Anna: A rocket that got grounded by the weather.
It's back on the pad and ready to fly
tonight.
Avery: And the most powerful rocket ever built is
fueled, stacked and just waiting for a green
light. Flight 12 could happen any day now.
Anna: Plus a uh, spacecraft is about to use
Mars as a slingshot. And someone has
figured out how to beam electricity to
satellites using lasers.
Avery: Big day in space. Let's get into it.
This is Astronomy Daily.
Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your
daily guide to the universe and everything in
it. I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm um, avery. It's Wednesday the 13th of
May 2026 and this is season five
episode 101.
Anna: Episode 101. We've officially
passed the century mark. Thank you as always
to everyone listening. From Europe to
Australia, across the Southern hemisphere,
through the Americas and all of the northern
hemisphere and around the world.
Avery: Big program today, six stories, some real
science, a, uh, sky watching update, and a
trivia question to keep your brain ticking.
Anna: Let's start with the launch that almost
wasn't, but very much is.
Avery: If you were with us yesterday, you might
remember we mentioned that the SpaceX Dragon
cargo launch was looking a little shaky,
weather was a concern and sure enough NASA
and SpaceX called off the Tuesday evening
attempt.
Anna: And here we are, it is back on
the CRS 34 mission.
Dragon's 34th cargo run to the
International Space Station is scheduled to
lift off today, Wednesday the 13th of
May at 6:50 in the evening Eastern
Time. That's 8:50am M Thursday
morning for us here in Australia.
Avery: The Falcon 9 launches from Space Launch
Complex 40 at AH, Cape Canaveral Space Force
Station in Florida. On board, about
6,500 pounds, roughly
2,950 kilograms of supplies,
hardware and scientific experiments bound for
the ISS.
Anna: And there are some genuinely interesting
experiments in that cargo hold. There's a
project looking at how well Earth based
simulators actually replicate microgravity M
conditions, which matters enormously for
preparing future astronauts.
Avery: There's also a bone scaffold, uh, made from
wood. Yes, wood that could eventually lead
to new treatments for conditions like
osteoporosis and equipment to study how
red blood cells and the spleen adapt to the
space environment. With an eye on protecting
future long duration crews.
Anna: What makes this mission particularly special
though is the Dragon capsule itself. This is
the sixth flight for the specific vehicle,
setting a new record for a SpaceX cargo
craft.
Avery: Six flights for one capsule. That
reusability story just keeps getting more
impressive. If all goes to plan, Dragon
will dock with the Harmony Module's forward
port at around 7:35 in the morning
EDT on Thursday the 14th.
Anna: We'll keep an eye on that one.
RCS 34 the comeback launch
While one
Avery: rocket is heading to the ISS today, another
one is sitting on the pad in South Texas,
generating enormous anticipation.
SpaceX's Starship V3 Flight 12
could launch as soon as May 19th.
Anna: And the milestone from this week that has
engineers buzzing. The fully stacked V3
vehicle successfully completed its wet dress
rehearsal. That means it was fueled up for
the first time ever more than 5,000
metric tons of propellant. That's a number
so large it barely sounds real.
Avery: Standing 124 meters tall, that's
taller than a 40 story building. The V3
is a complete, complete redesign of the
Starship system. It features upgraded Raptor
3 engines, a new lattice structure for hot
staging, and massively increased payload
capacity. We're talking 100 metric tons
to low Earth orbit in a fully reusable
configuration. The previous version managed
around 35.
Anna: Flight 12 will be a suborbital test.
SpaceX is deliberately taking a step back in
ambition to validate the new V3
architecture before pushing for the booster
catch milestones we saw in Flight 11.
Both the booster and the ship are uh,
targeting splashdown on this one.
Avery: What's at stake? Quite a lot. SpaceX's has
a reported IPO on the horizon. NASA's
Artemis program needs a functioning starship
lunar lander and the company's banking on
this vehicle to grow Starlink and eventually
launch AI data centers into orbit.
Anna: The wet dress rehearsal is done. The static
fires are done. All they need now is an FAA
launch license. And that apparently is close.
Watch this space quite literally, if you
Avery: want a front row seat to some incredible
orbital Mechanics, this Friday, May 15th
is your moment.
NASA Psyche spacecraft is about to use Mars
as a gravitational slingshot.
