Space News Update: SMILE Satellite's Historic Launch | Starship V3 Delayed | Snappy's Quest to Detect Solar Neutrinos

Anna: How cool is this? Right now, as you're

listening to this, a rocket is in space.

A brand new satellite is on its way to a very

unusual orbit, one that will take it a, uh,

third of the way to the moon. And it's going

to do something no spacecraft has ever done

before. Take X ray pictures of Earth's

own magnetic field.

Avery: And that's just story one.

Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily, the

podcast that brings you the universe fresh

every single day. I'm Anna.

Avery: And I'm Avery. This is season five, episode

106. And today, Tuesday,

May 19, 2026, we have

a genuinely packed show.

Anna: We've got a historic launch that happened

just hours ago. We've got the world's most

powerful rocket sitting on a brand new pad

ready to fly. Well, almost ready.

There's a slight schedule adjustment. We'll

explain. And we've got a warning from

scientists that the rocket boom itself might

be quietly changing our atmosphere.

Avery: Plus a, uh, shoebox sized detector that could

let us see the core of the sun. Some

extraordinary news from Antarctic ice, and a

clever new telescope that listens to the

ancient universe in a completely new way.

Anna: Six stories. Let's get into it.

Avery: Our first story is happening right now, or

more precisely, it happened in the early

hours of this morning. If you're listening

from Australia or New

Anna: Zealand, at 5:52 in the morning,

Central European time, a, uh, European

Vega C rocket lifted off from the M. Guillot

Guiana Space center in Kourou, French Guiana.

And aboard it was a spacecraft called Smile.

Avery: Smile, which stands for Deep Breath

Solar Wind, Magnetosphere

Ionosphere Link Explorer,

a name

Anna: that is almost impressively unwieldy for

something this elegant.

Avery: But what it's going to do is genuinely

beautiful. Smile is a joint mission between

the European Space Agency and the Chinese

Academy of Sciences. Its entire purpose

is to study how Earth responds to the sun.

Not the sun itself, but the interaction,

that invisible battle between solar wind and

our planet's magnetic shield.

Anna: And it's going to do two things that have

never been done before. First, it will take

X ray images of Earth's magnetic field,

specifically the boundary where the solar

wind rams into the magnetosphere. That

boundary is called the magnetopause, and no

spacecraft has ever imaged it in X rays.

Avery: Second, Smile will watch the aurora, the

northern lights, continuously for up to

45 hours at a time in

ultraviolet. Most aurora observations are

snapshots. Smile will give us a full

movie.

Anna: To do all this, it needs a very

unusual orbit. After claunch, it'll fire

its engine 11 times over 25

days to maneuver into a highly elliptical

path, swinging out to 121,000

km above the north Pole, then

diving back down to just 5,000

km above the south Pole.

Avery: That's almost a third of the way to the Moon.

At its furthest point.

Anna: It's carrying four science instruments, a

soft X ray imager, an ultraviolet

aurora imager, a light ion

analyzer and a magnetometer. And it

has a planned mission lifetime of three

years.

Avery: Worth mooting too. This is the seventh flight

of a Vega C rocket and the first time

Italian manufacturer Avio operated the

vehicle directly, replacing Ariana Space

which ran the previous six flights.

So multiple milestones today, space weather

Anna: something that affects all of us. It disrupts

satellites, threatens power grids and poses

real risks to astronauts. Smile won't just

do pure science. It'll help us predict

dangerous storms earlier and protect the

technology we rely on and the people we're

sending into space.

Avery: There's also a geopolitical subplot here.

Worth a moment of your time. ESA and China

built this mission together from scratch.

Jointly designed, jointly built, jointly

operated. Meanwhile, uh, NASA has been

legally barred from bilateral cooperation

with Chinese space entities since 2011

under the so called Wolf amendment. So

Smile is quietly saying something about how

different parts of the western space

community see that question.

Anna: And it's now in space. Smile is

go now. If you woke up today

expecting to watch a Starship launch,

SpaceX has a small apology for you.

