Anna: Good morning, good afternoon, or good
evening, wherever in the world you're
listening. It's Saturday, and that means it's
time for the Astronomy Daily weekend space
and astronomy news rep. I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm, um, Avery. Each week we take a look
back at the biggest stories from across the
past seven days. And today we've got two
fresh off the press headlines, four of the
week's most important stories, and a little
bonus to round things off.
Anna: It has been a genuinely spectacular week
in space. Let's get into it.
Avery: We're going to start with something that
happened literally yesterday. And it's the
kind of moment that reminds you just how
extraordinary space exploration really is.
Anna: NASA's Psyche spacecraft completed a, uh,
gravity assist flyby of Mars on Friday,
skimming just 2,800 miles above the
planet's surface at over 12,000 miles per
hour.
Avery: Now, for context, Psyche launched back in
October 2023 on a 2.2
billion mile journey to reach its namesake
asteroid 16 Psyche, a metal
rich rock in the asteroid belt that
scientists believe may hold clues about how
the cores of planets like Earth first formed.
Anna: And rather than burn through propellant to
get there, the mission used Mars as a
slingshot, borrowing the planet's
gravitational energy to boost Psyche's speed
and bend its trajectory toward the asteroid.
Avery: The numbers are remarkable. In the days
leading up to closest approach, Psyche was
traveling at around 46,500
miles per hour relative to the Sun. After the
flyby that jumped over 52,000
Anna: miles per hour, three speeds courtesy of
Mars.
Avery: And while Psyche was in the neighborhood, the
science team wasn't just watching. They used
the opportunity to calibrate the spacecraft's
imager for the first time using Mars as a
target. And they also fired up the other
science instruments. There's even a chance
the cameras may have captured evidence of
Mars faint dusty ring formed by
micrometeorites striking Phobos and Deimos.
Anna: The time lapse imagery is still being
compiled, so more to come on that front. Next
stop for Psyche, the asteroid belt. With
arrival at asteroid psyche expected in
Avery: 2029, a, uh, spacecraft worth an
estimated $10 quadrillion in
asteroid real estate. Though I suspect we're
not going to be mining it anytime soon.
Anna: Not quite, but what a journey it already is.
Avery: Also happening yesterday, SpaceX, uh, finally
got the CRS 34 mission off the ground
after not one, but two weather scrubs earlier
in the week.
Anna: Third time's a charm. A Falcon 9 rocket
lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 6:05 in the
evening. Eastern time on Friday, carrying a
Dragon cargo spacecraft loaded with around
£6,500 of supplies and science
experiments bound for the International Space
Station station.
Avery: And it's actually a record breaking flight.
This particular Dragon capsule is making its
sixth flight to the iss. That's the most
flights any cargo Dragon has ever made.
Anna: Now here's the live angle for our weekend
listeners. Dragon is due to dock autonomously
to the station's Harmony module at around 7
in the morning tomorrow, Sunday the 17th. So
if you're up early, you may actually be able
to catch that docking coverage live on NASA.
Avery: Among the science heading upstairs,
experiments studying how bacteria behave in
microgravity, a, uh, bone scaffold made from
wood that could lead to new treatments for
osteoporosis, equipment to monitor space
weather's effect on Earth's power grids and
satellites, and research into how red blood
cells change in the space environment.
Anna: The Dragon is set to stay docked until mid
June before returning with time sensitive
research samples.
Avery: The expedition's 74 crew, including Commander
Jessica Meir and ESA astronaut Sophie
Adeno, will
Anna: the unpacking honors busy times on the iss.
Let's now take a look at the biggest stories
from across the past seven days.
Avery: Time now for our four story weekly wrap. The
biggest, most important space and astronomy
stories from the past seven days. Anna, uh,
where do we start?
Anna: We start with the Universe's skeleton and
the most detailed look anyone has ever taken
at it.
Avery: Scientists using NASA's James Webb Telescope
have produced the most detailed map ever made
of what astronomers call the cosmic web. The
vast skeleton like structure of dark matter
filaments and sheets that forms the
underlying architecture of the entire
universe.
