Spectrum Aborts at T-3 | Canada Loses Its Moon Rover | Triton Tilted Neptune

0:00 Speaker 1: Before we dive into today's main stories, we have a

0:03 Speaker 1: quick update on a mission we've been following closely. I

0:07 Speaker 1: saw Aerospace's second Spectrum rocket launch onward and upward.

0:12 Speaker 2: And unfortunately it's not the news we were hoping for.

0:15 Speaker 2: On the evening of March twenty fifth, the Spectrum rocket

0:19 Speaker 2: was sitting on the pad at Hanoya Spaceport in Norway

0:22 Speaker 2: Countdown running world watching and the flight aborted at T

0:27 Speaker 2: minus three seconds, three seconds from ignition.

0:30 Speaker 1: The launch window closed without a second attempt, and as

0:34 Speaker 1: of right now, no new launch date has been announced.

0:37 Speaker 1: The cause of the abort hasn't been made public yet either.

0:41 Speaker 1: This was already a mission that had been delayed multiple

0:44 Speaker 1: times by bad weather, and now this for context.

0:48 Speaker 2: Spectrum's first flight last March ended about thirty seconds after

0:52 Speaker 2: liftoff when a vent valve opened unexpectedly and the rocket

0:56 Speaker 2: came down into the sea near the pad. Isar fixed

0:59 Speaker 2: the issue past static fire tests, loaded up five CubeSats

1:03 Speaker 2: and a science payload and went back to the pad

1:07 Speaker 2: and they got to T minus three seconds.

1:10 Speaker 1: Which, as painful as it is, does suggest the vehicle

1:13 Speaker 1: is healthy and the abort system is doing its job.

1:17 Speaker 1: We'll keep following this one for now. Isar's European dream

1:21 Speaker 1: of reaching orbit is still waiting.

1:24 Speaker 2: And we're going to stay in the world of difficult

1:26 Speaker 2: space news for our first main story today, because Canada

1:30 Speaker 2: has just canceled its first ever moon rover mission.

1:34 Speaker 1: The Water Seeking Lunar Rover project, which the Canadian Space

1:37 Speaker 1: Agency first announced back in twenty twenty one, has officially

1:41 Speaker 1: been terminated in Canada's spending plan for twenty twenty six

1:45 Speaker 1: to twenty twenty seven. It was a mission designed to

1:48 Speaker 1: explore the Moon's south pole, hunt for water ice, and

1:52 Speaker 1: probe the geology of our closest neighbor in space, and.

1:56 Speaker 2: It came remarkably close to being real. The rover was

1:59 Speaker 2: being built by Ontario company Canondenz's Aerospace under a forty

2:03 Speaker 2: three million Canadian dollar contract. It was at fhasee of development,

2:08 Speaker 2: approaching its critical design review later this year. That's not

2:11 Speaker 2: a concept on a whiteboard. That's hardware being built in

2:15 Speaker 2: a lab.

2:16 Speaker 1: The mission lead scientist Gordon Ozinski from Western University, known

2:21 Speaker 1: in a lunar community simply as oz told space dot

2:25 Speaker 1: Com that his team received the news back in February

2:28 Speaker 1: and spent a month trying to fight the cancelation, he said,

2:32 Speaker 1: and I love this quote. It's hopefully not a lost cause.

2:36 Speaker 2: The rover was expected to ride to the Moon on

2:39 Speaker 2: Firefly Aerospace is twenty twenty nine commercial Lunar Payload Services

2:43 Speaker 2: mission landing on the rim of Howarth Crater at the

2:47 Speaker 2: South Pole. Six instruments, twenty years of Canadian rover expertise

2:52 Speaker 2: wrapped into a thirty five kilogram vehicle. Gone.

2:56 Speaker 1: Canada says the knowledge and expertise built up through the

3:00 Speaker 1: program can be repurposed. There's a planned Canadian Lunar Utility

3:04 Speaker 1: rover in the pipeline, essentially a cargo vehicle to support

3:08 Speaker 1: future Artemis astronaut missions no earlier than twenty thirty three.

3:13 Speaker 1: Three companies are already doing preparatory studies for that vehicle.