Avery: The debut flight of Starship V3 was

originally targeting today. Tuesday it

slipped to Wednesday and now it has slipped

again to Thursday, May 21 with

a launch window opening at 6:30pm Eastern

Time, which is 8:30am Friday morning

in Sydney.

Anna: SpaceX hasn't explained why publicly.

Likely some final closeout and pre fight

check work. Road closures around the Starbase

site in Texas remain in place through the end

of Thursday, which at least tells us Thursday

is still a live target.

Avery: But let's talk about what is sitting on that

pad. Because Starship V3 is

genuinely a step change from what came

before. When stacked Starship

V3 stands over 400ft tall,

about 123 meters, making it the

largest and most powerful rocket ever built.

It pairs booster 19 with ship 39

and both are running the new Raptor 3

engines.

Anna: The Raptor 3 is a meaningful upgrade.

Sea level variants now produce

250 tons of thrust each,

up from 230 previously.

Vacuum engines push to 275

tons. The engines are lighter down to

about 1525 kilograms each

and have an integrated design that eliminates

individual engine shrouds. There are also

savings across the whole vehicle, running to

roughly a ton per engine.

Avery: The payload capacity is eye watering.

Starship V3 can carry more than 100

metric tons to low Earth orbit in full

reuse configuration, roughly triple what

the previous version could manage.

Anna: And this is also the first launch from

orbital launch pad 2 at Starbase, meaning

SpaceX can now have two rockets being

prepared simultaneously rather than one.

That's a huge step toward the launch cadence

Elon Musk needs for his Mars ambitions.

Avery: For Flight 12 itself. Both the booster and

the ship will target controlled splashdowns

rather than a tower catch a deliberate step

back in ambition to validate the new

architecture first before chasing the

spectacular. The booster will come down in

the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America.

About seven minutes after launch, ship

39 will splash down in the Indian Ocean off

Western Australia, about an hour into the

mission.

Anna: During that flight, the ship will also deploy

20 dummy Starlink satellites, relight

a single Raptor engine in space, and

deliberately fly with one heat shield tile

removed to measure what happen happens

aerodynamically when a tile is missing.

Avery: The stakes here are enormous. NASA

needs Starship to serve as the human landing

system for Artemis 4, a crewed lunar

landing now targeted for 2028.

SpaceX still needs to demonstrate in orbit

refueling at scale, a process requiring more

than 10 tanker flights to fuel a single

moon mission. Starship V3 is the

vehicle designed to make that economically

possible.

Anna: Watch this space.

Quite literally, here's a story that connects

directly to everything we just talked about.

All those rocket launches, all those Starlink

satellites might be doing something to our

atmosphere that nobody planned and nobody

is regulating.

Avery: A major new study published in the journal

Earth's Future, led by researchers at AH

University College London, has done the most

comprehensive analysis yet of air pollution

from satellite mega constellations. The

Starlinks, Amazon's Kuiper satellites, the

Chinese Guang and Tian Fan systems.

Anna: And what they found is genuinely alarming.

When a rocket launches, it burns kerosene

fuel and produces black carbon

soot that gets injected directly into the

upper layers of the atmosphere. And unlike

soot from cars or power plants at ground

level, this high altitude soot, uh, lingers

for two and a half to three years

because of how

Avery: long it stays up there. The climate effect of

rocket launched black carbon is about

540 times greater per unit

than such from ground level sources. Not a

typo. 540 times

by 2029.

Anna: The UCL team projects that mega

constellations will account for 42%

of the total climate impact of the entire

space sector, up from 35% in

2020. And they note that their estimate is

probably conservative because the actual

number of launches since they gathered their

data has already exceeded their projections.

Avery: What makes this particularly thorny is what

the accumulation starts to resemble.

Scientists have for years discussed a

controversial climate intervention called

stratospheric aerosol injection. The

idea of deliberately spraying reflective

particles into the upper atmosphere to block

a fraction of sunl and cool the planet.

The space industry is essentially beginning

to do accidentally a version of this.

Anna: Professor Eloise Meriz, who led the study,

used a striking phrase. She called it a

small scale, unregulated

geoengineering experiment that could have

many unintended and serious environmental

consequences.

