Anna: Hello and welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm
Anna.
Avery: And I'm, um, avery. It's Friday, July 10,
2026, and we've got quite the lineup for you
today.
Anna: We're talking about quasars from the dawn of
time. A telescope getting hoisted onto its
launch platform, an asteroid hunting
satellite constellation, a space snowman,
and a tiny cubesat that wants to
redraw the map of Earth itself. Itself.
Avery: It's a big one. Let's not waste any time.
Straight into it. And Anna, uh, how do you
feel about looking back nearly 13 billion
years?
Anna: Honestly, a little dizzy. But that's
exactly what the European Space Agency's
Euclid telescope has just done.
Astronomers have used it to find, uh, 31
quasars from the universe's first billion
years of existence.
Avery: And quasars, for anyone who needs the
refresher, are the blazing cores of galaxies.
Supermassive black holes gorging on gas and
dust so violently that they can outshine
every star in their host galaxy combined.
Anna: Right. And two of these 31 are
record breakers. Their light left them when
the universe was just 670
million years old. That's about 5%
of its current age.
Avery: 5%. That's like finding a photo
from someone's first birthday and using it to
figure out how they run a company 40 years
later.
Anna: Which is basically the mystery here. These
black holes are already around a billion
times the mass of our Sun. Nobody has a
clean explanation for how they packed on that
much mass so early.
Avery: The new record holder is cataloged as
Eucl J17, uh,
292.75641.8.1.
And it beats the previous most distant quasar
by about 15 million years, which, in
cosmic terms, is basically nothing.
Anna: The team, led by Daming Yang at Leiden
University, published the find in Astronomy
and Astrophysics. And here's a fun detail.
Finding 31 rare objects buried in a
survey of billions of galaxies is a
genuine needle in a haystack bobblem.
Avery: So how'd they do it?
Anna: Bayes Theorem. Um, centuries old statistics
repurposed for one of the largest
astronomical data sets ever assembled.
Old math, brand new universe.
Avery: I love that. Euclid's still got a long way
to run, too. This is from just its wide
survey, which will eventually cover more than
one third of the entire sky.
Anna: So consider this the opening chapter. There's
a lot more of the early universe still
defined now, from the deep past to the
very near future. NASA's Nancy
Grace Roman Space Telescope just took another
step toward launch.
Avery: This is the big dark matter dark energy
exoplanet hunting flagship. Right?
Anna: That's the one. NASA confirmed this week that
inside the payload hazardous servicing
facility at Kennedy Space center, technicians
used cranes to lift the 18,000
pound observatory onto a specialized work
platform called the Pantheon.
Avery: 18,000 pounds hanging in mid air on
a crane. That's not a moment I'd want to be
standing underneath.
Anna: Nerve wracking to watch, I'd imagine. But
it's a routine and carefully choreographed
step. It moves Roman from its padded shipping
configuration into its proper operational
setup, ready for integration and testing.
Avery: And they've already powered it up for system
checkouts to make sure everything survived
the trip from Goddard in one piece.
Anna: Exactly. Roman is targeting no earlier
than Sunday August 30th for launch on a
SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch
Complex 39A.
Avery: Once it's up, it's heading out to the sun.
Earth L2 point. About a million miles from
Earth where it'll have an unobstructed view
of the cosmos.
Anna: From there it'll hunt for dark matter, probe
dark energy and directly image
exoplanets around nearby stars. A
proper Swiss army knife of an observatory.
Avery: Less than two months to go now. We'll be
keeping a close eye on this one. Now Anna,
another quick question. Where's the one
direction in the sky where we're basically
blind to incoming asteroids?
Anna: Straight at the Sun. Anything approaching
from that direction gets lost in the glare
for any ground telescope.
Avery: Which is exactly how the 2013 Chelyabinsk
meteor snuck up on everyone. It came in from
near the sun and wasn't spotted until it was
already in the atmosphere over Russia.
Anna: China's now laying out detailed plans to
close that gap. Chief Scientist Li
Mingtao has confirmed a ah combined ground
and space monitoring network. And new
reporting this week reveals just how detailed
the space side of the plan already is.
Avery: Give me the details.
Anna: A paper from June co authored with Wu Wei
Ren, chief designer of China's lunar
exploration program, lays out four
candidate orbits for the space based
telescopes. The Sun, Earth L1,
Lagrange Point, an Earth leading or
trailing orbit, a Venus like
heliocentric orbit orbit, and something
called an Earth companion distant
retrograde orbit.
Avery: That's a lot of orbital real estate to be
considering.
Anna: It is. And each one's being evaluated for
how well it actually watches that sunward
blind spot. Right now more than 40,000
near Earth asteroids are cataloged and we've
found over 95% of the kilometer
plus ones that could cause global damage.
But. But only around
45% of the smaller
140 meter class asteroids have been
found and those are still big enough to
flatten a small country.
