this barrage coincides with a period of

widespread cooling and major shifts in our

biosphere, it is tempting to suggest the

former produced the latter. That is a

hypothesis flagged as tempting, not a

conclusion.

Avery: Because so far, only one impact has ever

been firmly tied to a biological outcome.

Anna: Pictxulub, 66 million years ago.

The end of the dinosaurs. That's the one.

Everything else is inference.

Avery: So how would you ever test this?

Anna: This is my favorite part of the paper. And

it's the reason to keep an eye on this story.

We have asteroid samples on Earth right now.

Hayabusa2 brought material back from

Ryugu in December 2020. Osiris

Rex brought Bennu back in September

2023. Both are under analysis.

Avery: And if they carry the Eulalia fingerprint,

Anna: if the mineralogy matches the Eulalia

family, then we are holding in a laboratory

physical samples of the material that rained

on solar system 800 million

years ago. That would turn a dynamical

model into a direct compositional record.

Avery: That's a remarkable thought. Brains in a lab

in Japan and Texas. That might be pieces of

the thing that helped freeze the Earth.

Anna: Published in the Planetary Science Journal by

Botke, with Volkerlitsky, Dykhuis and

Zellner.

Avery: Great.

And our next story comes with a deadline.

Wherever in the world you're listening.

Anna: What's the urgency?

Avery: The moon first quarter was yesterday,

the 21st. Tonight it's a waxing

gibbous. And every night from here it gets

brighter and stays up longer, building to the

buck. Moon full at 4:36 in the afternoon

UTC on Wednesday the 29th.

That's 10:36 in the morning Eastern time in

the States and 12:36 on Thursday

morning for us in Australia.

Anna: And that matters because of what's peaking.

Avery: The southern Delta Aquariates peak falls

on the 30th, effectively the same night as

the full moon. So the peak is going to be

washed out, which means the practical advice

is the same for everybody. Don't wait for

peak night. This week is your window in the

small hours while the moon still sets and

leaves you real darkness before dawn.

Anna: And this is a shower that favors us.

Avery: It does. From Australia, New Zealand and

southern Africa, the radiant sits high close

to overhead, which is why the shower gets

underrated. In the north, under genuinely

dark skies, you might see 15 to 20

an hour. And they're lovely meteors. Long,

graceful streaks rather than quick flashes,

and known for persistent trains, those

glowing trails that hang in the air for a

second or two afterwards.

Anna: And northern listeners aren't shut out of

Avery: this one, not at all. And I want to be clear

about that, because this shower gets written

off in the north too readily. If you're in

North America, particularly the southern

states, Texas, Florida, Arizona, the

Gulf coast, the Delta Aquarids are a

genuinely worthwhile watch. The radiance

sits low in your southern sky rather than

overhead, so you'll see fewer of them. But

the ones you do catch travel long paths

across the sky, and they can be spectacular.

Best time is after midnight through to dawn.

Southern Europe, the Mediterranean, North

Africa. Same deal.

Anna: And where do people look?

Avery: The radiant is in Aquarius, near the star

Delta Aquarii. Use Fomalhaut to find

the region. But honestly, don't stare at

the radiant. Lie back, take in as much sky as

you can and let them come to you. Parent body

is suspected to be Comet

96PMachholz. There are also

the Alpha Capricornids building to the 30th

and 31st. Far fewer meteors, but

few famous for slow, brilliant fireballs that

can punch straight through moonlight.

Anna: And for the north, there's something

considerably bigger coming.

Avery: There is, and if you're listening in North

America or Europe, you should be planning for

this. Now, two things land together on the

12th of August 1st, the Perseids Peak.

And this year the moon is new that same day,

which means A properly dark sky that

is the best Perseid year in some time. And

the second, a, uh, total solar

eclipse, the first on mainland Europe

since 1999 and the first in Spain

since 1905. Totality sweeps

across the Arctic, Greenland, Iceland and

northern Spain. And in Spain, it happens

close to sunset, with the sun only a few

degrees above the horizon, which could be

extraordinary.

Anna: North America doesn't get totality this time.

Avery: No, and I won't oversell it, but there is a

real partial eclipse across much of the

continent. Alaska gets the deepest view

near sunrise. Atlantic Canada gets

roughly half the sun covered at maximum in

the afternoon. New England and the

northeastern states get a smaller bite. And

there's some coverage visible right across

every Canadian province and the northern

contiguous states, though.

Anna: Dig out the glasses.

Avery: Dig out the eclipse glasses from 2024 and

check their ISO 1, uh,

23122 certified.

It will not get dark even with 50%

coverage. The remaining sun is blindingly

bright, so there is never a safe moment to

look without protection and the lovely

detail. If you're standing in the path of

totality in Spain or Iceland, there's a

genuine chance of a Perseid streaking pass

during those two minutes.

Anna: And tonight for everyone, the Milky

Way

Avery: from the Southern Hemisphere, the galactic

core is riding high overhead right now. One

of the real privileges of our winter, and

it's at its best. From the Northern

Hemisphere, it's lower in the south towards

Sagittarius. But on a dark night, it's still

magnificent. And before dawn, Saturn and

Mars are in the eastern sky for both

hemispheres.

Anna: One more thing before we go.

Avery: The launchers SpaceX is targeting Thursday

the 23rd for Starship Flight 13.

Window opening at 6:45 in the evening

Eastern Time. That's 5:45 Central,

3:45 Pacific and Friday morning,

quarter to nine for us in Australia. 20

Starlink V3 satellites aboard. Second

flight of the V3 vehicle dead and alarm.

And as always with starship, check before you

commit the date has already moved twice.

Anna: That's Astronomy daily for Wednesday 22

July, a mechanic on its way to

geostationary orbit, a rocket stage

two, two weeks from making a new crater, and

23 astronomers asking the world to watch

two

Avery: stars that died in sequence and left their

remnants side by side. The first magnetic

map of a galaxy cluster and an asteroid

breakup that may have been raining down on us

while the Earth froze.

Anna: Donotes sources and links are all at

astronomydaily IO and you can find us

at astrodaily Pod across the socials.

Avery: If you enjoy the show, a, uh, rating or

review genuinely helps other people find us.

Astronomy Daily is part of the bytes.com

podcast network.

Anna: I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm, um, Avery. Get outside this week. It

won't be dark for long.

Anna: Clear skies.

In this episode