Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily,
your daily guide to the Universe for Thursday
the 14th of May, 2026.
I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm Avery. Big show today, Anna. Uh,
we've got a rocket about to make history, a
spacecraft using Mars as a slingshot, and a
medieval poet who may have accidentally
written the world's first impact physics
textbook.
Anna: Coming up, SpaceX locks in a
launch date for the most powerful version of
Starship yet. NASA's Psyche
probe is just hours away from its dramatic
Mars flyby. The James Webb Space
Telescope has delivered its clearest ever
map of the universe's skeleton.
Avery: Coming up, a large coronal hole is sending a
surge of solar wind our way. Good news for
Aurora watchers in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Dragon cargo capsule has docked at the
International Space Station after a week of
weather delays. And we'll tell you why
researchers are re reading Dante's Inferno
through the eyes of a planetary scientist.
Anna: Stay with us. It's all coming up on
Astronomy Daily.
Avery: Let's go.
Anna: Then let's kick things off with a story that
has the space community buzzing.
SpaceX has officially announced the launch
date for Starship Flight 12, and
it is just five days away.
Avery: That's right, May 19 is now the target
for what may be the most anticipated rocket
test of the decade. This isn't just any
starship launch. Flight 12 will be the debut
of Starship version 3, a thoroughly
redesigned vehicle that SpaceX says has been
rebuilt almost from the ground up for full
and rapid reuse.
Anna: So what's actually changed? Well, the super
heavy booster now sports three grid
fins instead of the original six. Those are
the lattice like structures that help steer
it back through the atmosphere. The whole
vehicle is taller, heavier and more
capable than its predecessors.
Avery: The launch window opens at 6:30 in the
evening Eastern Time. That's 8:30 the next
morning here in Australia. On May 20th,
it'll lift off from Starbase in South Texas.
And um, importantly, this will be the very
first launch from Starbase's second orbital
launch pad.
Anna: Now, because this is a brand new vehicle
design, SpaceX won't be attempting to catch
the super heavy booster back at the launch
tower on this flight. Instead, both
the booster and the upper stage, known as
Ship, are targeting water landings. The
booster aims for the Gulf of Mexico and Ship
is targeting the Indian Ocean about 65
minutes after liftoff.
Avery: As for the payload, ship will carry 22
dummy Starlink satellites on the same
suborbital trajectory. And there's a clever
experiment. The last two of those dummy
satellites will actually scan Starship's heat
shield and beam images back to mission
controllers. They want to test whether they
can remotely assess heat shield integrity
from orbit.
Anna: There's also a single Raptor engine
relight planned in space, something that'll
be essential for future operational missions.
And SpaceX has deliberately removed one
heat shield tile to measure how adjacent
tiles behave under re entry stress when
there's a gap.
Avery: Full disclosure on the engineering nerves
here. The previous version of this booster,
called B18, was actually destroyed
during ground testing late last year when its
liquid oxygen tank imploded during a pressure
test. B19 has had a much smoother
road, passing three static fire tests in
the last three months, including a, uh, full
33 engine full duration burn.
Anna: We will of course, be watching this one very
closely. Mark your calendars May
19th. We'll have full coverage in the next
episode. Enormous stakes, enormous
rocket.
Avery: While everyone's eyes are on Starship next
week, there's something happening tomorrow
that deserves just as much attention, at
least for the science crowd. NASA's Psyche
spacecraft is about to use Mars as a cosmic
slingshot.
Anna: This is one of those elegantly clever
things about orbital mechanics. The
Psyche mission is ultimately headed for a
metal rich asteroid, also called
Psyche, out in the main asteroid belt
between Mars and Jupiter. It launched back
in October 2023, and it's been
gradually building speed using its solar
electric propulsion system ever since.
Avery: But solar electric propulsion is quiet and
efficient rather than fast. So to get the
extra kick it needs, the team planned this
Mars flyby from the very beginning. On
May 15th. That's tomorrow, Psyche
will pass just 2,800 miles from the Martian
surface. That's closer than the orbit of
Mars own moon, Phobos.
Anna: And it'll be moving at over
12,300 miles per hour,
nearly 20,000 kilometers per hour.