Anna: Imagine a uh, giant three dimensional
spider's web stretching across all of space
with galaxies and galaxy clusters sitting
at the intersections and along the threads,
while enormous empty voids lie in
between. That's the cosmic web.
Avery: Led by researchers at the University of
California, Riverside, the team used
Cosmos Webb, uh, the largest survey program
ever conducted by JWST, to chart more
than 164,000 galaxies
across 13.7 billion years of cosmic
history. They traced this structure all the
way back to when the universe was just 1
billion years old.
Anna: One of the lead researchers described the
jump in detail as truly significant,
saying they can now see the cosmic web at a
time when the universe was just a few hundred
million years old. An era that was
essentially out of reach before jwst.
Avery: What used to look like a single smooth
structure when viewed by Hubble now resolves
into many separate components. Details that
were blurred before are now clearly visible.
Anna: And in a wonderful commitment to open
science, the team has released everything
publicly. The full pipeline, the galaxy
catalog, and even a video showing the cosmic
web evolving across billions of years.
Avery: The skeleton of the universe. And now anyone
can explore it. Published this week in the
Astrophysical Journal.
Anna: Now to a story with possibly the best name
in the history of space.
Dracula's Civito.
Avery: I cannot think of a better name for a planet
nursery.
Anna: Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope have imaged the largest
protoplanetary disk ever observed around a
young star. The system is known officially
as
IRAS2307767,
but its researchers have nicknamed it
Dracula's Civito. One researcher is from
Transylvania, another is from Uruguay, where
a, uh, civito is
Avery: a popular sandwich science at its finest.
Anna: The disk is located about a thousand light
years from Earth and stretches nearly 400
billion miles across, roughly 40
times the diameter of our own solar system,
all the way out to the Kuiper Belt.
Avery: And what Hubble has revealed is that this
disk is not the calm, orderly structure
astronomers expected planet nurseries to be.
It's chaotic, turbulent, enormous
wisps of gas and dust shoot vertically above
and below the disk's central plane, far
further than anything seen in a similar
system.
Anna: And strangely, these dramatic features
only appear on one side of the disk. The
other side cuts off sharply with nothing
that bizarre asymmetry scientists cannot
yet fully explain. Perhaps a sudden
influx of material, perhaps gravitational
interactions with the surrounding
environment.
Avery: The disk contains between 10 and 30 times
the mass of Jupiter, enough raw material to
potentially build several gas giant planets.
Scientists think it may be an oversized,
super chaotic version of what our own early
solar system once looked like.
Anna: As lead author Christina Monch from Harvard
and Smithsonian put it, planet nurseries can
be far more active and chaotic than we ever
expected. Right now, there are more questions
than answers. But these images are a
beginning point
Avery: and the star at the center, still hidden
behind all that dust. Scientists don't even
know if it's one star or two.
Anna: Dracula's Chivito. A mystery wrapped in
a cosmic sandwich.
Avery: This one's for everyone who's been waiting.
And it has been a long wait. SpaceX
has set, uh, Tuesday, May 19th. That's this
coming Tuesday as the launch date for
Starship version 3 flight 12.
Anna: Seven months since the last Starship flight.
NV3 is not just another test.
It's the most comprehensively redesigned
version of the vehicle so far. Nearly
every major system has been modified.
Avery: The super heavy booster now uses three larger
redesigned grid fins rather than four, each
with a new catch point for the tower recovery
system. The Raptor 3 engines have been
upgraded for higher thrust and simplified
operation. The propellant tanks have been
enlarged. The upper stage has an entirely new
maneuvering and propulsion system.
Anna: This flight will also debut launch pad
2 at Starbase in Texas, a new
upgraded pad with faster propellant loading
and electromechanical actuators on the catch
arm.
Avery: Tower Flight 12 won't attempt a booster
tower catch SpaceX is prioritizing
systems validation over showmanship. This
time the super heavy will splash down in the
Gulf of Mexico, or if you prefer, the Gulf
of America, and the starship upper stage
will continue on a suborbital trajectory,
deploying 22 Starlink simulator
satellites before splash down in the Indian
Ocean.