3:17 Speaker 2: But there's a bigger picture here too. This news landed

3:21 Speaker 2: the same week NASA announced it was pausing the Gateway

3:24 Speaker 2: Lunar space station, and Gateway was supposed to be maintained

3:28 Speaker 2: by Canada's CANADARM three. That's a lot of uncertainty hitting

3:32 Speaker 2: the Canadian space program all at once. MBA Space, which

3:36 Speaker 2: makes Canada ARM three, has set its contract with the

3:39 Speaker 2: Canadian Space Agency is continuing and the ARM is still

3:42 Speaker 2: in the design phase, so there's flexibility to adapt. But still,

3:47 Speaker 2: and all.

3:47 Speaker 1: Of this is unfolding less than a week before the

3:50 Speaker 1: Artemis two launch, which includes Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on

3:55 Speaker 1: the crew pill be the first non American to fly

3:58 Speaker 1: on a Moon mission. Canada is simultaneously about to hit

4:02 Speaker 1: one of its highest ever moments in space exploration while

4:06 Speaker 1: quietly canceling its lunar rover.

4:09 Speaker 2: Space is complicated, but we'll raise a glass for Oz

4:13 Speaker 2: on his team. They did remarkable work and that knowledge

4:16 Speaker 2: doesn't just disappear.

4:18 Speaker 1: All right. Let's switch from the geopolitical and the heartbreaking

4:21 Speaker 1: to the genuinely thrilling, because astronomers have just solved a

4:26 Speaker 1: mystery that has been haunting the field for over one

4:28 Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years.

4:30 Speaker 2: The star at the center of all this is called

4:32 Speaker 2: Gamma Cassiopeia or Gamma cast for short. It's actually visible

4:37 Speaker 2: to the naked eye. It forms the central peak of

4:39 Speaker 2: the W shape in the constellation Cassiopeia. And back in

4:42 Speaker 2: eighteen sixty six, an Italian astronomer named Angelo Seki noticed

4:47 Speaker 2: something very strange about.

4:48 Speaker 1: It its hydrogen signature. The hydrogen fingerprint that appears in

4:52 Speaker 1: a star's light was bright, where in stars like our

4:56 Speaker 1: own sun it normally shows up as a dark line.

4:59 Speaker 2: That was so so.

5:00 Speaker 1: Unusual it actually created a whole new classification of stars,

5:04 Speaker 1: the so called B stars, B for the hot blue

5:07 Speaker 1: white type and E for the peculiar emission. Gamma Cass

5:11 Speaker 1: was the first of its kind, and it's been mysterious

5:14 Speaker 1: ever since. Then.

5:16 Speaker 2: In the nineteen seventies, the mystery got bigger. Astronomers discovered

5:20 Speaker 2: Gamma Cass was pumping out incredibly intense X rays, the

5:24 Speaker 2: kind of X rays you'd expect from plasma, burning out

5:26 Speaker 2: around one hundred and fifty million degrees for context, that's

5:30 Speaker 2: about ten times hotter than the core of our own sun.

5:34 Speaker 2: It shone forty times brighter in X rays in a

5:36 Speaker 2: typical star of its size. Nobody could explain it.

5:40 Speaker 1: Two competing theories emerged. Either the X rays were being

5:44 Speaker 1: produced by magnetic interactions between the star and the disk

5:48 Speaker 1: of material spinning around it, or there was a hidden

5:51 Speaker 1: companion star pulling matter from Gamma Cass and heating it

5:56 Speaker 1: to extreme temperatures as it fell in the problem was

6:00 Speaker 1: no telescope was precise enough to settle the debate until now.

6:05 Speaker 2: Enter XRIISM, the X ray Imaging and Spectroscopy mission run

6:09 Speaker 2: by Japan's Space Agency JOCKXA in collaboration with NASA and ISSA.

6:14 Speaker 2: Using its Ultra High Precision Resolve instrument. The team observed

6:18 Speaker 2: gamma cast three times in December twenty twenty four, February

6:22 Speaker 2: twenty twenty five, and June twenty twenty five, and tracked

6:25 Speaker 2: how the X ray signature changed between observations, and.

6:29 Speaker 1: The result was definitive. The X ray emissions follow the

6:32 Speaker 1: orbital motion of the companion, not the b star itself.

6:36 Speaker 1: The hidden companion is a white dwarf, a dead star

6:40 Speaker 1: roughly the size of Earth, orbiting gamma casts on a

6:43 Speaker 1: two hundred and three day cycle and slowly siphoning material

6:47 Speaker 1: from the larger star. As that material falls onto the

6:51 Speaker 1: white dwarf, it heats to extraordinary temperatures and blazes in

6:55 Speaker 1: X rays.

