Anna: How cool is this? Right now, as you're
listening to this, a rocket is in space.
A brand new satellite is on its way to a very
unusual orbit, one that will take it a, uh,
third of the way to the moon. And it's going
to do something no spacecraft has ever done
before. Take X ray pictures of Earth's
own magnetic field.
Avery: And that's just story one.
Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily, the
podcast that brings you the universe fresh
every single day. I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm Avery. This is season five, episode
106. And today, Tuesday,
May 19, 2026, we have
a genuinely packed show.
Anna: We've got a historic launch that happened
just hours ago. We've got the world's most
powerful rocket sitting on a brand new pad
ready to fly. Well, almost ready.
There's a slight schedule adjustment. We'll
explain. And we've got a warning from
scientists that the rocket boom itself might
be quietly changing our atmosphere.
Avery: Plus a, uh, shoebox sized detector that could
let us see the core of the sun. Some
extraordinary news from Antarctic ice, and a
clever new telescope that listens to the
ancient universe in a completely new way.
Anna: Six stories. Let's get into it.
Avery: Our first story is happening right now, or
more precisely, it happened in the early
hours of this morning. If you're listening
from Australia or New
Anna: Zealand, at 5:52 in the morning,
Central European time, a, uh, European
Vega C rocket lifted off from the M. Guillot
Guiana Space center in Kourou, French Guiana.
And aboard it was a spacecraft called Smile.
Avery: Smile, which stands for Deep Breath
Solar Wind, Magnetosphere
Ionosphere Link Explorer,
a name
Anna: that is almost impressively unwieldy for
something this elegant.
Avery: But what it's going to do is genuinely
beautiful. Smile is a joint mission between
the European Space Agency and the Chinese
Academy of Sciences. Its entire purpose
is to study how Earth responds to the sun.
Not the sun itself, but the interaction,
that invisible battle between solar wind and
our planet's magnetic shield.
Anna: And it's going to do two things that have
never been done before. First, it will take
X ray images of Earth's magnetic field,
specifically the boundary where the solar
wind rams into the magnetosphere. That
boundary is called the magnetopause, and no
spacecraft has ever imaged it in X rays.
Avery: Second, Smile will watch the aurora, the
northern lights, continuously for up to
45 hours at a time in
ultraviolet. Most aurora observations are
snapshots. Smile will give us a full
movie.
Anna: To do all this, it needs a very
unusual orbit. After claunch, it'll fire
its engine 11 times over 25
days to maneuver into a highly elliptical
path, swinging out to 121,000
km above the north Pole, then
diving back down to just 5,000
km above the south Pole.
Avery: That's almost a third of the way to the Moon.
At its furthest point.
Anna: It's carrying four science instruments, a
soft X ray imager, an ultraviolet
aurora imager, a light ion
analyzer and a magnetometer. And it
has a planned mission lifetime of three
years.
Avery: Worth mooting too. This is the seventh flight
of a Vega C rocket and the first time
Italian manufacturer Avio operated the
vehicle directly, replacing Ariana Space
which ran the previous six flights.
So multiple milestones today, space weather
is
Anna: something that affects all of us. It disrupts
satellites, threatens power grids and poses
real risks to astronauts. Smile won't just
do pure science. It'll help us predict
dangerous storms earlier and protect the
technology we rely on and the people we're
sending into space.
Avery: There's also a geopolitical subplot here.
Worth a moment of your time. ESA and China
built this mission together from scratch.
Jointly designed, jointly built, jointly
operated. Meanwhile, uh, NASA has been
legally barred from bilateral cooperation
with Chinese space entities since 2011
under the so called Wolf amendment. So
Smile is quietly saying something about how
different parts of the western space
community see that question.
Anna: And it's now in space. Smile is
go now. If you woke up today
expecting to watch a Starship launch,
SpaceX has a small apology for you.
Avery: The debut flight of Starship V3 was
originally targeting today. Tuesday it
slipped to Wednesday and now it has slipped
again to Thursday, May 21 with
a launch window opening at 6:30pm Eastern
Time, which is 8:30am Friday morning
in Sydney.
