Avery: Hello, space enthusiasts, and welcome back to
Astronomy Daily. I'm Avery.
Anna: And I'm Anna. We've got a packed show for you
today, from lunch delays and spacecraft
rescues to the brightest cosmic flash ever
seen. And we'll finish by traveling back in
time to the birth of Jupiter.
Avery: It's a huge lineup. Let's get right into it,
starting with the latest from SpaceX.
Anna: That's right, it's been a classic hurry up
and wait situation for SpaceX as they've had
to postpone the 10th test flight of their
massive Starship rocket again.
Avery: Indeed. They first tried to launch from their
Starbase site in South Texas on Sunday,
but a ground systems issue got in the way.
Then they tried again on Monday, but this
time it was Mother Nature who said, not
today.
Anna: And it was a very specific kind of not
today. Anvil shaped clouds were the culprit.
Those pose a serious lightning risk and
you do not want a lightning strike near a
fully fueled rocket.
Avery: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who was on site,
confirmed the scrub on social media.
Anna: The team is now looking for the next best
launch opportunity. A, uh, SpaceX
spokesperson mentioned that since they didn't
fire the water deluge system, reloading
propellant should be a relatively quick
process. So hopefully we'll see flight 10
take the sky soon.
Avery: And what a sight it'll be. For anyone new to
the program, Starship is the biggest and most
powerful rocket ever built.
SpaceX's grand vision is to use it to help
humanity settle the the moon and
Mars.
Anna: It's an incredible piece of engineering. The
vehicle consists of two fully reusable
stainless steel stages, a massive booster
called Super Heavy, and the upper stage,
which is also called Starship. The goal is
rapid reusability, but getting.
Avery: There has been a real process of trial and
error. Starship has flown nine times so far,
with the first flight back in April of 2023.
The last three flights this year have all,
been, well, learning experiences.
Anna: That's a polite way of putting it. On Flight
7 and 8, the upper stage exploded less than
10 minutes after launch. And on Flight 9, it
lost attitude control during re entry and
broke apart in the atmosphere. We even saw
reports of debris spotted over the Bahamas.
Avery: It's all part of the rapid iterative
development process, I suppose. SpaceX
traced the Flight 7 anomaly to a
harmonic response that caused propellant
leaks and fires. They've since made hardware
changes and adjustments to prevent it from
happening again.
Anna: So the plan for Flight 10 whenever it
launches, is ambitious. The super heavy
boosters will perform some experiments before
Attempting a controlled splashdown in the
Gulf of Mexico, The Starship Upper Stage will
aim to deploy eight dummy Starlink
satellites, relight an engine in space, and
then come down in the Indian Ocean about
66 minutes after launch.
Avery: It's a huge step and it's clear they're
looking to pick up the pace. Despite the
setbacks, SpaceX has requested approval for
an incredible 25 Starship
launches from Starbase in 2025.
They are not slowing down, Definitely not.
Anna: We'll be watching closely and will bring you
updates as uh, soon as Flight 10 gets off the
ground.
Now, from a mission waiting to start, let's
turn to one that just survived a major scare
millions of kilometers from home. This is a
fantastic story of teamwork from the European
Space Agency. Their Jupiter Icy Moons
Explorer, or juice, is currently on its way
to Venus for a gravity assist flyby. But for
a little while, the team on the ground had no
idea if it was okay.
Avery: Talk about a nerve wracking situation. On
July 16, during a routine check in,
JUICE just fell silent. The
Deep Space Antenna in Spain couldn't
establish contact. No signal, no
telemetry about its health or stat, nothing.
Anna: The control team at ESOC in Germany
immediately began troubleshooting. The
biggest fear was that JUICE had entered
survival mode, a last resort state triggered
by multiple system failures. But they weren't
detecting the intermittent signal you'd
expect in that scenario.
Avery: So with no data coming in, they had to start
making some educated guesses. The
team suspected an issue with the
communication subsystem. They faced a tough
wait, 14 days for an automatic
spacecraft reset or send
commands blind into space and hope
the spacecraft heard them.
Anna: Waiting wasn't really an option, as uh,
spacecraft Operations Manager Angela
Dietz explained, that would have delayed
crucial preparations for the Venus flyby.
So they went with the blind commanding
option.
Avery: Um, and that is not easy. Juice was
200 million kilometers away on
the other side of the sun. Each command
took 11 minutes to get there, and then they
had to wait another 11 minutes to see if it
worked. After nearly 20 hours of
troubleshooting, a command finally got
through.
Anna: The successful command manually activated the
signal amplifier, which boosts the strength
of the signal Juice sends to Earth. Suddenly,
they had contact again, and the spacecraft
was in perfect health. It turns out the
culprit was a very subtle software bug,
A, uh, timing.
Avery: Bug of all things. The software
function that controls the amplifier uses an
internal timer that resets every 16
months. It just so happened that the function
was running at the exact moment the timer
restarted, which left the Amplifier switched
off. What are the odds?
Anna: Incredibly small. But as we know, in
space, you have to plan for everything.
The team has already identified ways to
prevent this from happening again. It's a
textbook example of calm, methodical problem
solving under extreme pressure.
Avery: Absolutely. A huge congratulations to
the ESA mission operations team. With
that drama behind them, JUICE is now back on
track for its Venus flyby at the end of
August.
From a close call to a cosmic bullseye,
our next story is about a truly record
breaking discovery. This one is genuinely
exciting. Astronomers have just detected the
brightest fast radio burst ever recorded.