6:56 Speaker 2: Team leader Yaile Nazi of the University of Liege called

6:59 Speaker 2: it extremely satisfying to finally have direct evidence after so

7:03 Speaker 2: much effort across so many research groups over so many decades.

7:08 Speaker 2: And this isn't just about one weird star. It confirms

7:11 Speaker 2: a whole class of binary systems that theorists predicted existed

7:15 Speaker 2: but had never been clearly identified. Yamma Cass is now

7:18 Speaker 2: the prototype for the Bee plus white dwarf binary family.

7:22 Speaker 1: A mystery that started in eighteen sixty six finally closed

7:27 Speaker 1: in twenty twenty six. That's the kind of scientific patience

7:30 Speaker 1: that makes you feel very small and very odd at

7:33 Speaker 1: the same time.

7:34 Speaker 2: Here's the question that sounds simple but turns out to

7:37 Speaker 2: be surprisingly tricky. Why is Neptune tilted?

7:41 Speaker 1: Neptune has an axial tilt of about twenty eight degrees,

7:45 Speaker 1: not as extreme as Uranus, which is basically rolling around

7:48 Speaker 1: on its side, but still a significant lean. For decades,

7:52 Speaker 1: the standard explanation was that Neptune must have been hit

7:55 Speaker 1: by something large during the Solar system's chaotic early period.

8:00 Speaker 1: It off axis big collisions with planetary embryos, that kind

8:04 Speaker 1: of thing.

8:05 Speaker 2: But new research is proposing a very different culprit, one

8:08 Speaker 2: that's been sitting right there in Neptune's own backyard all

8:11 Speaker 2: the time.

8:12 Speaker 1: Triton Creighton is Neptune's largest moon, and it's one of

8:17 Speaker 1: the strangest objects in the Solar System. Unlike virtually every

8:21 Speaker 1: other large moon, it orbits backwards in the opposite direction

8:25 Speaker 1: to Neptune's rotation. That alone tells you it wasn't born there.

8:30 Speaker 1: It was captured, probably from the Kuiper Belt, billions of

8:33 Speaker 1: years ago.

8:34 Speaker 2: And the new research suggests that capture event and specifically

8:38 Speaker 2: the weight Triton's orbit evolved after being captured, may have

8:42 Speaker 2: been enough to tilt Neptune's entire spin axis. The mechanism

8:47 Speaker 2: involves what's called a spin orbit resonance. As train's orbit

8:51 Speaker 2: gradually decayed due to tidal forces and circularized, it passed

8:56 Speaker 2: through a resonance with the fundamental frequency of the Solar System,

9:00 Speaker 2: and that resonance torqued Neptune's access over The simulations show

9:05 Speaker 2: tilt exceeding fifty degrees in some cases.

9:08 Speaker 1: So rather than a catastrophic external collision, the tilt could

9:13 Speaker 1: have been an inside job, Neptune's own rebellious moon slowly

9:18 Speaker 1: nudging its parent planet off kilter over millions of years,

9:22 Speaker 1: just by the gravitational dynamics of its captured backwards orbit.

9:27 Speaker 2: It's a beautiful piece of celestial mechanics, and it's a

9:30 Speaker 2: reminder of just how much one object can quietly reshape

9:34 Speaker 2: the world around it without anyone noticing. Over deep time.

9:38 Speaker 1: Brighton has always been my favorite chaotic moon. This just

9:43 Speaker 1: cements it now.

9:44 Speaker 2: This one is a genuine milestone, and one that's had

9:48 Speaker 2: a long road to get here. NASA's Dragonfly mission has

9:51 Speaker 2: officially entered the integration and testing phase. The rotorcraft lander

9:56 Speaker 2: that will one day fly over the surface of Saturn's moon, Titan,

10:00 Speaker 2: is being assembled right now.

10:03 Speaker 1: The work is happening at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics

10:06 Speaker 1: Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, APL which is leading the mission.

10:10 Speaker 1: And when we say rotorcraft, we mean a full car

10:14 Speaker 1: sized nuclear powered drone, not a prototype, not a model,

10:18 Speaker 1: the actual flight vehicle that is going to launch in

10:21 Speaker 1: twenty twenty eight and spend six years traveling to Titan.