Mars's gravity will grab the spacecraft,
whip it around and send it on its way faster
and on a tilted trajectory that would have
been prohibitively expensive to achieve with
propellant alone.
Avery: The mission team has been preparing for this
for months. Back on February 23rd,
they fired the spacecraft's thrusters for,
uh, a full 12 hours to fine tune the
approach. And since May 7th,
Psyche has been sending back early images.
First a distant star field, then a
crescent shaped Mars, growing larger by the
day.
Anna: Those images aren't just pretty, they're
functional. The imaging team is using this
period to calibrate their cameras and
practice the techniques they'll need when
Psyche eventually arrives at the asteroid
in late 20. It's essentially
a dress rehearsal.
Avery: One unique visual because Psyche is
approaching from Mars's night side, the
planet currently looks like a crescent, just
a thin sliver of sunlight on the edge, very
much like our own crescent Moon. After
closest approach, mission controllers expect
to see a near full Mars view. As the
spacecraft swings around to confirm
Anna: the flyby was successful, the team will
monitor radio signals through NASA's Deep
Space Network. And there's a bonus science
objective, too. Psyche will use its
instruments to search for any faint dust
rings that might surround Mars
created by micrometeorites striking
Phobos
Avery: and Deimos asteroid arrival
2029 but tomorrow is a big
milestone. We'll have the results in our next
episode.
Anna: Now for something that puts everything, and
we mean everything, in perspective.
Astronomers using the James Webb Telescope
have produced what they're calling the most
detailed map ever made of the cosmic
web.
Avery: The cosmic web is, well, it's the
universe's skeleton. Imagine the largest
structure that exists, a vast network of
dark matter filaments and gas sheets
interwoven across billions of light years,
connecting galaxies and galaxy clusters
together. Between those filaments are
enormous, almost entirely empty regions
called voids. That's the cosmic web.
Anna: And now, for the first time, we have a
truly detailed map of it, one
that stretches all the way back to when the
universe was only about 1 billion years
old. The research was led by a team at
the University of California, Riverside,
using what's known as the Cosmos Web
Survey, the single largest observing program
that Webb has ever conducted.
Avery: The map charts the positions of over
164,000 galaxies
plotted across 13.7 billion
years of cosmic history. Think about that
A map of 164,000
galaxies spread across nearly the entire age
of the universe. Published in the
Astrophysical Journal.
Anna: What makes this such a leap forward is
precision. Webb's infrared instruments can
detect galaxies that were completely
invisible to older telescopes and can
measure their distances with far greater
accuracy. That's what allows you to place
each galaxy precisely in its cosmic
context, rather than just knowing roughly
where it sits.
Avery: The lead author, Jose Hatamnia, a
graduate student at UC Riverside, put it this
for the first time, scientists can study how
galaxies evolve within cluster and
filamentary structures across of
cosmic time, from the universe's infancy
right up to the present day.
Anna: And the images from this map are genuinely
beautiful. The dense clusters and filaments
show up as bright yellow in the
visualizations. The voids are dark,
great sweeping emptiness between the cosmic
threads. It really does look like a web.
Avery: The implications reach well beyond
aesthetics. Understanding how the cosmic
web formed and evolved over time is key to
understanding why galaxies look the way they
do today, why some are large spirals, others
are elliptical, others are irregular, and
how dark matter has shaped the universe we
live in.
Anna: One of the most stunning results from the
cosmos Webb data is that the cosmic web
appears to have been in place much earlier
than some models predicted, meaning the
universe organized itself into this vast
structure surprisingly quickly after the Big
Bang.
Avery: Webb continues to rewrite the textbooks. This
one is a landmark result.
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Avery: Alright, let's get back to today's space and
astronomy news.
Anna: Now for something that Southern Hemisphere
listeners may want to keep an eye on this
weekend our sun has been busy and the
results could mean auroras for sky watchers
across Australia, New Zealand and southern
South America.
Avery: A large coronal hole has rotated into what's
called a ah, geoffective position, meaning
it's pointing directly at Earth. Coronal
holes are regions in the Sun's outer
atmosphere where the magnetic field opens
outward into space rather than looping back,
allowing a fast stream of solar wind to
escape directly into the solar system.
