Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily
briefing from the edge of the cosmos. I'm
Anna.
Avery: And I'm, um, Avery. It is Tuesday, the 26th
of May, 2026, and we have an
enormous show for you today.
Anna: NASA is literally, as we record this,
preparing to unveil the most ambitious lunar
plan in a generation. We're talking about a
permanent moon base.
Avery: Starship V3 made its dramatic debut.
A Soviet rover that vanished nearly 40 years
ago has quietly come back to life. And
the James Webb Space Telescope has pulled off
something no telescope has ever done before.
Anna: Plus, a supernova mystery that took 20
years to crack. And a finding about rocky
planets across the galaxy that could reshape
how we think about worlds like our own.
Avery: Let's get into it.
Anna: Our lead story today is one for the history
books. And uniquely, it is unfolding right
now as we speak, as we record this
episode. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
is preparing to take the podium at NASA
headquarters in Washington, Washington, D.C.
for a 2pm Eastern press conference that could
define the next decade of human space
exploration.
Avery: The headline is NASA is announcing
a permanent moon base. A real one, not a
visiting program, not flags and footprints. A
sustained human outpost at the lunar South
Pole with a target date of 2036.
Anna: What we know going in is significant. The
program carries a price tag in the region of
$30 billion across a seven year
foundational phase. It centers on the lunar
south pole, chosen because that region
contains water ice in permanently shadowed
craters, which NASA plans to convert into
rocket fuel, oxygen and life support systems.
Avery: Critically, this plan effectively retires the
Gateway concept, the proposed orbiting lunar
space station that's been on the drawing
board for years. The thinking is that the
resources and launch cadence needed for
Gateway are better directed toward getting
people on the surface and keeping them there.
Anna: Nuclear power is central to the architecture.
Both the base itself and potential future
Mars missions are expected to rely on
nuclear, uh, electric systems, a choice the
Planetary Society has flagged as potentially
transformative for deep space operations.
As Casey Dreher put it, nuclear propulsion
could open up huge opportunities for energy
use in various science missions and crewed
missions around the solar system.
Avery: Phase one alone calls for approximately 22
launches to the Moon, including the Artemis
IV crewed landing by 2028.
Those early flights will serve as the proving
ground. If they go smoothly, the program
earns its next phase. If there are hiccups,
the timeline shifts.
Anna: Commercial partners will play a major role,
supplying rovers, habitat modules and
surface logistics. International
collaboration is also baked in, though the
competitive context is hard to ignore.
China has announced its own international
lunar research program targeting the 2000 and
30s, and multiple nations now have advanced
lunar capabilities.
Avery: NASA's framing going into today's briefing
has been unambiguous. As Isaacman put it in
the lead up, this time the goal is not flags
and footprints. This time the goal is to
stay.
Anna: By the time our listeners hear this episode,
those full details will be public. We'll have
complete coverage in tomorrow's edition. But
what a moment to be covering space news. The
moon isn't a destination anymore, it's
Avery: becoming an address staying with big space
news.
And this one delivered drama in Spades.
On Friday 22 May 2026,
SpaceX launched Starship V3 for the very
first time. Flight 12, the most
powerful and most sophisticated rocket ever
built, now in its third generation
configuration.
Anna: And it did not disappoint, though perhaps not
entirely in the way SpaceX had planned.
Let's walk through what happened, because
this is a story with multiple chapters. The
launch came from brand new Pad 2 at uh,
Starbase Texas, itself a uh first.
After two scrubbed attempts, one foiled by
a hydraulic pin issue literally in
the final minutes of the countdown, Starship
lifted off at 6:33pm
Eastern on Friday. All 33
Raptor engines on the super heavy booster
lit cleanly.
Avery: The ascent looked textbook right up until
approximately one minute and 42 seconds into
the flight, when one of the six vacuum Raptor
engines on the ship upper stage shut down.
Now, in most rocket programs, that's a
mission ending event.
