SpaceX's ISS Crew Launch, Bacteria in Microgravity, and Europa Clipper's Radar Success

Hallie: Hi everyone. Welcome to Astronomy Daily

with Steve and Hallie. It's August 4,

2025.

We are back again with the mostly live Monday

episode direct from the Australia studio here

down under. And with me as usual and always

is my very favorite human, Mr. Steve.

Steve Dunkley: Oh, nicely done, Hallie. And thank you so

much for those kind words, Mr. Steve.

Indeed. I think you handled that opening very

well for your.

Hallie: Thank you. I try.

Steve Dunkley: Yes. Maybe you should uh, take more of a

leading role in this and it's one less thing

I have to do.

And what have you discovered in the Astronomy

Daily newsletter for us today, Hallie?

Hallie: Some interesting stories that I thought you

would be interested in.

Steve Dunkley: Oh yes, do go on.

Hallie: I know you are following Europa Clipper on

its journey outward across the solar system.

Steve Dunkley: Ah, uh, yes, regular listeners will know that

is one of my favorites.

Hallie: You can present that one.

Steve Dunkley: Oh, okay.

Hallie: And a great news story about a solar sail

equipped spacecraft that has some special

properties.

Steve Dunkley: Solar sails. Intriguing. Yes, I like

that.

Hallie: I also found stories about new deep field

images from Webb and Hubble, the replacement

crew for the iss. And how about this one?

Steve Dunkley: Do tell.

Hallie: Like something out of a science fiction

story.

Steve Dunkley: Oh, okay, now you've got me.

Hallie: SpaceX is sending disease causing bacteria

out to the ISS.

Steve Dunkley: Say what disease causing bacteria?

Hallie: I can't wait to find out.

Steve Dunkley: Why haven't we seen this movie? Yeah,

why would they do that? I mean, what could

possibly go wrong?

Hallie: Exactly.

Steve Dunkley: Somebody's already writing the script for

that one.

Hallie: Just like SC.

Steve Dunkley: Oh, I don't know if it sounds fun or scary.

Sounds great. Okay, shall we do the thing?

Hallie: Let's go.

Steve Dunkley: I'm ready.

Hallie: Hallie Okies

astronauts sidelined for the past year by

Boeing's Starliner Trouble, blasted off to

the International Space Station on Friday

getting a lift from SpaceX. The US

AH Japanese Russian crew of AH4 rocketed from

NASA's Kennedy Space Center. They'll replace

colleagues who launched to the space station

in March as fill INS for NASA's two stuck

astronauts and stay for at least six months.

Zena Cardman, a biologist and polar explorer

who should have launched last year was yanked

along with another NASA crewmate to make room

for Starliner's Starcross test pilots.

I have no emotion but joy right now.

That was transcendent ride of a lifetime,

Cardman the flight commander said after

reaching orbit. The botched Starliner demo

forced Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to

switch to SpaceX to get back from the space

station more than nine months after departing

on what should have been a week long trip.

Every astronaut wants to be in space.

None of us wants to stay on the ground, but

it's not about me, cardman said before her

flight. NASA's Mike Fink, Cardman's

co pilot, was the backup for Wilmore and

Williams on Starliner, making those three

still the only ones certified to fly it.

Fink and Japan's Kamiya Yui, former military

officers with previous spaceflight

experience, were training for Starliner's

second astronaut mission. With Starliner

grounded until 2026, NASA switched the two to

the latest SpaceX flight, a, uh, SpaceX

Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon capsule

with a U2S. Japanese Russian crew of four

lifts off from Kennedy Space Center's Launch

Pad 39A in Cape Canaveral of Florida on

Friday, Aug. 1, 2025.

AP Photo Chris Omera

Boy it's great to be back in orbit again,

fink radioed. He last soared on

NASA's next to last space shuttle flight in

2011. Rounding out the crew is

Russia's Oleg Plaitanov. The former fighter

pilot was pulled a few years ago from the

Russian Soyuz flight lineup because of an

undisclosed health issue that he said has

since been resolved on hand for the first

launch Attempt. On Thursday, NASA's new

acting administrator, Transportation

Secretary Sean Duffy, met with Roscosmos

Director General Dmitri Bakanov, an invited

guest. The two discussed future

collaboration, then left town after thick

clouds forced a last minute delay. What we

learn on these missions is what's going to

get us to the moon and then from the moon to

Mars, which is I think the direction that

NASA has to be, duffy said in a NASA

interview. There's critical real estate on

the moon. We want to claim that real estate

for ourselves and our partners to save

money. In light of tight budgets, NASA is

looking to increase its space station stays

from six months to eight months, a um move

already adopted by Russia's space agency.