Anna: SpaceX hasn't explained why publicly.
Likely some final closeout and pre fight
check work. Road closures around the Starbase
site in Texas remain in place through the end
of Thursday, which at least tells us Thursday
is still a live target.
Avery: But let's talk about what is sitting on that
pad. Because Starship V3 is
genuinely a step change from what came
before. When stacked Starship
V3 stands over 400ft tall,
about 123 meters, making it the
largest and most powerful rocket ever built.
It pairs booster 19 with ship 39
and both are running the new Raptor 3
engines.
Anna: The Raptor 3 is a meaningful upgrade.
Sea level variants now produce
250 tons of thrust each,
up from 230 previously.
Vacuum engines push to 275
tons. The engines are lighter down to
about 1525 kilograms each
and have an integrated design that eliminates
individual engine shrouds. There are also
savings across the whole vehicle, running to
roughly a ton per engine.
Avery: The payload capacity is eye watering.
Starship V3 can carry more than 100
metric tons to low Earth orbit in full
reuse configuration, roughly triple what
the previous version could manage.
Anna: And this is also the first launch from
orbital launch pad 2 at Starbase, meaning
SpaceX can now have two rockets being
prepared simultaneously rather than one.
That's a huge step toward the launch cadence
Elon Musk needs for his Mars ambitions.
Avery: For Flight 12 itself. Both the booster and
the ship will target controlled splashdowns
rather than a tower catch a deliberate step
back in ambition to validate the new
architecture first before chasing the
spectacular. The booster will come down in
the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America.
About seven minutes after launch, ship
39 will splash down in the Indian Ocean off
Western Australia, about an hour into the
mission.
Anna: During that flight, the ship will also deploy
20 dummy Starlink satellites, relight
a single Raptor engine in space, and
deliberately fly with one heat shield tile
removed to measure what happen happens
aerodynamically when a tile is missing.
Avery: The stakes here are enormous. NASA
needs Starship to serve as the human landing
system for Artemis 4, a crewed lunar
landing now targeted for 2028.
SpaceX still needs to demonstrate in orbit
refueling at scale, a process requiring more
than 10 tanker flights to fuel a single
moon mission. Starship V3 is the
vehicle designed to make that economically
possible.
Anna: Watch this space.
Quite literally, here's a story that connects
directly to everything we just talked about.
All those rocket launches, all those Starlink
satellites might be doing something to our
atmosphere that nobody planned and nobody
is regulating.
Avery: A major new study published in the journal
Earth's Future, led by researchers at AH
University College London, has done the most
comprehensive analysis yet of air pollution
from satellite mega constellations. The
Starlinks, Amazon's Kuiper satellites, the
Chinese Guang and Tian Fan systems.
Anna: And what they found is genuinely alarming.
When a rocket launches, it burns kerosene
fuel and produces black carbon
soot that gets injected directly into the
upper layers of the atmosphere. And unlike
soot from cars or power plants at ground
level, this high altitude soot, uh, lingers
for two and a half to three years
because of how
Avery: long it stays up there. The climate effect of
rocket launched black carbon is about
540 times greater per unit
than such from ground level sources. Not a
typo. 540 times
by 2029.
Anna: The UCL team projects that mega
constellations will account for 42%
of the total climate impact of the entire
space sector, up from 35% in
2020. And they note that their estimate is
probably conservative because the actual
number of launches since they gathered their
data has already exceeded their projections.
Avery: What makes this particularly thorny is what
the accumulation starts to resemble.
Scientists have for years discussed a
controversial climate intervention called
stratospheric aerosol injection. The
idea of deliberately spraying reflective
particles into the upper atmosphere to block
a fraction of sunl and cool the planet.
The space industry is essentially beginning
to do accidentally a version of this.
Anna: Professor Eloise Meriz, who led the study,
used a striking phrase. She called it a
small scale, unregulated
geoengineering experiment that could have
many unintended and serious environmental
consequences.