Anna: Psyche launched back in October 2023
and has been on a long fuel efficient journey
toward the asteroid belt, where it's heading
for a metal rich asteroid, also named
psyche, arriving in 2029.
But to get there, it needs a speed boost. And
Mars is about to provide one.
Avery: At about 12,333 miles
per hour. That's nearly 20,000 kilometers
per hour. The spacecraft will pass just
2,800 miles, or about 4,500
kilometers from the Martian surface.
The planet's gravity will effectively grab
Psyche, swing it around, accelerate it and
redirect its trajectory towards the asteroid
belt.
Anna: This is called a, uh, gravity assist and it's
one of the most elegant techniques in all of
space exploration. Instead of burning
precious fuel, you borrow energy from a
planet's orbital motion. It's been used on
missions dating back to Voyager.
Avery: But this by blight isn't just about speed.
It's a rare opportunity to calibrate Psyche
science instruments. While there's something
large enough to actually observe, the imager
will get its first proper workout. The
magnetometer may detect Mars's magnetic
field. And scientists are intrigued by the
possibility that the spacecraft might catch
glimpses of a faint dust ring or torus
surrounding Mars created by
micrometeorites striking the surfaces of its
two moons, Phobos and Deimos.
Anna: Several existing Mars missions, including the
Curiosity and perseverance rovers and
NASA's orbiters, will also be watching and
contributing data during the encounter.
Avery: Friday the 15th. Mark it in your calendar.
Psyche and M Mars an encounter 2.8
billion kilometers in the making Just before
Anna: I take us into our next story, a quick
reminder to check out the great deal our uh,
sponsor NORDVPN has put together for you. Get
top grade online security for a fraction of
the price. You can check the details out via
the link in the show notes.
Alright, moving on. Here's a story that
sounds almost like science fiction, but it is
very much real and very much happening right
now. A Florida based startup called
Starcatcher Industries has just raised
$65 million to build what it
describes as the world's first power grid in
space.
Avery: The concept is called optical power beaming.
Starcatcher plans to launch a constellation
of satellites that will focus sunlight in the
form of laser light onto other solar panels
of other satellites that need more power. No
hardware modifications to the receiving
satellite required just extra electricity
on demand.
Anna: The company says its system can deliver up to
10 times more power to client satellites than
they could generate on their own, and its
CEO, Andrew Rush made an analogy
that I think really captures why this
matters. He said, and I'm paraphrasing
that every satellite is essentially on
camping trip. It carries its own power and at
some point it runs low.
Avery: Starcatcher wants to change that the same way
the terrestrial power grid enabled
revolutions in communications computing
here on Earth. An orbital power grid could
unlock the next generation of capabilities in
space, things like persistent Earth
observation, real time data processing and
advanced communications infrastructure.
Anna: The Series A round was oversubscribed,
meaning more investors wanted in than there
were shares available, and was led by B
Capital, with Shield Capital and Cerberus
Ventures also co leading. Notably, General
J. Raymond, the first chief of space
operations of the US Space Force, is joining
the board.
Avery: Starcatcher already holds the world record
for optical power beaming on the ground and
has completed an on orbit subsystem
demonstration. Now it's moving from validated
technology to scalable infrastructure.
An in space demonstration is planned for
later this year.
Anna: Mhm. Lasers in space, charging
your satellites. The future is something
else.
Avery: Alright, now we're going deep. This
one is for everyone who's ever stared at the
night sky and thought, why is any of this
here? And why does it work the way it does?
Anna: Physicists at Brown University in Rhode
island have published a paper in Physical
Review Letters proposing a potential solution
to one of the most vexing problems in all of
the cosmological constant problem.
Avery: Let's unpack that. The cosmological constant
is the mathematical term that describes the
energy driving the accelerating expansion of
the universe. Einstein introduced it,
famously, called it his greatest blunder, and
then died not knowing he'd actually been
right about it. Observations in the 1990s
confirmed the universe's expansion is indeed
accelerating.
Anna: Here's the Quantum field theory,
one of the most successful and rigorously
tested frameworks in physics, predicts that
vacuum energy, the energy inherent in empty
space, should make the cosmological constant
enormous, practically infinite. But
what we actually observe, a tiny, tiny
fraction of that prediction, the discrepancy
is around 120 orders of
magnitude. That's, uh, a one followed by
120 zeros.
Avery: It is, without exaggeration, the worst
prediction in the history of physics, and the
Brown University team thinks they may have
found a way to explain it.
