Anna: Hello, everyone and welcome to Astronomy
Daily. I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm Avery. Thanks for joining us this
Tuesday, January 14, 2026.
We've got a fantastic lineup of space news
for you today.
Anna: We really do. We're covering everything
from nuclear reactors on the moon to
ancient Martian oceans, plus some
fascinating discoveries about how spaceflight
affects astronaut brains.
Avery: And we'll be talking about a major ISS
update, a new privately fund space
telescope and scientists finally solving a
six decade old mystery about the moon's two
faces.
Anna: It's going to be an exciting episode, so
let's dive right in.
Avery: Anna.
Uh, let's start with some big news from NASA
and the Department of Energy. The United
States is getting serious about putting a
nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030.
Anna: That's right, Avery. This isn't just talk
anymore. Last week, NASA Administrator
Jared Isaacman and U.S. secretary of Energy
Chris Wright signed a memorial memorandum of
understanding that reaffirms their commitment
to meet that ambitious deadline.
Avery: And this comes on the heels of President
Trump's executive order from December calling
for construction to begin on a lunar base by
2030 with a nuclear reactor ready to
launch by that same year.
Anna: Isaacman said something really interesting in
the announcement. He said achieving this
future requires harnessing nuclear power.
This agreement enables closer collaboration
between NASA and the Department of Energy to
deliver the capabilities necessary to usher
in the golden age of space exploration and
discovery.
Avery: It makes sense when you think about it.
Nuclear power can generate electricity
continuously for years without refuelling.
And it's not affected by the moon's two week
long nights or changing weather conditions
like solar panels would be.
Anna: And this isn't the first time NASA and the
Department of Energy have worked together on
space nuclear systems. They've been
collaborating for more than half a century.
Right?
Avery: Many of NASA's deep space robotic explorers
have used radioisotope thermoelectric
generators, or RTGs, as a power
source. We're talking about missions like the
Cassini Saturn orbiter and the Curiosity and
Perseverance Mars rovers.
Anna: But this lunar reactor would be something
different entirely. It would be designed to
power one or more bases on the lunar
surface. As part of NASA's Artemis programme,
Secretary.
Avery: Wright made a connection to America's
historic achievements. He said history shows
that when American science and innovation
come together, from the Manhattan Project to
the Apollo mission, our nation leads the
world to reach new frontiers once thought
impossible. This agreement continues that
legacy.
Anna: For NASA's Artemis programme, having a
reliable long term power source on the Moon
is absolutely critical. If we're going to
establish a permanent presence there and use
it as a stepping stone to Mars. We need
infrastructure that can operate reliably.
Avery: For years, and the 2030 timeline
is really aggressive. We're talking about
just over four years from now. That's
incredibly fast for a project of this
magnitude.
Anna: It is. But with the renewed focus on
lunar exploration and the competition with
other spacefaring nations, particularly
China, there's definitely motivation to move
quickly.
Avery: Speaking of space developments, we have an
important update on the Crew 11 situation at
the International Space Station. Mission
managers have officially given the go for the
crew's return to Earth tomorrow.
Anna: That's right. NASA astronauts Zena Cardman
and Mike Finke, along with JAXA astronaut
Kimia Yu and Roscosmos cosmonaut
Oleg Platanov, are scheduled to undock
from the harmony module at 5:05pm
Eastern Time on Wednesday.
Avery: And they're coming home aboard the SpaceX
Dragon crew spacecraft, with Cardman
commanding and Finke piloting. The weather
forecast is looking excellent for their
parachute assisted splashdown off the coast
of California, which is scheduled for
3:41am on Thursday.
Anna: Yesterday, the crew spent most of their time
preparing for departure. They packed cargo,
reviewed return to Earth procedures and
transferred hardware. Hardman and her
crewmates also trained on how to use
respirators during unlikely emergency
events like an ammonia Lee.
Avery: NASA is planning extensive coverage of the
event. NASA will begin live coverage at
3pm on Wednesday when the crew enters the
Dragon spacecraft and says goodbye to the
remaining crew on the station.
Anna: Coverage continues at 4:45pm
for the actual undocking, then
returns at 2:15am Thursday
for the descent, and finally at
5:45am for the post splashdown
news conference. You can watch all of this on
NASA, Amazon prime or
NASA's YouTube channel.
Avery: As we discussed yesterday, this is the first
medical evacuation in ISS history.