It's so powerful, they've nicknamed it
RB Float, which stands for radio
brightest flash of all time.
Anna: A very fitting name. The burst, officially
cataloged as FRB2025
0316A, was spotted spotted
back in March by the CHIME telescope in
British Columbia. CHIME has found
thousands of these fast radio bursts, or
FRBs, but this one is special.
Avery: It's not just about the brightness. Right.
It's about where they found it.
Usually tracing an FRB is like trying to
find which tree a firefly is in from a
mile away. But this time they
pinpointed its origin to a region just
45 light years across.
Anna: Exactly that incredible precision is
thanks to a new upgrade to the CHIME system.
They've added three smaller outrigger
stations across North America, which
effectively turns them into a single
continent wide telescope. This allows them to
trace these millisecond long flashes back to
their home galaxies with stunning accuracy.
Avery: And the home galaxy in this case NGC
4141, is practically in
our backyard. Cosmically speaking, it's about
130 million light years away, which is
incredibly close for an frb. Most of
them come from billions of light years away.
Anna: That proximity, combined with its brightness
gives scientists a, uh, unique chance to
study the source in detail. The team found
the burst originated near the edge of a star
forming region in the galaxy. This hints that
the source could be a magnetar, an ultra
magnetized neutron star that's perhaps
a bit older than the very youngest stars at
the galaxy's core.
Avery: And the story gets even better. Because they
located it so quickly, they were able to
point the James Webb Telescope at the
location. Webb's infrared cameras spotted
a faint point of light nearby, which they've
dubbed Nir1.
Anna: The nature of Nir1 is still a
mystery. It could be a red giant star or
maybe a massive star in its midlife. It
Neither of these are typically associated
with FRBs, which has led to a
fascinating theory. Perhaps
NIR1 is part of a binary system
with its gravitational partner being the
compact objects like a neutron star that
produce the burst.
Avery: It's a fantastic cosmic puzzle. Another idea
is that NIR1 isn't a star at all, but the
fading afterglow of the burst itself,
whatever it is. As Ito Berger from the
Harvard Smithsonian center for Astrophysics
said the this could be the first step on a
new path to solving the FRB mystery.
Anna: It also adds to the debate over whether FRBs
are one time events or repeaters. So
far, RB float seems to be a one
off. Being able to study the environment of
a non repeating FRB this closely is a huge
deal. And it shows just how diverse their
origins might be.
Avery: Absolutely. It's a perfect illustration of
how collaboration between different
observatories can unlock new discoveries.
Now for our final story, we're coming a bit
closer to home to look at ancient raindrops
from the formation of our own solar system.
Anna: That's right. Avery researchers
have for the first time managed to determine
the date and origin of tiny ancient
molten droplets that came from the
neighborhood of a young Jupiter. These
droplets were found inside meteorites here
on Earth.
Avery: Molten rock raindrops from Jupiter?
That sounds incredible. How does that even
happen?
Anna: Well, about 4.5 billion years
ago, as Jupiter was forming, its
immense gravitational pull started flinging
nearby small rocky and icy
bodies called planetesimals into
each other at incredibly high speeds.
Avery: So these were seriously high energy
collisions. What happened to the rock?
Anna: The impacts were so forceful that the rock
and dust on these planetesimals melted
instantly, creating tiny molten
rock droplets known as chondrules.
These spheres, only about a millimeter wide,
eventually got incorporated into asteroids,
some of which later fell to Earth as
meteorites.
Avery: So scientists have had these chondrules for a
while, but they weren't sure exactly how they
formed. What's the new theory?
Anna: A team from Nagoya University in Japan
and the INAF Turin Astrophysical
Observatory in Italy developed a new
model. They realized that when these water
rich planetesimals collided, the water would
have instantly vaporized into steam.
This expanding steam acted like a series
of tiny explosions, breaking apart the
molten rock into the exact kind of droplets
we see in meteorites.
Avery: That makes so much sense. So they tested this
with a computer simulation.
Anna: They did. They programmed a simulation of
Jupiter's formation, tracking how its gravity
would cause these collisions. Co lead
author Dr. Diego Turini said the
model spontaneously generated realistic
looking chondrules. And importantly, it
showed that the peak of this chondrule
production happened right as Jupiter was
accumulating gas to become the giant it is
today.
Avery: And, um, the evidence from actual meteorites
backs this up perfectly.
Anna: The meteorite data shows that peak chondrul
Production occurred about 1.8 million years
after the solar system began, which is
exactly when they believed Jupiter was going
through its main growth spurt.
Avery: Wow. So these tiny droplets are like
fossilized evidence of Jupiter's birth.
That's amazing. Does this solve all the
mysteries?
Anna: Not quite. The model doesn't fully
explain why we find chondrules of different
ages in meteorites. The researchers suggest
that the formation of other gas giants like
Saturn could have triggered similar events
later on, creating more chondrules.
Avery: It's a fantastic piece of detective work. It
m gives us a clearer picture of how our solar
system formed and provides insights that
could apply to other systems as well. A huge
story contained in a tiny, ancient raindrop.
And that's all the time we have for this
episode of Astronomy Daily. From cosmic
flashes to planetary raindrops, it's been
another incredible week in space.
Anna: It certainly has. Thank you so much for
joining us. If you enjoyed the show, please
subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and
you can follow us on social media for daily
updates.
Avery: Until next time, keep looking up.
Anna: Goodbye, everyone.