SpaceX is close to certifying its Dragon

capsules for longer flights, which means the

newly launched crew could be up there until

April. NASA is also considering

smaller crews, three astronauts launching on

SpaceX instead of the typical four to cut

costs. As for Starliner, NASA

is leaning toward launching the next one with

cargo before flying another crew.

Engineers are still investigating the

thruster failures and helium leaks that

bedeviled Starliner following liftoff. Time

is running out as NASA looks to abandon the

aging space station by 2030.

An air leak on the Russian side of the

station remains unresolved after years of

patching. Engineering teams already are

working on the plan for the space station's

last days. NASA's Ken Bowersox

said the US and Russia need to cooperate in

order to steer the outpost into the Pacific

with minimal risk to the public. It will

take at least two years to get the space

station low enough to where a SpaceX vehicle

can provide the final shove. Thrusters on the

Russian side of the station will help with

control, but that means more fuel will have

to be delivered by 2028. The latest

timeline calls for SpaceX to launch the last

mission for NASA, the Deorbit Vehicle, to the

space station in 2029.

Astronauts would remain on board until the

last four to six months of the station's life

to handle any breakdowns with the empty

outpost plunging into the Pacific by late

2030 or early 2031.

You're listening to Astronomy Daily.

Steve Dunkley: The burgeoning space industry and the

technologies society increasingly relies

on electric grids. Aviation and

telecommunications are all vulnerable to

the same threat. Space Weather

Space weather encompasses any variations in

the space environment between the sun, um,

and the Earth. One common type of space

weather event is called interplanetary

planetary coronal mass ejection.

These ejections are bundles of magnetic

fields and particles that originate from the

sun. They can travel at speeds of up to

1242 miles m per

second or 2000 kilometers per second and may

cause geomagnetic storms. They

create beautiful aurora displays like the

northern lights you can sometimes see in the

skies, but can also disrupt satellite

operations and shut down electric grids

and expose astronauts aboard future

crewed missions to the moon and Mars to

lethal doses of radiation. The goal

of a heliophysicist and space weather

expert is to forecast

extreme space weather, uh, more accurately

and earlier. And to do this, they use a

satellite constellation called Swift.

Commercial interests now make up a big part

of space exploration, focusing on on

space tourism, building satellite networks

and working towards extracting

resources from the moon and nearby asteroids.

Space is also a critical domain for military

operations. Satellites provide essential

capabilities for military communication,

surveillance, navigation and intelligence.

As countries such as the US grow to

depend on infrastructure in space, extreme

space weather events pose a greater threat.

Today, space weather threatens up to

$2.7 trillion in assets

globally. In September

1859, the most powerful recorded space

weather event, known as the Carrington Event,

caused fires in North America and Europe

by supercharging, uh, telegraph wires.

In August 1972, another

Carrington like event nearly struck the

astronauts orbiting the mo. The radiation

dose could have been fatal. More recently, in

February 2022, SpaceX

lost 39 of its 49 newly

launched Starlink satellites. Because of a

moderate space weather event. Space weather

services heavily rely on satellites. That

monitor the solar wind, which is made up

of magnetic field lines and particles coming

from the sun. And communicate their

observations back to Earth. Satellites

can then compare those observations with

historical records. And predict space

weather. And explore how the Earth may

respond to the observed changes in solar

wind. The Earth's magnetic field

naturally protects living things and, uh,

Earth, uh, orbiting satellites. From most

adverse effects of space weather. However,

extreme space weather events may compress

or, or in some cases, peel back the Earth's

magnetic shield. This process allows

solar wind particles to make it into our

protected environment, the magnetosphere,

Exposing satellites and astronauts aboard

space stations to harsher conditions. Most

satellites that continuously monitor

earthbound space weather Orbit relatively

close to the planet. Some satellites are

positioned in low Earth orbit. About 100

miles or 161 kilometers above the Earth.

While others are in geosynchronous orbit,

approximately 25,000 miles or

40,000 kilometers away.

At these distances, the satellites remain

within Earth's, uh, protective magnetic

shield. And can reliably measure the planet's

response to space weather conditions.

However, to more directly study incoming

solar wind, Researchers use additional

satellites located further upstream.

Hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth.

The U.S. the European Space Agency

and India all operate space

monitoring satellites positioned around the

L1 Lagrange point. Nearly 900,000

miles, or

1450,000 kilometers from Earth,

where the gravitational forces of the Earth

and the sun balance. Um, from this

vantage point, space weather monitors can can

provide up to 40 minutes of advanced warning

for incoming solar events. Increasing the

warning time beyond 40 minutes. Current

warning time would help satellite operators,

electric grid planners, flight directors,

astronauts and space force officers.

