Starfall Takes Flight, Roman Telescope Arrives, and Dark Matter's New Secrets Unveiled

Anna: Today, right now, as you're listening,

SpaceX may already have launched something

the world barely knows exists, a brand

new spacecraft, a secret disk shaped

capsule called Starfall. It blasted off

this morning from Cape Canaveral and it could

change how things are made in space. Today on

Astronomy Daily. That story plus the next

great space telescope just touched down in

Florida and the most mysterious glow in the

galaxy just got a whole lot more mysterious.

Stay with us.

Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm

Anna.

Avery: And I'm Avery. It is Tuesday 23rd

June, 2026, and the universe has been

busy.

Anna: We have six big stories for you today. A same

day launch, a telescope milestone, two

JWST blockbusters, a, uh,

ticking clock, space rescue and China's

asteroid mission. Approaching the moment of

truth.

Avery: Let's get into it.

Anna: Here's something a bit unusual to kick things

off. We're covering a story that is happening

right now, this morning. As this episode goes

out, SpaceX launched,

Avery: or is about to launch, a spacecraft that the

company has said almost nothing about

publicly.

Anna: It's called Starfall. And everything we know

about it comes not from SpaceX press releases

or Elon tweets, but from filings with the

U.S. federal Aviation Administration and

Federal Communications Commission.

Avery: So what is it? Starfall is a re entry

capsule, a vehicle designed to carry cargo

into orbit and bring it safely back to Earth.

But it's not another dragon. It's a flat

disk, about 3.1 meters across and

only 75 centimeters tall. Think of a

large flying saucer rather than a pointy

rocket cone.

Anna: The launch window opened at, uh, 6:43 this

morning, Eastern Time. That's

8:43pm here on the east coast of

Australia. It's flying on a Falcon 9 from

Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the

booster supporting the mission on its 29th

flight.

Avery: Now, why does this matter? The target market

is space manufacturing. The idea is that

microgravity, true weightlessness, lets

you make things you can't make on Earth. Pure

pharmaceutical crystals, advanced materials,

bio printed tissues. But to make any of that

commercially viable, you need a cheap,

reliable way to bring your product home.

Anna: Until now, a small California company called

Varda Space Industries has been pioneering

that market. They've flown six capsule

missions. But their capsules are small,

carrying dozens of kilograms at most.

Starfall is rated for up to

1000kg. That's roughly 30

times more return capacity,

Avery: which creates an interesting situation

because Varda has been launching all of its

missions on SpaceX rockets. SpaceX

is now entering the market.

Anna: It's been powering after reentry

starfall splashes down in the Pacific Ocean

off the US West coast, about

1,300km offshore. It's

designed to be mass produced for starship

flights in the future. Though Today's demo

uses Falcon 9, SpaceX

Avery: has been approved for two re entry

demonstrations. This is the first. We'll be

watching closely for news of a successful

recovery.

Anna: A genuinely exciting morning to be a space

nerd.

Now, from a launch happening today to a

launch that's just a couple of months away,

NASA's next great space telescope

Avery: has arrived in Florida, the Nancy Grace

Roman Space Telescope. Roman for short,

arrived at the Kennedy Space center on Sunday

21 June, riding NASA's

Pegasus barge down from Baltimore after being

loaded up at Goddard Space Flight center in

Maryland.

Anna: The telescope was tucked inside a special

transport container that NASA has nicknamed I

love this, the Chariot, keeping with the

Roman theme because the telescope is named

after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's very

first chief of astronomy, not after the

Empire. Roman is often called the

mother of Hubble. She was the driving force

behind getting Hubble built in the first

place. It's a fitting tribute.

Avery: Now roman is at KSC's Payload Hazardous

Servicing Facility for final launch

preparations. The team will check all six

solar panels, inspect insulation and thermal

blankets, and load around 290 gallons

of hydrazine fuel.

Anna: And here's the headline number NASA is

targeting launch no earlier than Sunday 30th

August on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.

And that timeline puts Roman a full eight

months ahead of its original schedule.

Avery: Eight months ahead. That's remarkable for a

flagship space telescope.