Avery: So this network is specifically going after
the ones we're most likely to miss.
Anna: Exactly. The idea, round the clock, no
blind spots. Coverage. Combining ground
telescopes for the night sky with space based
eyes watching the direction
Avery: the sun blocks, planetary defense,
filling in, um, the gaps one orbit at a time.
Anna: Time for my favorite kind of space story,
the ones that come with genuinely gorgeous
pictures. As we reported over the last couple
of episodes, JAXA's Hayabusa2
spacecraft has just flown past the asteroid
Tory Foon. And the images that have been sent
back so far are wonderful.
Avery: This is the same Hayabusa 2 that brought us
those Ryugu samples back in 2020?
Anna: The very same. Now out on an extended
mission. On July 5, it screamed past
Tory Foon at about 5 kilometers a second,
coming within roughly 800 meters of the
surface.
Avery: And what did it find?
Anna: Tory Foon turns out to be a contact
binary. Two separate asteroids that
drifted together over time and fused into
1 elongated 2 lobed shape.
Scientists are calling it a snowman. And once
you see the image, you can't unsee it.
Avery: Ground based observations had hinted it might
be elongated, but this is the first time
anyone's actually confirmed the double lobe
structure.
Anna: Right. Using its optical camera,
Thermal infrared Imager, Near Infrared
Spectrometer and lidar, all within about
an hour of closest approach. That's a lot of
instruments working overtime. On a single
high speed pass.
Avery: Corey foons, about 450 meters across,
orbits the sun every 383 days and
spins once every five hours. It belongs to
the Apollo Group, the near Earth asteroids
whose paths cross our own.
Anna: Hayabusa2 isn't done yet either.
Backstop is 1998
KY26 in 2031, an
asteroid only about 11 meters across,
which would make it the smallest asteroid
ever visited by a spacecraft.
Avery: From a cosmic snowman to visiting something
the size of a house, this mission just keeps
giving.
Our next story is proof that not every
exciting mission needs to leave Earth orbit.
Sometimes it's all about measuring the planet
we're already standing on.
Anna: This is grits, the Geodetic
Reference Instrument transponder for small
satellites. It launched July 7th
aboard SpaceX's Transporter 17
rideshare mission out of Vandenberg.
Avery: A cubesat, no less. How small are we talking?
Anna: A, uh, 12U cubesat, about the size of a
large shoebox built by the Dutch company
ISAS Space, working with NASA Goddard
and the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Avery: So what's the actual job here?
Anna: It's tackling a really specific,
unglamorous, but important problem.
Right now we measure Earth's precise shape
and position using three separate systems.
GPS satellites, radio telescopes, doing
something called very long baseline
interferometry and laser ranging stations
on the ground.
Avery: And those three systems don't always agree
with each other.
Anna: Exactly. Tying them together traditionally
relies on physical ground based surveying,
which introduces tiny errors.
Brits acts as a single satellite that all
three systems can see and measure at once,
effectively becoming a shared reference point
in the sky.
Avery: So instead of three separate rulers that, uh,
don't quite line up, you get one ruler
everyone agrees on.
Anna: That's the idea. It upconverts incoming
GPS signals and rebroadcasts them so
ground based radio telescopes can track it
too, while a mounted laser reflector lets
ground stations range it directly.
Avery: And the payoff is millimeter accuracy in
what's called the international terrestrial
reference frame. Basically the master
coordinate system the whole world uses for
mapping, navigation and tracking sea level
rise.
Anna: It sounds small, but that kind of precision
underpins everything from your phone's GPS
to climate science. A, uh, shoebox in orbit,
quietly making the whole planet easier to
measure.
Let's finish today somewhere a little more
relaxed. If you're the sort of person who
likes to just step outside and look up
tonight, you're in luck.
Avery: Why's that?
Anna: There's no moon in the sky at all this
evening, which means no wash of moonlight
drowning out the fainter stuff. It's
genuinely one of the best nights of the month
for chasing dimmer objects with a telescope
or a decent pair of binoculars.
Avery: And for anyone wanting an easier target with
the naked eye, Venus is still keeping close
company with Regulus, the brightest star in
Leo, low in the evening twilight.
Anna: That pairing's been a lovely one this week.
And Venus is on track to meet up with a
slender crescent moon around the 17th,
so keep half an eye on the western sky over
the coming days.
Avery: A dark sky tonight. A, uh, planet and star
pairing to enjoy right now. And a moon Venus
meetup to look forward to. Not a bad way to
close things out.
Anna: Not bad at all. Get outside if you can. The
sky's putting on a show either way.
Avery: That's it for today. Quasars from the dawn of
time. Roman's launch getting closer. A
sunward asteroid watch. A snowman in the
asteroid belt. And a cubesat remeasuring the
Earth.
Anna: Thanks for spending part of your day with us.
We'll be back tomorrow with more from across
the universe. Until then, Clear skies.
Avery: Astronomy day. Mhm
stories.