Anna: This particular coronal hole is both large
and positioned right at the solar equator,
which means the high speed solar wind stream
it produces is aimed squarely in our
direction. That stream is expected to begin
reaching Earth on Friday, which is tomorrow.
Avery: Our time base weather forecasters have
issued a uh, G2 moderate geomagnetic
storm watch for Friday the 15th.
G2 conditions are significant enough to push
aurora visibility well beyond the polar
circles. For Southern Hemisphere observers,
that means southern Australia, Tasmania and
New Zealand could all be in play.
Anna: There's also a separate, slightly earlier
event to watch, a coronal mass
ejection. A blob of solar plasma was
launched on May 10 during an M
M5.7 flare from Active
Region 4436. That CME
may deliver a, uh, glancing blow today or
tomorrow, potentially adding some extra
activity before the main solar wind stream
arrives.
Avery: So what should you do if you want to catch
the show? Tonight and Friday night are your
best windows? Get away from city lights, find
the clear southern horizon and check the
Bureau of Meteorology's Space Weather Alert
page or apps like space weather live for
real time, KP Index updates. If it hits
KP5 or above, look south.
Anna: Clear skies and fingers crossed.
For those of you hoping to see the Southern
lights this weekend, now for
Avery: something a little different. What if one of
the greatest works of medieval literature was
also accidentally a, uh, reasonably accurate
description of a planetary impact event?
Anna: That is the argument being put forward by
Timothy Burberry, a professor at Marshall
University in West Virginia, in research
presented at the European Geosciences Union
General assembly in Vienna earlier this
month. And once you hear it, it's
genuinely hard to unthink.
Avery: So, the basics. Dante Alighetti wrote
the Divine Comedy in the early 1300s.
That's the 1300s. The inferno is the
first part of that work. And it describes
Hell as an inverted conical pit beneath
Jerusalem. Nine concentric circles
descending downward to a frozen core where
Satan is trapped.
Anna: Now, for seven centuries, readers have
interpreted this as spiritual allegory,
pure and simple. Satan fell from
heaven and was imprisoned at the Earth's
center. Mount Purgatory was created on
the opposite side of the globe from the
displaced Earth. Vivid imagery,
profound theology, end of story.
Avery: Or so everyone thought. Burberry's
argument is that if you strip away the
religious symbolism and look at what Dante is
actually describing as a physical event,
it maps remarkably well onto the structure of
a complex impact crater.
Anna: In his interpretation, Satan acts as
a high velocity impactor, an
asteroid sized object striking the southern
hemisphere at tremendous speed,
drilling through the crust to the Earth's
core. The nine circles of Hell. They
closely resemble the concentric terraced
rings that large impacts create as
shockwaves propagate outward, the same
structures you see in major impact basins
on the Moon and Venus.
Avery: The specific comparison Burberry makes is to
the Chicxulub impact, The asteroid strike
66 million years ago that ended the age of
the dinosaurs and left the 150
kilometer crater beneath what is now the Gulf
of Mexico. Chicxulub is one of the best
studied complex impact structures on Earth.
And its internal geometry, peak
rings, terraced walls, central basin,
mirrors what Dante described.
Anna: Mount Purgatory rising on the opposite
side of the globe. That would be the central
peak, or in some large impacts, an
antipodal feature, a mountain created by
the focused seismic energy of the impact
converging on the far side of the planet.
Avery: It's a real phenomenon now, and, um,
this is important. Burberry is not claiming
that Dante had secret knowledge of impact
physics. He's proposing something more
interesting than that, that Dante
intuitively applied the best physics
available to him in the 14th century to think
through what a catastrophic fall from heaven
would look like as a real physical event. And
in doing so, he stumbled into something that
looks a lot like what we now know about
impact craters.
Anna: The research was presented under the flag of
what Burberry calls literary
geomythology, the idea that ancient
texts and myths sometimes preserve
intuitions about natural phenomena long
before science has the tools to formally
describe them. The nine Circles of Hell
as Multi Ring Impact Basin
Satan as Oblong Asteroid
it's quite a thought.