Anna: So what will Roman actually do? Its main

Instrument is a 300 megapixel infrared

camera with a field of view 100 times

wider than Hubble's. It will survey billions

of galaxies, discover hundreds of thousands

of exoplanets, probe dark energy and

dark matter, and do all of this at speeds and

scales that simply weren't possible before.

Avery: It also carries a coronagraph, a starlight

blocking instrument that will directly image

planets around nearby stars, a key step

in the long hunt for Earth.

Anna: Like worlds after launch, Roman will travel

to the second Sun, Earth, Lagrange Point L2,

about 1.5 million kilometers from

Earth, the same neighborhood where the James

Webb Space Telescope is parked right now.

Avery: Webb looking deep and narrow, Roman

looking wide and fast. They're going to

complement each other beautifully.

Anna: And speaking of the James Webb Space

Telescope, let's talk about what it's been

showing us lately, because JWST

keeps finding things that shouldn't be there.

Avery: This week, a series of three new papers

published in the Astrophysical Journal

Letters reveal something extraordinary about

a galaxy cluster called

XLSSC122.

Anna: Now, XLSSC122 was

first spotted way back in 2014 during an X

ray survey. It's about 10.4

billion light years away, meaning we're

seeing it as it existed when the universe was

only around 3.3 billion years old.

That era is called cosmic noon, the peak

of star formation when galaxies were building

themselves at a furious rate.

Avery: It looks far too grown up for its age. It's

large, it's organized, it has a dense,

concentrated core. A According to standard

cosmological models, galaxy clusters that far

back should still be loose, scattered. Still

assembling, this one looks like it's had

millions of years more to develop than it

should have.

Anna: But JWST has now revealed something

even more surprising. When astronomers

pointed the telescope at this cluster, they

discovered it's acting as a gravitational

lens. Its immense mass is bending and

warping the light of even more distant

galaxies behind it, creating beautiful

blue gray arcs around the cluster's center.

Avery: And that makes XLSSC122 the

most distant galaxy cluster ever confirmed to

act as a strong gravitational lens. Some of

that bent light set out on its journey more

than 12 billion years ago.

Anna: The lensing effect is dominated not by the

cluster's stars and gas, but by dark matter.

By studying the arcs, the team at Caltech's

IPAC can map the dark matter distribution

with remarkable precision. And what they

found is a core that's far more concentrated

than their models.

Avery: Predictable the third paper in the series

found something called intracluster light, a

faint glow from stars that have been stripped

loose from their galaxies and now drift free

through the cluster.

XLSSC122 is the

earliest known cluster where this glow has

been detected.

Anna: These results were announced at the

248th meeting of the American

Astronomical Society. Lead author Kyle

Finner from IPAC summed it up before

JWST we couldn't do this level of

science in the early distant universe.

Avery: It's another reminder that the early universe

was far more structured and stranger than our

models expected.

Next up, we're staying in the realm of dark

matter because a new study published in

Physical Review Letters has just reignited

one of astrophysics most stubborn debates.

Anna: At the heart of our Milky Way, there's a

mysterious spherical glow of high energy

gamma rays. It extends for thousands of light

years out from the galactic center. NASA's

Fermi telescope first spotted it in the late

2000s, and astronomers have been arguing

about it ever since.

Avery: It's called the galactic center excess, and

there are two main explanations. One, a, uh,

huge population of millisecond pulsars,

rapidly spinning neutron stars that beam

gamma rays outward. Two, dark

matter particles annihilating each other.

When two dark matter particles collide and

destroy each other, they can release energy,

including gamma rays.

Anna: The pulsar explanation had been gaining

ground in recent years. Some earlier

analyses suggested a relatively modest

population of a few hundred pulsars could

explain the signal.

Avery: But this new research, led by Florian List at

the University of Vienna and Nick Rod at the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has

changed the picture. They trained a machine

learning model on more than 1 million

simulated gamma ray observations. And the

result? For pulsars to account for the

signal, you would need more than 35,000

of them concentrated near the galactic

center.