Anna: Their insight draws an analogy with something
called the quantum hall effect, an exotic
phenomenon in condensed matter physics, where
electrical conductance in certain materials
is held perfectly steady, regardless of
imperfections, because of the topology,
the mathematical shape of the quantum state.
Avery: The researchers found that the simplest
formulation of quantum gravity has a
mathematically analogous structure, something
called the Chern Simons Kodama state. And
in that framework, the cosmological constant
becomes essentially locked in place. It's
protected by topology. The quantum
fluctuations that should be destabilizing it
are simply too small or improbable
Anna: to shift it, which, if it holds up, would
explain why the constant has the value it
does, not because of some extraordinary fine
tuning, but because the universe's geometry
protects it.
Avery: The authors are the first to acknowledge this
is a beginning, not an ending. There's a lot
of detailed work still to do, but it's a
genuinely new idea in one of the oldest
unsolved problems in physics, and that
deserves a moment.
Anna: We end today in the Jovian system And
with an image that has had planetary
scientists genuinely excited.
Avery: On 1 May, NASA's Juno spacecraft
completed a close flyby of Thebe, the
second largest of Jupiter's inner moons. And
when we say close, we mean it.
Juno passed within just 3,100
miles or 5,000 kilometers of thebe's
surface. The resulting image captures detail
at a resolution of about 1.9 miles
per pixel. The sharpest view we have ever had
of this world.
Anna: Thebe sits at the outer edge of Jupiter's
faint ring system. And that position is no
coincidence. Scientists believe Thebe
plays an active role in shaping one of
Jupiter's most delicate structures, the so
called gossamer ring. Dust shed from
Thebes surface gets swept into the ring,
helping maintain it.
Avery: The image was captured using Juno's Stellar
Reference Unit, an instrument whose primary
job is navigation imaging star fields to keep
the spacecraft oriented. But its exceptional
sensitivity in low light conditions has made
it a surprisingly powerful secondary science
instrument. It's previously discovered
shallow lightning in Jupiter's atmosphere and
revealed the structure of Jupiter's ring
system.
Anna: And now it's given us Thebe up close. A
small irregular world, heavily cratered,
ancient, playing a uh, quiet but essential
role in the dynamics of the solar system's
largest planet.
Avery: Juno continues to surprise us even this deep
into its extended mission. What a spacecraft.
Anna: Before we go, let's take a look at the sky
above you this week. Southern Hemisphere
listeners.
Avery: This morning, if you were up early enough,
you may have caught Saturn and a slender
crescent moon sharing the sky in the east
just a few degrees apart in Pisces.
Saturn's ring system is tilted towards us
again after years at southerly declinations,
so conditions are improving every month.
Anna: Also in the pre dawn sky, Neptune is in the
area, though you'll need binoculars or a
telescope for that one.
Avery: Tomorrow morning, Thursday the 14th, Mars
makes its own crescent moon pairing. A thin
sliver of moon sitting about 4 degrees from
the red planet, both visible to the naked eye
under a reasonably dark sky.
Anna: And looking ahead, the flower moon, May's
full moon arrives on May 31 and it
will be a blue moon. That's the second full
moon in a single calendar month. It won't
actually look blue, but it's a lovely thing
to know.
Avery: Clear skies to all of you out there now,
trivia time.
Anna: Today's trivia question ties into our Psyche
mission story.
Avery: The asteroid 16 Psyche is thought to be the
exposed metallic core of an ancient
protoplanet. Scientists believe it may be
composed primarily of two elements.
Anna: What are they Oh, I know that one. The
answer Nickel and Iron Psyche is
thought to be a, uh, remnant planetary core,
the building blocks of rocky worlds stripped
bare by billions of years of collisions.
Studying it from orbit could give us the
closest thing we'll ever have to a look
inside the Earth itself, which
Avery: is remarkable when you think about it. We
can't drill to our own planet's core, but we
might be able to
Anna: fly around one that is everything for today's
episode of Astronomy Daily, episode
101. Thank you for spending part of your day
with us.
Avery: If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe,
leave a review and tell a space curious
friend. Every listener matters.
Anna: You can find us at astronomydaily,
IO and across all major podcast
platforms, and you can follow us on social
media. Astrodaily Pod we'll be back
tomorrow with
Avery: the latest from the universe. Until then,
keep looking up from Anna and Avery
Clear skies.