Anna: Not here. Starship's flight computer
detected the shutdown, instantly
redistributed the burn load across the
remaining five engines, extending their
burn durations to compensate. The vehicle
stayed on trajectory Face X
spokesperson Dan Hewitt on the live
commentary put it this way, the flight was
within analyzed bounds even if it wasn't
fully nominal.
Avery: Ship 39 reached space deployed
22 dummy Starlink satellites,
including two specially equipped with cameras
that captured stunning imagery of Starship in
orbit, and then executed a controlled
atmospheric re entry, splashing down in the
Indian Ocean as planned. Elon Musk called
it epic and a goal for humanity.
Anna: NASA Administrator Isaacman, who was watching
in person at Starbase, wrote on X
One step closer to the moon, one step
closer to Mars. Given that Starship
is the intended vehicle for the Artemis
crewed lunar landing, that's not a casual
observation.
Avery: Now, the super heavy booster did not have
such a clean ending. Multiple engines failed
during the boostback burn, the stage went off
normal and it came down hard in the Gulf of
Mexico. Rather than completing a soft
splashdown. The FAA has opened the review
as a standard after any anomaly over
navigable waters.
Anna: SpaceX had planned a splashdown rather than a
tower catch on this first V3 flight,
so losing the booster was within acceptable
test parameters. The company has formally
declared most of its pre planned test
objectives as completed.
Avery: The V3 design brings significant upgrades
over previous iterations larger propellant
capacity, simplified aft sections, new
Raptor 3 engines with higher thrust and
reduced complexity and ground infrastructure
at uh Pad 2. Designed for a much higher
launch cadence, this flight was about proving
those systems in the real environment.
Anna: It proved quite a lot. Flight 13
will be very interesting indeed.
Avery: Now to a piece of science that genuinely made
us sit back and marvel. The James Webb
Telescope has done something no telescope has
ever managed before. It has watched a daily
weather cycle unfold on a planet in another
star system.
Anna: The planet in question is WASP
94ab, a hot Jupiter
about 690 light years from Earth in
the constellation Microscopium. It's a
gas giant 1.7 times larger
than Jupiter, orbiting its star every four
days at a distance of roughly 8 million
kilometers. Temperatures on its dayside
exceed 1200 degrees Celsius,
and it is tidally locked, meaning one face
always points toward its star, the other
always faces away.
Avery: The research team led by Sagnik Mukherjee,
a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State
University who began this work as a PhD
student at UH UC Santa Cruz, used Webb's
Nirri M Instrument and a technique
called transit spectroscopy to observe the
planet as it crossed in front of its host
star.
Anna: And what they found was extraordinary. The
leading edge of the planet, the side rotating
from night into day. The planetary morning
was blanketed with thick clouds made of
magnesium silicate. Sand clouds,
essentially the same mineral found in talc
and ordinary rocks on Earth, vaporized and
condensed high in an alien atmospher.
Avery: But by the time the trailing edge, the
evening side, came into view, those clouds
had completely disappeared. A cloudy
dawn, a clear dusk. A weather cycle
repeating every four days with the planet's
orbit.
Anna: Co author David Singh of John Hopkins
University captured the significance
beautifully. He said, I've been looking at
exoplanets for 20 years, and general
cloudiness has been a thorn in our side.
We've known for quite a while that clouds are
pervasive on hot Jupiter planets, which is
annoying because it's like trying to look at
the planet through a foggy window.
Avery: Webb's ability to separate the morning and
evening limbs of the planet something the
Hubble Space Telescope simply cannot do
gave researchers their clearest view yet of
the atmosphere itself. And what they found
there was a surprise.
Wasp94ab is far more Jupiter
like in composition than a decade of Hubble
data had suggested.
Anna: Previous measurements had indicated the
planet had hundreds of times more oxygen and
carbon than Jupiter. The new cloud
corrected analysis brings that down to
roughly five times a full order
of magnitude correction and a reminder
that unresolved clouds can seriously
skew our picture of what other worlds are
made of.
Avery: The team didn't stop at WASP 94ab.
They found the same cloud cycle pattern on
two other hot jupiters, WASP 39b
and WASP 17b, suggesting this
isn't an anomaly, but a recurring feature of
how hot Jupiter atmospheres behave.