Anna: 35,000. That's an

implausibly high number. And crucially,

those pulsars would need to be so

individually faint that they'd be nearly

indistinguishable from the emission you'd

expect from annihilating dark matter.

Avery: As Nick Rod put it, our new analysis shows

that the sources would have to be so faint

that they would be almost indistinguishable

from the emission expected from annihilating

dark matter.

Anna: The study doesn't prove dark matter is the

cause, far from it. But it means the dark

matter explanation cannot be ruled out.

And the pulsar hypothesis is on much

shakier ground than many thought.

Avery: Upcoming observatories, including the

Cherenkov Telescope Array and the Southern

Wide Field Gamma Ray Observatory, should

eventually give us the resolution to separate

these two signals. That observatory,

incidentally, is being built in Chile. Well

placed for Southern Hemisphere skywatchers.

Anna: Something to watch closely. The heart of our

own galaxy may be telling us something

profound about the invisible stuff that makes

up most of the universe now. A, uh,

ticking clock. NASA's SIFT observatory

rescue mission is four days from launch, and

the people behind it are honest about what

they've pulled off.

Avery: Sean Domogal Goldman, NASA's astrophysics

division director, said at a briefing press

last week. And I quote, frankly,

I have to be honest, no one thought it was

going to be possible.

Anna: The story so far. The Neil Gerald

Swift Observatory has been watching the sky

for gamma ray bursts since 2004.

Over 2,000 detected across more than

two decades. But it's been slowly

losing altitude. Increased solar

activity has puffed up Earth's upper

atmosphere, creating drag that's been pulling

Swift down faster than expected.

Avery: Without intervention, Swift faces a

90% chance of uncontrolled re entry

by the end of this year. So NASA awarded

a contract to an Arizona company called

Catalyst Space Technologies last September

to build and launch a rescue spacecraft in

under nine months. Nine months from

scratch. To build something that has never

been attempted before.

Anna: That spacecraft is called Link,

lightweight in space, navigation and

kinematics. It's a boxy vehicle about the

size of a fridge, carrying three robotic arms

fitted with lidar sensors, three hall

thrusters and 16 reaction control

thrusters.

Avery: Link is now encapsulated inside a, uh,

Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, which

itself will be making history as the last

ever Pegasus XL flight. The

rocket is carried under the belly of a

modified aircraft called Stargazer, the only

remaining airworthy Lockheed Martin L1011

TriStar in the world.

Anna: Launch is set for Saturday 27th

June from Kwajalen Atoll in the Marshall

Islands. The air launch method is required

because Swift's orbit, inclined

20.6 degrees to the equator, can't be

efficiently reached from a ground based

launch site.

Avery: Once Link reaches Swift, it faces a delicate

capture operation. Swift was never designed

to be serviced. It has no docking port, no

handholds. Link will have to grab it

anyway. And after more than 20 years in

space, Swift's insulation blankets may be as

brittle as glass.

Anna: If all goes well, Link will gradually raise

Swift's orbit back to its original 600

kilometer altitude, adding years to the

telescope's life and proving that commercial

satellite servicing can work at scale.

Avery: We will absolutely be back with updates as

this one unfolds. Saturday, June 27th.

Mark it in your calendars.

And finally today, China's Tianwen 2

mission, an asteroid sample return mission

that is now in its most critical phase yet.

Anna: Taiwan 2 launched in May 2025,

and on June 7 this month it

performed its main insertion burn to enter

orbit around a T near Earth

asteroid called Kamo oaloa.

Formally designated

469219 Kamo

Oeloa, Kamola' Olua is

extraordinary.

Avery: It's a quasi satellite of Earth. Not a moon

in the traditional sense, but a space rock

that orbits the sun on a path so similar to

ours that it dances around us, perpetually

staying between 38 and 100 times

the distance of the moon. It's been Earth's

companion for more than a century and will

remain so for the foreseeable future.

Anna: The asteroid is tiny, somewhere between

40 and 100 meters across,

smaller than a football pitch. It spins

once every 28 minutes, which presents

real challenges for the sampling operation.