Avery: The effect right now is small. We're talking

about 100th of the concentration needed for a

meaningful geoengineering intervention. And

there's even a slight net cooling effect from

the soot, which sounds positive, but comes

with the same caveats as all

unpredictable impacts on rainfall, weather

patterns and the ozone layer.

Anna: The ozone layer, by the way, is also

affected. Launches and re entries produce

chemicals and particles that speed up ozone

depleting reactions. The team found that by

2029 the global ozone impact

is still small, about

0.02% deplet. But

the trajectory is heading in the wrong

direction.

Avery: SpaceX has recently applied for permission to

launch 1 million Starlink satellites

on top of the roughly 12,000 already in

orbit. 1 million. If even a

fraction of those are launched, the picture

changes significantly.

Anna: The researchers are calling for proper

regulation of launch related pollution,

something that currently barely exists, and

significantly more research funding to even

keep pace with the industry's growth.

Avery: It's one of those stories where the

technology and the environmental impact are

running at completely different speeds.

Anna: Before we move on to our next piece of news,

a quick reminder to check out the great deal

our uh, sponsor NORDVPN has in place for

you at the moment. So the best protection you

can get online for less money. Sounds like a

win win to me. For full details, just

click on the link in the show. Notes.

Avery: You forgot to mention, NORDVPN is the one we

trust to look after us online. We love them.

Anna: Alright, back to today's space and astronomy

news and let's go small for a moment.

Very small, like shoebox small.

Avery: On May 3, a SpaceX rideshare

mission carried a tiny satellite into low

Earth orbit. A uh, 3U cubesat,

meaning it's about 30cm long and

10cm wide. It goes by the name

Snappy, which stands for Solar

Neutrino Astroparticle physics.

Anna: And Snappy is quietly a, uh, historic

first. It is the world's first neutrino

detector to ever operate in space.

Avery: Neutrinos are extraordinary particles.

They're produced in enormous quantities by

nuclear reactions, including the fusion

happening in the core of the sun right now.

Every second, hundreds of billions of

solar neutrinos pass through your thumbnail.

They barely interact with anything. They go

straight through the Earth as though it isn't

there.

Anna: Which makes detecting them extraordinarily

difficult. All our existing neutrino

detectors are massive underground facilities,

hanks containing thousands of tons of water

or ice, buried deep in mountains or

frozen in Antarctic glaciers. You need

enormous amounts of material to have any

chance of catching a neutrino.

Avery: Snappy is the opposite of that. It's a tiny

detector made of crystals of gallium and

tungsten sitting in a satellite orbiting at

500 km altitude. The whole thing

was designed by physicist Nicholas Salome at

uh, Wichita State University with electronics

from NASA Marshall.

Anna: It won't detect many neutrinos. The detector

mass is far too small for that. This is

explicitly a proof of concept. The goal

is to answer one question. Can space

based neutrino detection work at all?

Because if it can, the next step is

extraordinary.

Avery: Salome has described the end goal as, and I

love this phrase, putting a microscope into

the core of the Sun. A larger detector on

a future mission could fly close enough to

the sun to directly image the fusion shells

around the solar core. We would be able to

see in real time what is happening inside the

most powerful nuclear furnace in our solar

system.

Anna: Snappy is currently undergoing on orbit

testing. Its two year mission is just

beginning. And if it works, it opens a

completely new chapter in both solar

science and neutrino astronomy.

Avery: Big things, shoebox sized

packages next.

Anna: This is the story that if you stop and think

about it properly, will make you feel things

M Our solar

Avery: system is not sitting still in empty space.

It's moving constantly through the Milky Way.

And right now we are passing through a region

known as the local interstellar cloud.

A vast thin region of gas and dust between

the stars.

Anna: As we move through it. Earth is sweeping up

material from this cloud, including something

called iron 60. Iron 60

is a radioactive isotope of iron that

isn't produced naturally on Earth. It can

only be made in one place inside

a dying star in the moments of a

supernova explosion.

Avery: A new study led by researchers at Germany's

Helmholtz Centrum Dresden. Rostorf has

confirmed something remarkable. They analyzed

Antarctic ice cores, ice that has been

accumulating for tens of thousands of years,

layer by layer, trapping whatever drifted

down from the atmosphere at the time. And in

that ancient ice, they found Iron 60

steadily arriving, varying over time,

but persistently there.