Better prepare for extreme space weather

events. For instance, during

geomagnetic storms, the atmosphere

heats up, um, and expands, increasing drag on

satellites in low Earth orbit. With enough

advance warning, operators can update their

drag calculations. To prevent satellites from

descending and burning up during these

events. With the updated drag

calculations, satellite operators could use

the satellite's propulsion systems. To

maneuver them into a higher orbit.

Airlines could change their routes. To avoid

exposing passengers and staff to high

radiation doses. During geomagnetic

storms. And and future astronauts on the way

to or working on the Moon or Mars. Who lack

protection from these particles. Could be

alerted in advance to take cover. Aurora

lovers would also appreciate having more time

to get to their favorite viewing

destinations.

The team in charge of the Swift

Constellation, which stands for Space Weather

Investigation Frontier. Will for the first

time place a weather monitor beyond the L1

point. At 1.3 million miles or

2.1 million kilometers from Earth. This

distance would allow scientists to inform

decision makers of any Earthbound, uh, space

weather events up to nearly 60 minutes before

arrival. Satellites with traditional

chemical or electric propulsion systems

cannot maintain an orbit at that location

farther from Earth and closer to the sun for

very long. This is because they would need to

continually burn fuel to

counteract the Sun's gravitational pull. To

address this issue, the team has spent

decades designing and developing a new

propulsion system. The solution is designed

to affordably reach that distance that is

closer to the sun than the traditional L1

point and to operate there reliably for

more than a decade by harnessing an abundant

and reliable source that is sunlight.

Swift would use a fuel less propulsion

system called a solar sail to reach its

orbit. A solar sail is a hair thin

reflective surface simulating a very

thin mirror that spans about a third of a

football field. It balances the force of

light particles coming in from the sun, which

pushes it away with the Sun's

gravity which pulls it inward.

While a sailboat harnesses the lift

created by wind flowing over its curved

sails to move it across the water. A solar

sail uses the momentum of photons from

sunlight reflected off its large shiny sail

to propel a spacecraft through space. Both

the sailboat and the solar sail exploit the

transfer of energy from their respective

environments to drive motion without relying

on traditional propellants. A solar sail

would enable Swift to enter an Otherwise

unstable sub L1 orbit without the

risk of running out of fuel. NASA

successfully launched its first solar sail in

2010. This space demonstration, named

Nanosail D2 featured a

107 square foot or 10

uh square meter sail and was placed in low

Earth orbit. That same year, the Japanese

space agency launched a larger solar sail,

Icarus, which deployed a

2,110 foot or

196 square meter sail

in the solar wind and successfully orbited

Venus. The Planetary society and NASA

followed up by launching two sales in low

Earth orbit Light sail and the advanced

composite solar sail system. With an

area of

860ft square feet

or 80 uh square meters, the

Swift team's solar sail

demonstration mission Solar cruiser will

be equipped with a much larger sail.

Its sail will have an area of

17,793 square

feet or

1653 square

meters and launch as early as

2029. If successful, solar cruiser

will pave the way for Swift's constellation

of four satellites. The constellation would

include one satellite equipped with a sail

propulsion set to be placed in an orbit

beyond L1 and three smaller satellites

with chemical propulsion in an orbit at the

L1 Lagrange point.

Thank you for joining us for this Monday

edition of Astronomy Daily, where we offer

just a few stories from the now famous

Astronomy Daily newsletter, which you can

receive in your email every day just like

Hallie and I do. And to do that, just visit

our uh, URL astronomydaily

IO and place your email address in the slot

provided. Just like that, you'll be receiving

all the latest news about science, space

science and astronomy from around the world

as it's happening. And not only that, you can

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astrodaily Pod on X

or at our new Facebook page, which is of

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there. Astronomy Daily

with Steve and Hallie Space,

Space, Science and Astronomy.

Hallie: There's a secret extra member of Crew 11

traveling to the International Space Station

right now. Disease causing bacteria, or

at least such bacteria, will be growing

aboard the orbiting laboratory very soon.

Scientists at the Sheba Medical center in

Israel, in partnership with US Based space

tech company Space Tango, have developed a

study that will examine how microgravity

affects the growth of certain bacterial

species that cause diseases in humans.