Avery: Since the June 7th orbit insertion, amateur

radio operators using a 20 meter dish in

Germany and the 25 meter Dwingelo telescope

in the Netherlands have been tracking the

spacecraft's fine adjustment burns. The

Because China has published no official

mission updates or ephemerities, everything

we know about the mission's progress has come

from independent observers.

Anna: The mission timeline has sample collection

beginning on July 4. Taiwan, too,

has three sampling methods available Touch

and go, hover and anchor and attach

to cope with whatever surface conditions it

finds at arrival.

Avery: There's also a fascinating scientific debate

simmering beneath all of this. Kamoa

Olawa's reddish color resembles lunar rock,

leading some scientists to propose it's a

fragment blasted off the moon by an ancient

impact. But a new study in Nature

Communications suggests it may instead have

originated in the Flora family of the main

asteroid belt.

Anna: The samples, expected to return to earth in

late 2027, should settle that debate

definitively. If the isotopes match

lunar rock, the lunar fragment theory wins.

If not, we're looking at a space weathered

asteroid from the inner belt that just

happens to look lunar.

Avery: After delivering the samples, Tianwen 2

doesn't stop. It uses Earth's gravity to

slingshot toward a main belt comet called

311P Pan Stars, with

rendezvous expected in January 2035,

a ten year mission of remarkable ambition.

Anna: We will be watching the July 4th sample

collection attempt very closely indeed

before we go tonight.

Tuesday 23rd the moon sits

beautifully close to Spica, the brightest

star in Virgo. They're separated by less than

2 degrees, so easy to find with the naked eye

after sunset, Spica, uh, shines as a

brilliant bluish white point right beside the

moon's glow.

Avery: Looking ahead. On June 25, Mercury

will appear close to Jupiter, low in the

western sky after sunset. Venus will be

shining nearby to complete a nice little

planetary trio. You'll want a clear horizon

to the west to catch Mercury, but Jupiter

will be unmissable.

Anna: And for our Southern Hemisphere listeners,

you're well placed for the Milky Way core

right now. Midwinter means dark early

evenings, and the galactic center rises

nicely in the north after sunset. Get away

from city lights if you can. It's a beautiful

time of year for it.

Avery: The Strawberry Moon June's full moon rises

on June 29th. That's coming up fast,

shining in Sagittarius near the Teapot

asterism for parts of southern Australia and

New Zealand. Keep an eye out. There may be a

lunar occultation of antares visible on June

27th.

Anna: That's Astronomy Daily for Tuesday

23rd June 2026.

What a morning. Starfall in the air,

Roman in Florida and the

universe full of mysteries that keep

getting deeper.

Avery: We'll be back tomorrow with the latest from

the Cosmos. Find us at astronomydaily IO

and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Anna: On behalf of Avery and the whole Astronomy

Daily team, keep looking up. Clear skies,

everyone.

Avery: Fall is a re entry capsule, a vehicle

designed to carry cargo into orbit and bring

it safely back to Earth. But it's not another

Dragon. It's a flat disk, about

3.1 meters across and only 75

centimeters tall. Think of a large flying

saucer rather than a pointy rocket cone.

Anna: The launch window opened at 6:43 this

morning, Eastern Time. That's

8:43pm here on the east coast of Australia.

It's flying on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral

Space Force Station, the booster supporting

the mission on its 29th flight.

Avery: Now, why does this matter? The target market

is space manufacturing. The idea is that

microgravity, true weightlessness, lets

you make things you can't make on Earth. Pure

pharmaceutical crystals, advanced materials,

bio printed tissues. But to make any of that

commercially viable, you need a cheap,

reliable way to bring your product home.

Anna: M Until now, a small California

company called Varda Space Industries has

been pioneering that market. They've flown

six capsule missions, but their capsules are

small, carrying dozens of kilograms at most.

Starfall is rated for up to

1000kg. That's roughly 30

times more return capacity,

Avery: which creates an interesting situation

because Varda has been launching all of its

missions on SpaceX rockets. SpaceX

is now entering the market it's been

powering.