Anna: Why does this matter? Beyond the Spectacle
because Starship V3 is the version
NASA needs for the Artemis lunar landing
program. Before astronauts can land on the
moon, SpaceX needs to demonstrate
propellant transfer in orbit, and that
milestone depends on the success of this new
vehicle.
Avery: Launch window opens at 6:30 in the morning
AEST on Wednesday, May 20. For
our Australian listeners and for the rest of
the world, that will be 8:30pm
UTC on Tuesday, May 19th.
We'll be watching closely and you can expect
coverage in Monday's episode ahead of
Anna: the launch and before our bonus story,
a personal message to our Australian and
Southern Hemisphere Step outside
tonight, look west after sunset and
say goodbye to a visitor that won't be back
for 170,000 years.
Avery: Comet C 2025 R3 Pan
stars, which put on such a spectacular show
for Northern Hemisphere observers through
April, has now moved into the southern sky
and it's your turn.
Anna: The comet passed its closest point to the sun
back on April 19 and reached its
closest approach to Earth on April
26. It's fading now, but it's also
moving further from the sun in the sky, which
means it's becoming easier to spot from a,
uh, dark location with binoculars
tonight.
Avery: Saturday 16th May is actually
ideal timing because tonight is New
Moon, the darkest skies of the month. The
comet is currently tracking through the
constellation Monoceras the Unicorn,
just east of Orion in the evening sky.
Anna: Earlier this week, NASA's Astronomy
Picture of the Day featured a breathtaking
long exposure shot taken from the Craigieburn
Mountain range in New Zealand, showing the
comet with two distinct a short
curved dust tail and a long blue
ion tail, with the Orion Nebula
visible in the background.
Avery: This comet is an Oort Cloud visitor, a
frozen time capsule from the earliest days of
our solar system. Some astronomers believe
gravitational interactions with the outer
planets could eventually fling it out of the
solar system entirely. Meaning this truly
may be humanity's last chance to see it.
Anna: Clear skies, Southern Hemisphere
binoculars, dark horizon. Look west
after sunset. You've got a few more weeks
before it fades beyond reach.
Avery: And now, because we couldn't resist, it's
time for this week weekend wrap bonus. And
this one is pure joy.
Anna: Even Mars rovers have bad days.
Avery: NASA's Curiosity rover, which has been
exploring the Gale crater on Mars since 2012,
drilled into a rock this week nicknamed
Atacgama. Standard procedure.
Curiosity does this all the time to sample
the rock's chemistry.
Anna: Except this time, the entire chunk of
rock ripped clean out of the ground and
stayed stuck to the drill.
Avery: Just refused to let go. A, uh, complete Mars
souvenir that Curiosity did not ask for.
Anna: Engineers at JPL had to watch as the
rover shook, maneuvered and worked to free
itself from its unexpected passenger. The
Internet naturally had a field day.
Avery: Curiosity has been on Mars for nearly
14 years. It has drilled into
hundreds of rocks. And this week it
finally met one that fought back.
Anna: A little reminder that space exploration,
even after all these years, still has the
ability to surprise you. Sometimes with awe
inspiring science and sometimes with a rock
that just won't let go.
Avery: We love you Curiosity. Never change.
Anna: That's your Astronomy Daily weekend space and
astronomy news wrap for Saturday 17th
May, 2026. What a week it has
been.
Avery: Psyche's Mars Slingshot, a record
breaking Dragon launch with docking happening
today. The cosmic web mapped in
stunning detail. The most chaotic planet
nursery ever seen. Starship V3
ready on the pad. A once in
170,000 years Comet in
your southern skies and a uh, Mars rover
with a souvenir it uh, didn't ask for.
Anna: If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe.
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Avery: And a uh, reminder, we have new episodes
every Monday to Saturday and we'll be back
Monday ahead of that Starship V3 launch.
Don't miss it.
Anna: For Avery, I'm Anna. Clear skies everyone.
Wow.
Story soul.