Avery: The effect right now is small. We're talking
about 100th of the concentration needed for a
meaningful geoengineering intervention. And
there's even a slight net cooling effect from
the soot, which sounds positive, but comes
with the same caveats as all
unpredictable impacts on rainfall, weather
patterns and the ozone layer.
Anna: The ozone layer, by the way, is also
affected. Launches and re entries produce
chemicals and particles that speed up ozone
depleting reactions. The team found that by
2029 the global ozone impact
is still small, about
0.02% deplet. But
the trajectory is heading in the wrong
direction.
Avery: SpaceX has recently applied for permission to
launch 1 million Starlink satellites
on top of the roughly 12,000 already in
orbit. 1 million. If even a
fraction of those are launched, the picture
changes significantly.
Anna: The researchers are calling for proper
regulation of launch related pollution,
something that currently barely exists, and
significantly more research funding to even
keep pace with the industry's growth.
Avery: It's one of those stories where the
technology and the environmental impact are
running at completely different speeds.
Anna: Before we move on to our next piece of news,
a quick reminder to check out the great deal
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Avery: You forgot to mention, NORDVPN is the one we
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Anna: Alright, back to today's space and astronomy
news and let's go small for a moment.
Very small, like shoebox small.
Avery: On May 3, a SpaceX rideshare
mission carried a tiny satellite into low
Earth orbit. A uh, 3U cubesat,
meaning it's about 30cm long and
10cm wide. It goes by the name
Snappy, which stands for Solar
Neutrino Astroparticle physics.
Anna: And Snappy is quietly a, uh, historic
first. It is the world's first neutrino
detector to ever operate in space.
Avery: Neutrinos are extraordinary particles.
They're produced in enormous quantities by
nuclear reactions, including the fusion
happening in the core of the sun right now.
Every second, hundreds of billions of
solar neutrinos pass through your thumbnail.
They barely interact with anything. They go
straight through the Earth as though it isn't
there.
Anna: Which makes detecting them extraordinarily
difficult. All our existing neutrino
detectors are massive underground facilities,
hanks containing thousands of tons of water
or ice, buried deep in mountains or
frozen in Antarctic glaciers. You need
enormous amounts of material to have any
chance of catching a neutrino.
Avery: Snappy is the opposite of that. It's a tiny
detector made of crystals of gallium and
tungsten sitting in a satellite orbiting at
500 km altitude. The whole thing
was designed by physicist Nicholas Salome at
uh, Wichita State University with electronics
from NASA Marshall.
Anna: It won't detect many neutrinos. The detector
mass is far too small for that. This is
explicitly a proof of concept. The goal
is to answer one question. Can space
based neutrino detection work at all?
Because if it can, the next step is
extraordinary.
Avery: Salome has described the end goal as, and I
love this phrase, putting a microscope into
the core of the Sun. A larger detector on
a future mission could fly close enough to
the sun to directly image the fusion shells
around the solar core. We would be able to
see in real time what is happening inside the
most powerful nuclear furnace in our solar
system.
Anna: Snappy is currently undergoing on orbit
testing. Its two year mission is just
beginning. And if it works, it opens a
completely new chapter in both solar
science and neutrino astronomy.
Avery: Big things, shoebox sized
packages next.
Anna: This is the story that if you stop and think
about it properly, will make you feel things
M Our solar
Avery: system is not sitting still in empty space.
It's moving constantly through the Milky Way.
And right now we are passing through a region
known as the local interstellar cloud.
A vast thin region of gas and dust between
the stars.
Anna: As we move through it. Earth is sweeping up
material from this cloud, including something
called iron 60. Iron 60
is a radioactive isotope of iron that
isn't produced naturally on Earth. It can
only be made in one place inside
a dying star in the moments of a
supernova explosion.
Avery: A new study led by researchers at Germany's
Helmholtz Centrum Dresden. Rostorf has
confirmed something remarkable. They analyzed
Antarctic ice cores, ice that has been
accumulating for tens of thousands of years,
layer by layer, trapping whatever drifted
down from the atmosphere at the time. And in
that ancient ice, they found Iron 60
steadily arriving, varying over time,
but persistently there.