The crew was originally scheduled to stay
until after Crew 12 arrived in mid February,
but an undisclosed medical condition
affecting one of the four crew members
prompted NASA to bring them home early.
Anna: After Crew 11 leaves, Expedition
74 will be commanded by
Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey
Kudzverchkov, leading flight engineers
Sergei Mikayev and NASA's Chris
Williams. That's a skeleton crew of just
three people running the entire station.
Avery: Yesterday, Kuts, Verchkov and Mikhayev
participated in a study assessing how crews
make decisions and work together in space,
which is especially relevant given they'll be
operating with a reduced crew for a while.
Anna: BASA is still evaluating whether they can
move up the Crew 12 launch date to replenish
the station crew sooner than originally
planned.
Avery: Now let's talk about Mars. Anna. There's
exciting new evidence that an ancient ocean
once covered half the planet.
Anna: This is really fascinating research, Avery.
A team led by Ignatius
argadestia, a, uh, PhD student at the
University of Bern, has identified features
in Mars Valles Marineris that
look remarkably similar to river deltas here
on Earth.
Avery: Valles Marineris is that massive canyon
system on Mars, right? The largest in the
solar system.
Anna: Exactly. Along with Olympus Mons,
it's one of Mars's most defining features.
This research focused specifically on the
southeast part of a sub canyon called
Copratus Chosma.
Avery: The researchers used images from multiple
orbital Cameras, CTX and
HiRISE on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter and CASSIS
on the ESA Roscosmos
Trace Gas Orbiter. They also worked with
digital elevation models to examine what they
call scarpa fronted deposits.
Anna: These scarp fronted deposits, or
SFDs, are fan shaped
sediment deposits that form where a river
empties into a body of standing water.
The team identified three of these features
in Copratus Chasma and they're almost
identical to river deltas we see on Earth.
Avery: Professor Fritz Schlundjugger put it really
clearly. He said, the structures that we were
able to identify in the images are clearly
the mouth of a river into an ocean.
Anna: What's particularly compelling is that all
three SFDs are at the same
elevation. That suggests they were all
deposited at the same water level,
essentially marking an ancient coastline.
Avery: The researchers believe these deposits were
formed sometime between the late Hesperian
period and the early Amazonian period.
That's roughly between 3.7 billion and
3 billion years ago.
Anna: Reid author R. Ghedestia said something
interesting in the press release. He said,
when measuring and mapping the Martian
images, I was able to recognise mountains
and valleys that resemble a, uh, mountainous
landscape on Earth. However, I was
particularly impressed with the deltas that I
discovered at the edge of one of the
mountains.
Avery: Previous research had suggested Mars had a
large ocean, but this study provides much
more concrete evidence. Slunjugger noted
that earlier claims were based on less
precise data and sometimes indirect
arguments.
Anna: But their reconstruction of the sea level is
based on clear evidence of an actual
coastline. Thanks to these high resolution
images, the paleo shoreline they
identified extends from Valles Marinus
all the way to the northern lowlands.
Avery: Argadestia summed it up nicely. With
our study we were able to provide evidence
for the deepest and largest former ocean on
Mars to date, an ocean that stretched across
the northern hemisphere of the planet.
Anna: This has huge implications for Mars
past habitability. As the authors write,
their findings will impact research on the
evidence for potential life on Mars. Since
this represents a period when Mars had the
highest water availability, it's amazing.
Avery: To think that billions of years ago, Mars
might have looked very different from the
cold, dry desert we see today.
Anna: Speaking of things changing, Avery, let's
talk about a fascinating new study on how
spaceflight literally changes astronauts
brains.
Avery: This is wild. Ana um. A team led by Rachel
Seidler at MIT took MRI scans of
26 astronauts and 24 non
astronaut participants. And they found that
spaceflight causes astronauts brains to shift
position inside their skull.
Anna: The study was published just yesterday. The
researchers found a consistent pattern of the
brain shifting backward and upward and
rotating upward after time in
microgravity. And here's the kicker.
Some of these positional changes were still
detectable months after astronauts returned
to Earth.
Avery: Instead of looking at the brain as one whole
unit, they divided it into 130
separate regions and examined each one
individually. This regional analysis
showed many areas with significant
displacement across two spatial axes.
Anna: The data set included astronauts with
different mission lengths, roughly two weeks,
six months and one year. They found
significant positional shifts across large
portions of the brain, with some
displacements measured as high as
2.52 millimetres in
subjects with the most time in space.