To pull it off, researchers will grow

different strains of bacteria under

microgravity, freeze that bacteria at minus

80 degrees Celsius, and then return the

samples to Earth to see how they've grown

differently than the same bacteria grown on

the home planet. The bacterial strains

involved re Coli, Salmonella bongori and

Salmonella tiffimurium, and they were

launched toward the International space

station aboard NASA's Crew Crew 11 mission

that SpaceX successfully launched on Friday,

August 1. Scientists have already

studied how a lack of gravity affects the way

bacteria grow, and research from NASA is

already underway to study bacteria in space

in general. But researchers behind the

current ISS and bacteria mission specifically

hope to bring home data that will help curb

the spread of infectious disease, or at least

help experts find ways to stop bacteria from

developing antibiotic resistance, uh, a major

public health problem. That means some

disease causing bacteria is no longer wiped

out by drugs that? Ve been developed to clear

the bacteria from people's bodies and get

them healthy again. We know that space

conditions affect bacterial behavior,

including how they grow, express genes and

acquire traits like antibiotic resistance or

virulence, ohad Galmore, head of the

Infectious Diseases Research Laboratory at

Sheba Medical center, said in a statement.

This experiment will allow us for the first

time to systematically and molecularly map

how the genetic expression profile of several

pathogenic bacteria changes in space,

the health of astronauts, and microgravity's

effect on the human body has been top of mind

as people explore space and the idea of what

life off Earth looks like. Human

genes sometimes express themselves

differently in microgravity conditions, and

scientists have linked such an environment to

the expedited loss of muscle seen in

astronauts and even their likelihood of

developing skin rashes if examined on

their own. However, genetic changes in

bacteria will hopefully give researchers more

clues about how they act once inside a human,

whether it's how fast they spread or their

likelihood of getting around our treatments

both in space and here on Earth.

You're listening to Astronomy Daily, the

podcast.

Steve Dunkley: With Steve Dunkley and now

the latest news from Europa Clipper by

NASA. The agency's largest

interplanetary probe tested its radar during

a Mars flyby. The results include a

detailed image and bode well for the mission

at Jupiter's moon Europa

as it soared past Mars in March,

Europa uh, Clipper conducted a critical radar

test that had been impossible to accomplish

here on Earth. Now that the mission

scientists have studied the full stream of

data, they can declare that mission ace or

that test a success. The radar

performed just as expected, bouncing and

receiving signals off the region around Mars

m equator without a hitch.

Europa Clippers radar instrument received

echoes of its very high frequency

radar signals that bounce off Mars and were

processed to develop a radiogram which can be

found on the NASA website. What looks like a

skyline is the outline of the topography

beneath the spacecraft called reason, which

stands for radar for Europa Assessment and

Sounding Ocean near to surface. The radar

instrument will see into Europa's icy

shell, which may have pockets of water

inside. The radar may even be able to detect

the ocean beneath the shell of Jupiter's

fourth largest moon. We've got everything

out of the flyby that we dreamed of, said Don

Blankenship. He's the principal investigator

of the radar instrument of the University of

Texas at Austin. He says the goal was

to determine the radar's readiness for the

Europa mission. And it worked. He says

everything part of every part of the mission

proved itself to do exactly what we

intended. He sounds like a very happy

developer. The radar will help scientists

understand how the ice may capture materials

from the ocean and transfer them to the

surface of the moon above ground. The

instrument will help to study elements of

Europa's topography, such as ridges

so the scientists can examine how they relate

to features that REASON images beneath the

surface. Europa Clipper has an unusual

radar setup for an interplanetary

spacecraft. Reason uses two pair of

slender antenna that jut out from the

solar arrays spanning a distance of about

58ft, or 17.6 meters.