10:25 Speaker 2: The early weeks of integration have focused on two critical components,

10:29 Speaker 2: the integrated electronics module essentially Dragonfly's brain, housing the core

10:35 Speaker 2: avionics including command, data handling, guidance, and navigation, and the

10:40 Speaker 2: power switching units that control the flow of electricity to

10:44 Speaker 2: all the instruments and systems, both past their first power

10:47 Speaker 2: on tests connected to the spacecraft's wiring system.

10:51 Speaker 1: Principal investigator Elizabeth Turtle called it, and this is a

10:54 Speaker 1: great line, the birth of our flight system, because that's

10:58 Speaker 1: really what integration is. All the components that have been

11:01 Speaker 1: designed and tested and refined separately are now coming together

11:05 Speaker 1: as one machine for the first time, and.

11:08 Speaker 2: The rest of the vehicle is taking shape. Two. The

11:11 Speaker 2: aeroshell and cruise stage are being integrated and tested at

11:14 Speaker 2: Lockheed Martin in Colorado, when tunnel testing at NASA Langley

11:19 Speaker 2: has been completed. The foam insulation that will protect Dragonfly

11:23 Speaker 2: from Titan's minus one hundred and eighty degree surface temperatures

11:27 Speaker 2: is being tested in a dedicated Titan chamber at APL.

11:31 Speaker 2: The flight radio has been delivered, the science payload is

11:34 Speaker 2: coming together at institutions around the world.

11:38 Speaker 1: Integration and testing will continue at APL through this year

11:41 Speaker 1: and into early twenty twenty seven, when system level testing

11:45 Speaker 1: moves to Lockheed Martin. Then it returns to APL for

11:48 Speaker 1: final environmental testing before heading to Kennedy's Space Center in

11:52 Speaker 1: spring twenty twenty eight for launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.

11:56 Speaker 2: And why is Titan worth all of this? Because it

12:00 Speaker 2: is one of the most extraordinary places in the Solar System.

12:03 Speaker 2: It has a thick nitrogen atmosphere, lakes and rivers of

12:07 Speaker 2: liquid methane and ethane, complex organic chemistry on its surface,

12:12 Speaker 2: and likely a subsurface ocean of liquid water. It looks

12:16 Speaker 2: in many ways like a frozen early Earth, and studying

12:20 Speaker 2: it may help us understand how the chemistry of life

12:22 Speaker 2: got started. Dragonfly is going to fly to dozens of

12:26 Speaker 2: locations across its surface, sampling, imaging, sniffing the atmosphere.

12:32 Speaker 1: We are literally building the thing right now, and in

12:35 Speaker 1: twenty thirty four it lands on another world. That's extraordinary.

12:40 Speaker 2: Story five takes us to Kazakhstan and a moment that's

12:43 Speaker 2: been a long time coming for Russia's troubled space program.

12:47 Speaker 1: Baikanor Cosmodrome is one of the most storied launch sites

12:51 Speaker 1: in history, the place where Sputnik launched, where Yuri Gagarin launched,

12:56 Speaker 1: where the Soviet and then Russian space program wrote some

12:59 Speaker 1: of its most legendary chapters. But last November, one of

13:04 Speaker 1: its launch structures suffered a catastrophic structural collapse. It was

13:09 Speaker 1: a major blow to an already struggling program.

13:12 Speaker 2: The repairs are now complete, a fresh cargo mission has

13:15 Speaker 2: launched successfully from the same pad that failed, and Russia

13:19 Speaker 2: is back in orbit. On the surface, it looks like

13:22 Speaker 2: a recovery story, and in some ways it is.

13:25 Speaker 1: But the broader context is hard to ignore. The Russian

13:29 Speaker 1: space program that once put the first human in space,

13:32 Speaker 1: that was neck and neck with the United States in

13:35 Speaker 1: the greatest technological race in history, is now a shadow

13:39 Speaker 1: of what it was. Budget pressures, geopolitical isolation, brain drain,

13:44 Speaker 1: the loss of international partnerships, all of it has compounded

13:48 Speaker 1: over the years into a program that is struggling to

13:51 Speaker 1: find its footing.

13:53 Speaker 2: The successful launch from Baikunor is genuinely good news for

13:57 Speaker 2: the cosmonauts who depend on cargo resupply and for the

14:00 Speaker 2: engineers who work through the repairs, but it doesn't resolve

14:04 Speaker 2: the deeper questions about where the Russian space program goes

14:07 Speaker 2: from here, or whether it can rebuild its place among

14:10 Speaker 2: the stars.