Anna: The pattern of how the iron 60 arrives and
the way it varies tells the researchers that
this material has been stored inside the
local interstellar cloud since a stellar
explosion that happened long, long ago.
And as Earth moves through the cloud, it
picks some up.
Avery: Think about what that means. The ice in
Antarctica is preserving a record of our
solar system's journey through the galaxy.
The atoms that blew off a dying star are now
sitting in the ice at the South Pole, and
scientists can read that record.
Anna: The study also helps scientists understand
the structure and boundaries of the local
interstellar cloud, a region whose edges and
properties are still being mapped. Our
solar system has been inside it for tens of
thousands of years and will eventually exit
it, moving into whatever lies beyond.
Avery: We are quite literally moving through space,
and the universe is leaving fingerprints on
our planet as we go. I find that
extraordinary.
Anna: Our final story today is about a problem that
has frustrated astronomers for decades, and a
clever new instrument that might solve it.
Avery: The early universe is full of ancient
galaxies, galaxies that formed when the
universe was young, when star formation was
happening at an extraordinary rate. But
they're so far away and so faint that even
our most powerful telescopes struggle to
study them.
Anna: Individually, though, astronomers have done
something ingenious. Instead of trying to
resolve individual galaxies, they've built an
instrument that looks at a whole crowd of
them at once and tracks one spectral
line across the entire population.
Watching how that line changes over time and
across cosmic distances gives you a
statistical picture of what all those
galaxies are doing collectively.
Avery: The instrument is called time, the
Tomographic Ionized Carbon Mapping
Instrument. And, um, the spectral line it
focuses on comes from ionized carbon, a
tracer for star formation. Carbon emission
tells you where gas is being turned into
stars.
Anna: Time essentially makes a three dimensional
map of carbon emission across huge
stretches of cosmic history. You're not
seeing individual galaxies, you're. You're
seeing the aggregate glow of star formation
across the ancient universe, shifted and
stretched by cosmic expansion.
Avery: The tomographic part of the name is key.
Tomography means imaging by slices, like a
CT scan. But for the cosmos, time
slices through cosmic time by measuring how
the carbon line appears at different
frequencies, each corresponding to a
different distance and era.
Anna: It's a bit like trying to study a
conversation in a crowded room. You can't
hear every individual voice, but you
can measure the overall hum, how it changes
over time, when it gets louder, when it
fades. And from that you learn an
enormous amount about the crowd.
Avery: Time represents a new class of cosmological
instruments, one designed not for precision
individual observation, but for the
statistics of the universe at scale. And the
first results are already showing promise.
Anna: It's a reminder that sometimes the most
powerful approach isn't to look harder at
one thing, it's to look differently at
everything.
Avery: Before we wrap up, a quick look at the sky
for our Southern Hemisphere and Australian
listeners.
Anna: And there's something genuinely lovely
happening right now in the western sky after
sunset.
Avery: Venus is blazing in the evening sky. It's one
of the brightest things you can see after the
sun goes down. And over the next few nights,
the crescent moon will be moving past it,
creating a beautiful close pairing in the
west. Look low on the western horizon about
45 minutes to an hour after sunset. You won't
need binoculars.
Anna: And looking ahead to the end of the month,
mark May 31st in your calendar, we
get a full moon and it's a blue moon, the
second full moon in a single calendar month.
It won't actually look blue, but it is a
rarer event and it'll be a beautiful full
moon to observe clear skies, everyone.
That is Astronomy daily for Tuesday, May
19th. Six stories, one launch day,
one rocket sitting on a brand new pad and a,
uh, shoebox changing the future of physics.
Avery: If you enjoyed today's episode, please
subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and
leave us a review. It really does help new
listeners find the show. You can find us at
astronomydaily IO and we're
@astrodaily pod on all the major platforms.
Anna: Astronomy Daily is part of the bites.com
podcast network. We'll be back tomorrow with
more of the universe freshly delivered.
Avery: See you then.