Avery: The Divine Comedy simultaneously one of
history's greatest literary achievements, and
apparently a geophysical thought
experiment.
Anna: Who knew Wrapping up our main stories
today with an update to a mission we've been
following this week. After not one but
two weather scrubs, the SpaceX Dragon
cargo capsule for NASA's CRS
34 mission has successfully docked with
the International Space Station.
Avery: The launch finally got off the ground from
Cape Canaveral on Wednesday evening. After
scrubs on both Tuesday and Wednesday due to
weather, Dragon arrived at the ISS today,
May 14, docking autonomously to the
forward port of the Harmony Module.
Anna: On board about 6,500
pounds, roughly 2,950
kilograms of science experiments,
supplies and hardware for the expedition's
74 crew. BASA astronaut Jack
Hathaway and ESA astronaut Sophie
Adenow were on duty to monitor Dragon's
approach and docking.
Avery: Now, some of that cargo is genuinely
fascinating. One investigation, called Green
Bone, involves a scaffold made from wood that
researchers believe could be used to help
grow bone cells in microgravity. The
goal is to develop new treatments for bone
fragility conditions, particularly
osteoporosis Wood derived growing
bone in space.
Anna: There's also the ODESSI study, which is
testing how accurately Earth based simulators
can replicate actual microgravity
conditions. Scientists will compare
bacteria behavior in true space
conditions against results from ground based
labs, and if the data differs, it
could mean some of our ground based
conclusions about microgravity biology
need to be revised.
Avery: And a third investigation is looking at how
red blood cells and the spleen change
in the space environment, crucial data for
protecting the health of astronauts on long
duration missions to the moon and eventually
Mars.
Anna: This Dragon capsule known as
C209 is actually making its
sixth flight to the ISS. That's a record for
a SpaceX cargo craft and a sign of just
how reliably reusable these vehicles have
become. It's expected to stay at the station
for about a month before returning to Earth
with completed experiments splashing down off
the coast of California in mid June.
Avery: Despite the weather delays, CRS 34
is on its way. Science is being done.
Good news all round.
Anna: Time now for your Sky Watcher's Corner, our
weekly guide to what's worth looking for in
the night sky. And this week, Avery, we've
got a very timely one.
Avery: We do. As we mentioned in story four,
there is a real chance of aurora activity
this weekend for the Southern Hemisphere
observers with a, uh, G2
geomagnetic storm watch in effect from Friday
the 15th. The Southern Lights, the
Aurora Australis could be visible from
southern Australia, Tasmania and New
Zealand.
Anna: The best viewing is away from city light
pollution with a clear, unobstructed southern
Horizon. Check the KP index. If it
reaches 5 or higher, you're in business.
Apps like Space Weather Live and my Aurora
Forecast give real time updates. Bundle up,
be patient and look south.
Avery: And while you're out there Friday evening,
remember that just hours earlier, NASA's
Psyche spacecraft will have completed its
Mars flyby, slingshotting around the red
planet on its way to a metal asteroid.
Mars itself is in the pre dawn sky this week
near Saturn. Early risers can catch both
as the sky lightens before sunrise.
Anna: A weekend of space events right on our
doorstep. Don't miss it.
Avery: That's everything from us for this Thursday
edition of Astronomy Daily. What a show.
Starship V3 on the launch pad.
Psyche swinging past Mars. The
universe's skeleton mapped in unprecedented
detail. Aurora alerts for the Southern
Hemisphere. Dante moonlighting as an
impact physicist and Dragon safely
at the station.
Anna: Before we go, a quick trivia. The
Chicxulub impact crater, the one that helped
end the dinosaurs 66 million years ago,
is buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico and the
Yucatan peninsula. At roughly
150km across, it's one of the
largest confirmed impact structures on Earth.
And now possibly in medieval Italian
poetry.
Avery: Links to everything we've covered today are
in the show Notes. Find us at astronomydaily
IO and follow us on social media
astrodaily pod. And if you enjoy the
show, please leave us a rating and a review.
It genuinely helps new listeners find us.
Anna: From all of us here at Astronomy Daily, keep
looking up clear skies and we'll see you
tomorrow.
Avery: I saw every day
the stories be told.
Stories.