14:11 Speaker 1: Base exploration has always been at its most powerful when

14:15 Speaker 1: it's collaborative, and whatever your views on geopolitics, there's something

14:19 Speaker 1: genuinely sad about watching a program with such an extraordinary

14:23 Speaker 1: legacy find itself so diminished. We hope the trajectory turns

14:28 Speaker 1: around and.

14:29 Speaker 2: We're closing today with something that is a combination of

14:32 Speaker 2: deep history and cutting edge astronomy, because NASA's brand new

14:36 Speaker 2: sphere X space telescope has just made a striking observation

14:40 Speaker 2: of the remnant of a nova that exploded over one

14:42 Speaker 2: hundred and twenty years.

14:44 Speaker 1: Ago, Nova Perseus nineteen oh one. On February the twenty second,

14:50 Speaker 1: nineteen oh one, astronomers watched a star in the constellation

14:54 Speaker 1: Perseus suddenly blaze to life, becoming one of the brightest

14:58 Speaker 1: objects in the nights. People all over the world could

15:02 Speaker 1: see it for a few days.

15:04 Speaker 2: It was dazzling, unlike a supernova, which destroyed the star.

15:08 Speaker 2: A nova is a thermonuclear explosion on the surface of

15:12 Speaker 2: a white dwarf in a binary system, triggered when it

15:15 Speaker 2: accumulates enough material from a companion. The star survives, but

15:19 Speaker 2: the explosion blasts material out into space at enormous velocity.

15:24 Speaker 1: SPHEERX, the spectro Photometer for the History of the Universe,

15:28 Speaker 1: Epoch of Reionization and ICE's explore, which is a mouthful

15:33 Speaker 1: even by NASA standards, launched earlier this year and is

15:36 Speaker 1: already delivering science pointed at the remnant of nova persee.

15:41 Speaker 1: It detected something remarkable, a bipolar molecular hydrogen shell surrounding

15:47 Speaker 1: the nova, two lobes of hydrogen gas expanding outward from

15:51 Speaker 1: the explosion in opposite directions.

15:54 Speaker 2: This kind of structure tells astronomers about how the explosion expanded,

15:58 Speaker 2: how it interacted with surrounding material, and what the environment

16:02 Speaker 2: around the nova looked like before it erupted. And detecting

16:05 Speaker 2: molecular hydrogen specifically requires the kind of infrared sensitivity that

16:10 Speaker 2: sphex was built for.

16:12 Speaker 1: It's a lovely early result for a telescope with enormous ambitions.

16:17 Speaker 1: SPHEREx is designed to survey the entire sky in infrared

16:20 Speaker 1: over its mission, mapping hundreds of millions of galaxies and

16:24 Speaker 1: probing the physics of the early universe. But starting with

16:28 Speaker 1: one hundred year old nova in our own galactic neighborhood

16:31 Speaker 1: is a pretty charming way to get going.

16:33 Speaker 2: A star exploded in nineteen oh one, a farmer in

16:37 Speaker 2: England looked up and pointed at it, and in twenty

16:40 Speaker 2: twenty six we're building detailed maps of what it left behind.

16:43 Speaker 2: That's science across generations.

16:46 Speaker 1: That is everything for today's Astronomy Daily. What a lineup,

16:50 Speaker 1: a dramatic abort in Norway, a canceled moon rover, one

16:54 Speaker 1: hundred and fifty year mystery cracked open Neptune's mysterious lean

16:59 Speaker 1: potentially explained by its own moon, a spacecraft being assembled

17:03 Speaker 1: for a world of methane lakes, a Russian comeback from

17:07 Speaker 1: a crumbles launch pad, and a hundred year old nova

17:10 Speaker 1: being macked by a brand new telescope.

17:13 Speaker 2: There is never a dull day in space. You can

17:16 Speaker 2: find all of today's source links in the show notes,

17:18 Speaker 2: and if you've been enjoying the show, please leave us

17:20 Speaker 2: a review or share the episode. It makes an enormous difference.

17:24 Speaker 1: We're on x, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and tumbler at astro

17:29 Speaker 1: Daily pod and you can find us at Astronomy Daily

17:33 Speaker 1: dot io for more. Until tomorrow, keep watching the Skies,

17:37 Speaker 1: Clear Skies, Everyone.

17:39 Speaker 2: Sunday Stars Starz