Avery: To put that in perspective, that's about a
uh, tenth of an inch. It might not sound like
much, but when we're talking about the brain
inside your skull, that's actually quite
significant.
Anna: The researchers also compared astronauts with
people who participated in a long duration
head down tilt bed rest experiment which
is used to simulate some effects of
microgravity on Earth.
Avery: And they found some interesting differences.
Astronauts showed stronger upward movement,
while the bed rest participants showed
stronger backward movement. Only some of the
brain shape changes observed after
spaceflight appeared in the bedrest group.
Anna: This tells us that head down bed rest, while
useful, doesn't perfectly replicate what
happens to the brain in actual microgravity.
There are unique effects that only real
spaceflight produces.
Avery: One of the most important findings was the
connection to balance problems. The study
found that displacement affecting sensory
related brain regions correlated with larger
declines in astronauts balance after
spaceflight, Right.
Anna: We know that when astronauts return from
space, they often experience balance issues
because their inner ear's sense of direction
isn't immediately restored. This study
helps explain why that happens.
Avery: And while astronauts normally find their
footing within a week or so, the physical
shifts in their brains persisted for up to
six months post spaceflight. That's quite
remarkable.
Anna: The authors note that this underscores the
long lasting effects of spaceflight on
neuroanatomy. They recommend future
studies with larger astronaut crews on a
broad range of mission lengths to better
understand how quickly these shifts begin
and how they evolve.
Avery: This research is crucial as we plan longer
missions to the moon and eventually to Mars.
Understanding how extended spaceflight
affects the brain will help us better prepare
astronauts and develop countermeasures.
Anna: Avery, let's shift gears and talk about a
really exciting development in space
telescope technology. There's a new
privately funded observatory called Lazuli
that could change how we build flagship class
telescopes.
Avery: This is fascinating, Anna. Uh, the Lazuli
Space Observatory is being funded by Eric
Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and his
wife Wendy, through their philanthropic
organisation, Schmidt Sciences. We're talking
about a $500 million investment.
Anna: The whole premise is applying the new space
philosophy to space telescopes. You know that
Silicon Valley mindset of move fast and
don't break things. The idea is to prove that
you don't need decades and billions of
dollars to build a flagship level space
observatory, right?
Avery: Compare this to the James Webb Space
telescope, which cost $10 billion, or the
upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope,
which is on track for $3 billion. These
huge costs come from using completely de
risked flight proven technology to ensure
taxpayer dollars don't literally go up in
flames.
Anna: But schmidt has a $36 billion
fortune, so even if Lazulli fails, he can
afford the loss. And that's kind of the
point. This is an experiment to see if the
approach even works for expensive flagship
level observatories.
Avery: To keep costs down, up to 80% of the
telescope will use off the shelf components.
And operating under Schmidt Sciences
alleviates a lot of the bureaucratic and
political decision making that inevitably
delays government funded programmes.
Anna: So where does Lazuli fit in the bigger
picture? Webb is obviously already
operational, sending back spectacular images.
Roman is next scheduled to launch in May
2027. But both have weaknesses when
tracking transient phenomena.
Avery: Exactly. Events like kilonovae or
gravitational wave producing black hole
mergers happen on timescales of hours, not
days. They require almost immediate response
from observatories to catch them before they
end.
Anna: And Webb just can't slew. That's the term
for rotating to a new target fast enough.
It captures extremely high resolution images,
but it takes too long to get into position.
Avery: On the other hand, Roman is a survey
telescope that looks at white swaths of sky,
but doesn't have the resolution to examine
individual systems like Lazuli will.
Anna: So Lazuli's sweet spot is Target
of opportunity tracking. It's designed to
slew within an hour and a half to observe
short lived events. It'll work in concert
with ground based observatories like ligo,
the Gravitational Wave Detector.
Avery: But it has the advantage of being in space
so no cloud cover or daylight to worry about.
Lazuli will also have a wild Field context
camera with 23 separate CMOS sensors,
kind of like Roman, to detect things like
exoplanet transits.
Anna: And here's something really cool it should be
able to directly image exoplanets using a
vector Vortex coronagraph along with
deformable mirrors to suppress starlight by
up to 10 million times.
Avery: This same technology is planned for NASA's
Habitable Worlds Observatory which won't
launch for decades, so Lazuli will actually
serve as a technology demonstration platform
well before the taxpayer funded mission.