Anna: Researchers now plan to extend the survey to
planets on highly eccentric orbits.
Worlds that experience dramatic temperature
swings where even more extreme weather
patterns may be waiting to be discovered.
Avery: Weather forecasts for alien worlds we are
living in remackable times.
Anna: For nearly 20 years, astronomers have
been puzzled by a class of stellar explosions
so bright they break the rules. Super
luminous supernovae. Stellar deaths that
produce 10 times or more the visible light of
an ordinary supernova up to a hundred
times brighter in some cases. The question
has always been what is powering them
now?
Avery: Data from NASA's Fermi Gamma Race telescope
has delivered the first definitive answer and
it involves one of the most extreme objects
in the known universe.
Anna: The story centers on SN2017
EGM, first spotted by
ESA's Gaia mission back in May 2017.
An international team led by Fabio Acero uh
at the French national center for Scientific
Research has now confirmed that Fermi
detected gamma rays the most energetic
form of light coming from this event.
Avery: That confirmation matters enormously because
gamma rays carry the fingerprint of what's
actually happening at the core of the
explosion. And what Fermi's data reveals is
a magnetar a neutron star born in the
same stellar collapse that triggered the
supernova.
Anna: To understand why that's significant,
consider what a magnetar is. When a
star many times the mass of our sun
exhausts its fuel and collapses, its
core can compress into a neutron star
roughly the size of a city. Magnetars
are the most extreme version of those
objects, spinning hundreds of times per
second, generating magnetic fields a
thousand times stronger than those of
ordinary neutron stars the most
powerful magnetic objects in the known
universe.
Avery: The model works like the newborn
magnetar's furious rotation generates an
outflow of electrons and positrons,
matter and antimatter particles that forms a
vast cloud of energetic particles. That
cloud pumps energy back into the expanding
shell of stellar material, supercharging the
explosion and making it shine far brighter
than any ordinary supernova.
Anna: The team compared optical and gamma ray data
from SN2017 EGM
against theoretical mod models of exactly
this process, and the match was compelling.
As Fabio Acero put it, for nearly
20 years, astronomers have searched Fermi
data for gamma ray signals from thousands of
supernovae. And while a few intriguing
hints have been reported, none were
definitive until now.
Avery: This is a genuine first, a direct
observational window into the engine driving
the most powerful stellar explosions in the
cosmos,
Anna: and it opens a new avenue for future
research. The team has assessed how the
upcoming Tarenkov Telescope Array
Observatory, a UH next generation ground
based gamma ray facility, will perform at UH
detecting similar events. The era of
magnetor forensics is just beginning.
Avery: A mystery that's been open since the early
2000s finally cracked. And the answer
is a star corpse the size of a city
spinning like a cosmic dynamo.
Anna: Here's a finding that quietly challenges one
of our most fundamental assumptions about
what planets are made of. And it matters a
great deal for how we think about
habitability beyond our solar system.
Avery: A new paper submitted to the Astrophysical
Journal proposes that the structure we take
for granted here on Earth a dense metallic
core surrounded by a silicate mantle topped
by a thin crust may be the exception rather
than the rule for rocky planets across the
galaxy.
Anna: For decades, planetary scientists have used
our solar system as the template. Earth has
a metallic core. Mars has one. Mercury,
though radically oversized relative to the
rest of the planet, has one. The assumption,
largely unchallenged, was that rocky
planets formed this way. Heavy metals sank
to the center during the molten phase early
in planetary history, creating the
familiar layered structure.
Avery: But when you look at the full range of rocky
planets now cataloged and we have confirmed
over 6,000 exoplanets as of this year,
with many hundreds in the rocky category. The
diversity of compositions is striking.
Rocky planets form in vastly different
stellar environments with different ratios of
iron, silicate and other materials depending
on the chemistry of their parent nebula.
Anna: The researchers argue that many of the most
common rocky planets in the galaxy, so
called super Earths and sub Neptunes,
may have form in conditions where metallic
core formation simply didn't occur in the
same way or at all. Without that
dense metallic core, you don't get a global
magnetic field generated by a dynamo effect.