Anna: After re entry, Starfall splashes down in the

Pacific ocean off the US West coast, about

1300 kilometers offshore. It's designed

to be mass produced for starship flights in

the future. Though today's Demo uses Falcon

9, SpaceX

Avery: has been approved for two re entry

demonstrations. This is the first. We'll be

watching closely for news of a successful

recovery.

Anna: A, uh, genuinely exciting morning to be a

space nerd.

Now, from a launch happening today to a

launch that's just a couple of months away,

NASA's next great space telescope has arrived

in Florida.

Avery: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, Roman

for short, arrived at the Kennedy Space

center on Sunday, 21 June, riding

NASA's Pegasus barge down from Baltimore

after being loaded up at Goddard Space Flight

center in Maryland.

Anna: The telescope was tucked inside a special

transport container that NASA has nicknamed I

love this, the Chariot, keeping with the

Roman theme, because the telescope is named

after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's very

first chief of astronomy, not after the

Empire.

Avery: Roman is often called the mother of Hubble.

She was a driving force behind getting Hubble

built in the first place. It's a fitting

tribute. Now roman is at KSC's Payload

Hazardous Servicing Facility for final launch

preparations. The team will check all six

solar panels, inspect insulation and thermal

blankets, and load around 290 gallons

of hydrazine fuel.

Anna: And here's the headline number. NASA is

targeting launch no earlier than Sunday 30th

August on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.

And that timeline puts Roman a full eight

months ahead of its original schedule.

Avery: Eight months ahead. That's remarkable for a

flagship space telescope.

Anna: So what will Roman actually do? Its main

Instrument is a 300 megapixel infrared

camera with a field of view 100

times wider than Hubble's. It will survey

billions of galaxies, discover hundreds of

thousands of exoplanets, probe dark energy

and dark matter, and do all of this at

speeds and scales that simply weren't

possible before.

Avery: It also carries a coronagraph, a starlight

blocking instrument that will directly image

planets around nearby stars, a key step

in the long hunt for Earth. Like worlds.

Anna: After launch, Roman will travel to the second

Sun, Earth Lagrange Point L2,

about 1.5 million kilometers from

Earth, the same neighborhood where the James

Webb Space Telescope is parked right now.

Avery: Webb looking deep and narrow, Roman

looking wide and fast. They're going to

complement each other beautifully.

Anna: And speaking of the James Webb Space

Telescope, let's talk about what it's been

showing us lately, because JWST

keeps finding things that shouldn't be there.

Avery: This week, a series of three new papers

published in the Astrophysical Journal

Letters reveal something extraordinary about

a galaxy cluster called

XLSSC122.

Anna: Now, XLSSC122

was first spotted way back in 2014 during

an X ray survey. It's about 10.4

billion light years away, meaning we're

seeing it as it existed when the universe was

only around 3.3 billion years old.

That era is called cosmic noon, the peak

of star formation, when galaxies were

building themselves at a furious rate.

Avery: It looks far too grown up for its age. It's

large, it's organized, it has a dense,

concentrated core. According to standard

cosmological models, galaxy clusters that far

back should still be loose, scattered. Still

assembling. This one looks like it's had

millions of years more to develop than it

should have.

Anna: But JWST has now revealed something

even more surprising. When astronomers

pointed the telescope at this cluster, they

discovered it's acting as a gravitational

lens. Its immense mass is bending and

warping the light of even more distant

galaxies behind it, creating beautiful

blue gray arcs around the cluster's center.

Avery: And that makes XLSSC122

the most distant galaxy cluster ever

confirmed to act as a strong gravitational

lens. Some of that bent light set out on its

journey more than 12 billion years ago.

Anna: The lensing effect is dominated not by the

cluster's stars and gas, but by dark matter.

By studying the arcs, the team at Caltech's

iPac can map the dark matter distribution

with remarkable precision. And what they

found is a core that's far more concentrated

than their models predict.

Avery: The third paper in the series found something

called intracluster light, a faint glow

from stars that have been stripped loose from

their galaxies and now drift free through the

cluster. XLSSC122

is the earliest known cluster where this glow

has been detected.