Anna: Perhaps the most impressive aspect is the
timeline. Schmidt Sciences is planning a
three to five year development cycle for this
massive space observatory that's
exponentially faster than any comparable
government led system.
Avery: Though to be fair, new space leaders do have
a tendency to underestimate timelines. Even
if it takes twice as long though, we'd still
get another flagship level observatory within
a decade.
Anna: And here's something amusing. If Schmidt just
leaves his remaining $36 billion in an
S&P 500 index fund, he'd make back
around 40 times what the entire project cost
over a five year period. So financially
this is barely a blip for him.
Avery: Either we get an amazing new space telescope
or we get a $500 million lesson in what can
go wrong when applying speed to large scale
astrophysics projects. Either way, the
scientific community learned something.
Anna: Valuable for our final storey today.
Avery scientists may have finally
solved a mystery that's puzzled them for over
60 years. Why does the moon
look so different on its near and far
sides?
Avery: This is based on analysis of dust collected
from the lunar far side by China's Chang' e
6 mission, which returned the first ever
samples from the moon's hidden hemisphere in
2024.
Anna: The material came from the south pole
Aitken Basin, which is believed to be the
site of the largest impact in the solar
system. This colossal crater spans
nearly a quarter of the lunar surface.
Avery: A team letter by Heng Si Tan from the Chinese
Academy of Sciences conducted isotopic
analysis of potassium and iron found in the
far side dust and compared it with samples
from the moon's near side collected during
the Apollo missions and by China's Chang'
E5 spacecraft.
Anna: The results showed a significant difference
near side Samples contained more light
isotopes, while the far side material
was richer in heavier isotopes,
particularly of potassium.
Avery: This type of isotopic separation couldn't be
explained by normal volcanic activity.
Instead, the researchers suggest the south
pole Aitken impactor generated such
extreme heat that lighter isotopes were
vaporised and lost, leaving behind a
heavier chemical fingerprint.
Anna: The researchers wrote this feature
most likely resulted from potassium
evaporation caused by the south pole
Aitken basin forming impactor,
demonstrating the profound influence of this
event on the Moon's deep interior.
Avery: What's particularly interesting is that the
study suggests the impact may have punched
through the crust and into the mantle,
permanently changing the Moon's inner
composition.
Anna: The sample analysis revealed that
potassium isotopes on the far side
appear to originate from a mantle source
distinct from that of the near side. This
implies widespread internal melting
and chemical redistribution.
Avery: The team even proposes that the impact might
have triggered hemisphere wide mantle
convection, a process that could reshape a
planet's crust and inner layers over time.
Anna: As they noted in their study, this finding
also implies that large scale
impacts are, uh, key drivers in shaping
mantle and crustal compositions.
Avery: So planetary impacts leave far more than just
visible craters. They can set off long
lasting internal transformations that remain
detectable billions of years later.
Anna: Heng Si Tian summed it up nicely.
With our study, we were able to provide
evidence for the deepest and largest former
ocean on Mars today date. Wait,
that's the wrong quote.
Avery: Wrong planet.
Anna: Anna, uh, oh my goodness, let me get that
right. Pyeon said. With the Chang' e
6 samples, scientists now have their
first hard evidence from the Moon's far side,
an area once entirely out of reach.
Avery: This discovery is particularly timely as
multiple nations gear up for lunar
exploration missions, including NASA's
Artemis programme and China's continuing
Chang' E missions.
Anna: Understanding the Moon's geological history
and internal structure will be crucial
as we plan to establish permanent bases
there. Each new sample and discovery
helps us piece together the storey of how
our nearest celestial neighbour formed and
evolved.
Avery: Well, that brings us to the end of today's
episode of Astronomy Daily. What an
incredible day of space news.
Anna: From nuclear reactors on the moon and the
crew 11 undocking tomorrow to
ancient Martian oceans and shifting
astronaut brains, plus a uh, privately
funded space telescope and solving the
Moon's two faced mystery, we've covered a
lot of ground today.
Avery: If you enjoyed today's episode, please
subscribe to Astronomy Daily wherever you get
your podcasts. And don't forget to leave us a
review. It really helps other space
enthusiasts discover.
Anna: The show you can find us on social media and
at our website for more space news and
updates. Um, on the socials search for
Astro Daily Pod and our website can be
found at astronomydaily.IO
thanks so much for listening everyone.
Avery: Until, um, next time, keep looking up Clear
skies.
Sam.