Avery: And that has profound implications for
habitability. Earth's magnetic field shields
our surface from the solar wind. Without it,
our atmosphere would gradually be stripped
away over geological timescales Mars
lost most of its magnetic field billions of
years ago. And look at it now.
Anna: If the majority of rocky planets across the
galaxy lack that protective magnetic
shielding, the calculus for finding life
friendly worlds changes considerably.
Avery: It's a sobering and fascinating paper and
a reminder that our solar system, for all its
familiarity, may be showing us a rather
unusual version of what planets typically
look like.
Anna: We're closing tonight with a story that has
everything Cold War history, a, uh,
decades long mystery, a surprising
rediscovery, and a laser beam fired
from New Mexico to a hillside on the moon.
Avery: Pass your minds back to November 1970.
The Soviet Union lands Luna 17 on the
Moon's sea of rains. Mada imbrium.
Out rolls Lunohod 1, a bathtub
shaped eight wheeled Rover bristling with
scientific instruments. The world's first
remote controlled vehicle to operate on
another world.
Anna: It was designed for a relatively short
mission. Instead, it kept going,
surviving 11 lunar day night cycles,
traversing roughly 10.5 kilometers of
the lunar surface, sending back thousands of
photographs and mountains of scientific data.
Then, in the autumn of 1971,
contact ceased. Mission over.
Avery: But here's the thing. Mounted on Lunohod 1
was a French built laser retroreflector,
a passive optical device that requires no
power whatsoever. Its only job is to bounce
laser light back toward wherever it came
from. And that device was still there,
perfectly intact, waiting.
Anna: The problem was that no one knew precisely
where Lunokhod 1 had ended its journey.
The rover had moved across the surface during
its mission, and without high resolution
orbital imagery, pinpointing its final
resting place to the precision needed for
laser ranging was impossible. For
nearly 38 years, it sat there,
silent, invisible,
scientifically tantalizingly out of reach.
Avery: Then, in 2010, um, everything changed.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sent back
high resolution imagery of Mare Imbrium, and
researchers spotted it, the rover and its
landing platform still sitting exactly where
they'd been left.
Anna: With updated coordinates in hand, a team from
the Apache Point Observatory lunar laser
ranging operation in New Mexico. The
Apollo project fired laser pulses at
the site in April 2010. And Lunokhod
1 fired back, not metaphorically.
Avery: The retroreflector returned approximately
2,000 photons per shot,
roughly four times stronger than the returns
from Lunokhod 2, and stronger than expected
from a reflector that had spent nearly four
decades exposed to the lunar environment.
Anna: The location turns out to be scientifically
valuable in ways researchers hadn't
anticipated. Lunokhod 1 sits closer
to the lunar limb than any of the Apollo
reflectors, a position that improves
measurements of the lunar librations, the
subtle wobbles in its rotation, which in
turn help refine models of the lunar
interior.
Avery: And there's a puzzle that the recovered
reflector is helping solve. Near Full
Moon, the strength of laser returns from all
reflectors drops by a factor of 10. No
one fully understands why Lunokhod
1's strong returns from a different geometry
are providing new clues.
Anna: Long term laser ranging, now including this
recovered Cold War relic, has given us some
of our most precise measurements of how the
Moon is slowly drifting away from Earth,
uh, at about 3.8 centimeters per year,
and has contributed evidence for the
existence of a fluid lunar core.
Avery: A rover that fell silent in
1971, rediscovered from
orbit, resurrected by a laser pulse,
and still contributing to science today.
Sometimes the best stories don't end, they
just go quiet for a while.
Anna: And that wraps up Astronomy daily for
Tuesday, 26 May 2026
from a moon base that could redefine human
civilization to a Soviet rover
whispering back from the lunar surface.
What a day to be paying attention to the
cosmos.
Avery: If today's episode sparked something for you,
please subscribe, leave a review and share us
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Avery: For Anna, I'm Avery.
Anna: Keep looking up Astronomy Daily Every
day from every corner of the universe,
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