Anna: These results were announced at the 248th

meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Read author Kyle Finner from IPAC summed it

up before jwst we

couldn't do this level of science in the

early distant universe.

Avery: It's another reminder that the early universe

was far more structured and stranger than our

models expected.

Next up, we're staying in the realm of dark

matter because a new study published in

Physical Review Letters has just reignited

one of astrophysics most stubborn debates.

Anna: At the heart of our Milky Way, there's a

mysterious spherical glow of high energy

gamma rays. It extends for thousands of light

years out from the galactic center. NASA's

Fermi telescope first spotted it in the late

2000s, and astronomers have been arguing

about it ever since.

Avery: It's called the Galactic Center Excess, and

there are two main one a

huge population of millisecond pulsars,

rapidly spinning neutron stars that beam

gamma rays outward. Two dark

matter particles annihilating each other.

When two dark matter particles collide and

destroy each other, they can release energy,

including gamma rays.

Anna: The pulsar explanation had been gaining

ground in recent years. Some earlier

analyses suggested a relatively modest

population of a few hundred pulsars could

explain the signal.

Avery: But this new research, led by Florian List at

the University of Vienna and Nick Rod at the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has

changed the picture. They trained a machine

learning model on more than 1 million

simulated gamma ray observations. And the

result? For pulsars to account for the

signal, you would need more than 35,000

of them concentrated near the galactic

center.

Anna: 35,000. That's an

implausibly high number. And crucially, those

pulsars would need to be so individually

faint that they'd be nearly indistinguishable

from the emission you'd expect from

annihilating dark matter.

Avery: As Nick Rod put it, our new analysis

shows that the sources would have to be so

faint that they would be almost

indistinguishable from the emission expected

from annihilating dark matter.

Anna: The study doesn't prove dark matter is the

cause, far from it. But it means the dark

matter explanation cannot be ruled out.

And the pulsar hypothesis is on much

shakier ground than many thought.

Avery: Upcoming observatories, including the

Cherenkov Telescope Array and the Southern

Widefield Gamma Ray Observatory, should

eventually give us the resolution to separate

these two signals. That observatory,

incidentally, is being built in Chile. Well

placed for Southern Hemisphere skywatchers.

Anna: Something to watch closely. The heart of our

own galaxy may be telling us something

profound about the invisible stuff that makes

up most of the universe now a, ah,

ticking clock. NASA's SIFT observatory

rescue mission is four days from launch and

the people behind it are honest about what

they've pulled off.

Avery: John Domogal Goldman, NASA's astrophysics

division director, said at a briefing press

last week, and I quote, frankly I

have to be honest, no one thought it was

going to be possible.

Anna: The story so far the Neil Gerald's

Swift Observatory has been watching the sky

for gamma ray bursts since 2004.

Over 2,000 detected across more than

two decades. But it's been slowly

losing altitude. Increased solar

activity has puffed up Earth's upper

atmosphere, creating drag that's been pulling

Swift down faster, uh, than expected.

Avery: Without intervention, Swift faces a uh,

90% chance of uncontrolled re entry

by the end of this year. So NASA awarded

a contract to an Arizona company called

Catalyst Space Technologies last September

to build and launch a rescue spacecraft in

under nine months. Nine months from

scratch to build something that has never

been attempted before.

Anna: That spacecraft is called Link.

Lightweight in space navigation and

kinematics. It's a boxy vehicle about the

size of a fridge, carrying three robotic

arms fitted with lidar sensors, three hall

thrusters and 16 reaction control

thrusters.

Avery: Link is now encapsulated inside a Northrop

Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, which itself

will be making history as the last ever

Pegasus XL flight. The rocket is

carried under the belly of a modified

aircraft called Stargazer, the only remaining

airworthy Lockheed Martin L1011

Tristar

Anna: in the world launch is set for Saturday

27 June from Kwajalen

Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The air launch

method is required because Swift's orbit,

inclined 20.6 degrees to the equator,

can't be efficiently reached from a ground

based launch site.