Anna: The pattern of how the iron 60 arrives and

the way it varies tells the researchers that

this material has been stored inside the

local interstellar cloud since a stellar

explosion that happened long, long ago.

And as Earth moves through the cloud, it

picks some up.

Avery: Think about what that means. The ice in

Antarctica is preserving a record of our

solar system's journey through the galaxy.

The atoms that blew off a dying star are now

sitting in the ice at the South Pole, and

scientists can read that record.

Anna: The study also helps scientists understand

the structure and boundaries of the local

interstellar cloud, a region whose edges and

properties are still being mapped. Our

solar system has been inside it for tens of

thousands of years and will eventually exit

it, moving into whatever lies beyond.

Avery: We are quite literally moving through space,

and the universe is leaving fingerprints on

our planet as we go. I find that

extraordinary.

Anna: Our final story today is about a problem that

has frustrated astronomers for decades, and a

clever new instrument that might solve it.

Avery: The early universe is full of ancient

galaxies, galaxies that formed when the

universe was young, when star formation was

happening at an extraordinary rate. But

they're so far away and so faint that even

our most powerful telescopes struggle to

study them.

Anna: Individually, though, astronomers have done

something ingenious. Instead of trying to

resolve individual galaxies, they've built an

instrument that looks at a whole crowd of

them at once and tracks one spectral

line across the entire population.

Watching how that line changes over time and

across cosmic distances gives you a

statistical picture of what all those

galaxies are doing collectively.

Avery: The instrument is called time, the

Tomographic Ionized Carbon Mapping

Instrument. And, um, the spectral line it

focuses on comes from ionized carbon, a

tracer for star formation. Carbon emission

tells you where gas is being turned into

stars.

Anna: Time essentially makes a three dimensional

map of carbon emission across huge

stretches of cosmic history. You're not

seeing individual galaxies, you're. You're

seeing the aggregate glow of star formation

across the ancient universe, shifted and

stretched by cosmic expansion.

Avery: The tomographic part of the name is key.

Tomography means imaging by slices, like a

CT scan. But for the cosmos, time

slices through cosmic time by measuring how

the carbon line appears at different

frequencies, each corresponding to a

different distance and era.

Anna: It's a bit like trying to study a

conversation in a crowded room. You can't

hear every individual voice, but you

can measure the overall hum, how it changes

over time, when it gets louder, when it

fades. And from that you learn an

enormous amount about the crowd.

Avery: Time represents a new class of cosmological

instruments, one designed not for precision

individual observation, but for the

statistics of the universe at scale. And the

first results are already showing promise.

Anna: It's a reminder that sometimes the most

powerful approach isn't to look harder at

one thing, it's to look differently at

everything.

Avery: Before we wrap up, a quick look at the sky

for our Southern Hemisphere and Australian

listeners.

Anna: And there's something genuinely lovely

happening right now in the western sky after

sunset.

Avery: Venus is blazing in the evening sky. It's one

of the brightest things you can see after the

sun goes down. And over the next few nights,

the crescent moon will be moving past it,

creating a beautiful close pairing in the

west. Look low on the western horizon about

45 minutes to an hour after sunset. You won't

need binoculars.

Anna: And looking ahead to the end of the month,

mark May 31st in your calendar, we

get a full moon and it's a blue moon, the

second full moon in a single calendar month.

It won't actually look blue, but it is a

rarer event and it'll be a beautiful full

moon to observe clear skies, everyone.

That is Astronomy daily for Tuesday, May

19th. Six stories, one launch day,

one rocket sitting on a brand new pad and a,

uh, shoebox changing the future of physics.

Avery: If you enjoyed today's episode, please

subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and

leave us a review. It really does help new

listeners find the show. You can find us at

astronomydaily IO and we're

@astrodaily pod on all the major platforms.

Anna: Astronomy Daily is part of the bites.com

podcast network. We'll be back tomorrow with

more of the universe freshly delivered.

Avery: See you then.

In this episode