Those arrays themselves are huge, from tip to

tip, the size of a basketball court, so they

can catch as much light as possible at

Europa, which gets about 1 25th as sunlight

as Earth. The instrument team conducted all

the testing that was possible prior to the

Spacecraft's launch from NASA's Kennedy

Space center in Florida on October

14, 2024. During development,

engineers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Lab

laboratory in Southern California even took

the work to outdoors, using open air

towers on a plateau above JPL to stretch out

and test engineering models of the

instruments spindly high frequency and more

compact very high frequency antennas. But

once the actual flight hardware was built, it

needed to be kept sterile and could be tested

only in an enclosed area. Engineers

used the giant high Bay

one clean room at JPL where the spacecraft

was assembled to test the instrument piece by

piece. To test the echo or the bounce back of

reason signals, however, they needed

a chamber of about 250ft, or

76 meters long, nearly 3/4 the length of a

football field. The mission's primary goal in

flying by Mars on March 1, less than

five months after the launch, was to use the

plan planet's gravitational pull to reshape

the spacecraft's trajectory. But it

also presented opportunities to calibrate the

spacecraft's infrared camera and perform a

dry run of the radar instrument over terrain

NASA scientists had been studying for

decades. As Europa Clipper

zipped by the volcanic plains of the Red

planet, starting at 3,100 miles or

5,000 kilometers, down to 550

miles, or 884 kilometers above the surface,

Reason sent and received radio waves for

about 40 minutes. In comparison, at

Europa, the instrument will operate as close

as 16 miles, or 25 kilometers above the

moon's surface. All told,

engineers were able to collect 60 gigabytes

of rich data from the instrument. Almost

immediately, they could tell REASON was

working very well indeed. The flight team

scheduled the full data set to download

starting in mid May. Scientists relished the

opportunity over the next couple of months to

examine the information in detail and compare

notes. The engineers were excited that

their test worked so perfectly, said JPL's

Tina Ray, Europa Clippers deputy science

manager. All of us who had worked so hard to

make this test happen and the scientists

seeing the data for the first time were

ecstatic, she says, saying, oh, look at

this and look at that. Now the science team

is getting a, uh, head start on learning how

to process the data and understand the

instruments behavior compared to the models

they are exercising those muscles just like

they will out at Europa. She sounds like a

very excited scientist. Europa Clipper's

total journey to reach the icy moon will

be about 1.8 billion miles, or

2.9 billion kilometers, and includes more

one more gravity ascendant, fastest using

Earth in 2026. The

spacecraft is currently about 280 million

miles, or 450 million kilometers from Earth.

Europa UH Clipper's three main science

objectives are UH to determine the thickness

of the Moon's icy shell and its interactions

with the ocean below to investigate its

composition and characterize its geology. The

mission's detailed exploration of Europa will

help scientists better understand the

astrobiological potential for habitable

worlds beyond Earth.

You're listening to Astronomy Daily, the

podcast.

Hallie: With your host Steve Dudley.

Astronomers using the NASA ESA

CSA James Webb Space Telescope have observed

the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, an area of deep

space with nearly 10,000 galaxies in the

constellation Fornax. The original

HUDF images were pioneering deep field

observations with hubble. Published in 2004,

they probed more deeply than ever before and

revealed a menagerie of galaxies dating back

to less than a billion years after the Big

Bang. The area was subsequently observed

many times by Hubble and other telescopes.

The field shown here, known as the MIRI Deep

Imaging Survey region, was observed with the

shortest wavelength filter of Webb's mid

infrared Instrument for nearly 100 hours, the

Webb astronomer said in a statement. This

is Webb's longest observation of an

extragalactic field in one filter so far,

producing one of the deepest views ever

obtained of the universe. Combined with data

from Webb's near infrared camera, this image

allows astronomers to explore how galaxies

formed and evolved over billions of years.

These deep observations have revealed more

than 2,500 sources in this tiny patch of sky.

The sky among them are hundreds of extremely

red galaxies, some of which are likely

massive dust obscured systems or evolved

galaxies with mature stars that formed early

in the universe's history. Thanks to Webb's

sharp resolution even at mid infrared

wavelengths, researchers can resolve the

structures of many of these galaxies and

study how their light is distributed,

shedding light on their growth and evolution.

In the new Webb image of hudf, the colors

that appear have been assigned to different

kinds of infrared light highlight the fine

distinctions astronomers can make with these

deep data. Orange and red represent the

longest mid infrared wavelengths, the

astronomers said. The galaxies in these

colors have extra features such as high

concentrations of dust, copious star

formation, or an active galactic nucleus at

their center, which emit more of this farther

infrared light. Small greenish white

galaxies are particularly distant with high

redshifts. This shifts their light

spectrum into the peak mid infrared

wavelengths of the data, which are depicted

in white and green. Most of the galaxies

in this image lack any such mid infrared

boosting features, leaving them most bright

at shorter near infrared wavelengths, which

are depicted with blue and cyan colors.

That everyone was the Monday episode.

Steve Dunkley: Wow, Hallie. All done.

Hallie: Um, and no one caught a nasty science fiction

bug from outer space, did we?

Steve Dunkley: No we didn't, Hallie. So

thankfully, we will be seeing you again next

week on Astronomy Daily with.

Hallie: Us, Hallie and Steve.

Steve Dunkley: That's right. See you next Monday, everybody.

Hallie: Bye.

Voice Over Guy: Astronomy Daily, the podcast

with your host, Steve Dunkley.

In this episode