Avery: Once Lync reaches Swift, it faces a

delicate capture operation. Swift was never

designed to be serviced. Um, it has no

docking port, no handholds. Link will

have to grab it anyway. And after more than

20 years in space, Swift's insulation

blankets may be as brittle as glass.

Anna: If all goes well, Link will gradually raise

Swift's orbit back to its original 600

kilometer altitude, adding years to the

telescope's life and proving that commercial

satellite servicing can work at scale.

Avery: We will absolutely be back with updates as

this one unfolds. Saturday June 27th.

Mark it in your calendars.

And finally today, China's Tianwen 2

mission, an asteroid sample return mission

that is now in its most critical phase yet.

Anna: Taiwan 2 launched in May 2025,

and on June 7 this month it

performed its main insertion burn to enter

orbit around a tiny near Earth asteroid

called Kamo oeloa. Formally

designated 469219,

Kamo Oloa Kaumo'

Oloa is extraordinary.

Avery: It's a quasi satellite of Earth, not a moon

in the traditional sense, but a space rock

that orbits the sun on a path so similar to

ours that it dances around us, perpetually

staying between 38 and 100 times the

distance of the Moon. It's been Earth's

companion for more than a century and will

remain so for the foreseeable future.

Anna: The asteroid is tiny, somewhere between

40 and 100 meters across,

smaller than a football pitch, it spins

once every 28 minutes, which presents

real challenges for the sampling operation.

Avery: Since the June 7th orbit insertion, amateur

radio operators using a 20 meter dish in

Germany and the 25 meter Dwingolo telescope

in the Netherlands have been tracking the

spacecraft's fine adjustment burns. Because

China has published no official mission

updates or ephemerities, everything we know

about the mission's progress has come from

independent observers.

Anna: The mission timeline has sample collection

beginning on July 4th. Taiwan

2 has three sampling methods.

Touch and go, hover and anchor and

attach to cope with whatever surface

conditions it finds at arrival.

Avery: There's also a fascinating scientific debate

simmering beneath all of this. Kamoa

Olawa's reddish color resembles lunar rock,

leading some scientists to propose it's a

fragment blasted off the moon by an ancient

impact. But a new study in Nature

communications suggests it may instead have

originated in the Flora family of the main

asteroid belt.

Anna: The samples expected to return to earth in

late 2027 should settle that debate

definitively. If the isotopes match

lunar rock, the lunar fragment theory wins.

If not, we're looking at a space weathered

asteroid from the inner belt that just

happens to look lunar.

Avery: After delivering the samples, Tianwen 2

doesn't stop. It uses Earth's gravity to

slingshot toward a main belt comet called

311P, with

rendezvous expected in January 2035,

a 10 year mission of remarkable ambition.

Anna: We will be watching the July 4th sample

collection attempt very closely indeed.

Before we go tonight, Tuesday

23rd, the moon sits beautifully close to

Spica, the brightest star in Virgo.

They're separated by less than 2 degrees,

so easy to find with the naked eye after

sunset. Spica, uh, shines as a brilliant

bluish white point right beside the moon's

glow, looking m ahead.

Avery: On June 25, Mercury will appear close

to Jupiter, low in the western sky after

sunset. Venus will be shining nearby to

complete a nice little planetary trio. You'll

want a clear horizon to the west to catch

Mercury, but Jupiter will be unmissable.

Anna: And for our Southern Hemisphere listeners,

you're well placed for the Milky Way core

right now. Midwinter means dark early

evenings, and the galactic center rises

nicely in the north after sunset. Get away

from city lights if you can. It's a beautiful

time of year for it.

Avery: The Strawberry Moon June's full moon rises

on June 29th. That's coming up fast,

shining in Sagittarius near the teapot

asterism for parts of southern Australia and

New Zealand. Keep an eye out. There may be a

lunar occultation of antares visible on June

27th.

Anna: That's Astronomy Daily for Tuesday,

23rd June 2026.

What a morning star fall in the air,

Roman in Florida and the universe

full of mysteries that keep getting

deeper.

In this episode