Anna: Happy Saturday space fans. I'm
Anna.
Avery: And I'm Avery. Welcome to Astronomy Daily's
weekend space and astronomy news wrap.
Anna: It's been another big week out there.
Ancient quasars, mystery spheres on an
Australian beach, and a solar system mystery
hiding in plain sight on two very different
worlds.
Avery: And today we've also got two brand new
stories, including a genuine world first from
China and a tribute to one of the true
pioneers of space flight.
Anna: So settle in, let's get into it.
Avery: Let's start with today's headline story.
Yesterday morning, Friday, July 10,
China made genuine space flight history.
Anna: The Long March 10B rocket lifted off from
the Hainan Commercial space launch site its
very first flight and successfully placed a
satellite into orbit.
Avery: Nothing unusual about that bit. But about
six minutes after the first and second stages
separated, that first stage came back
down out of the sky and FL itself
directly into a giant net sitting on a
ship at sea.
Anna: A, uh, net, not legs. Like SpaceX's
Falcon 9 or Blue Origin's New Glenn, the
Long March 10B has no landing legs at
all. Instead it deploys four
lightweight hooks that snag onto a
huge cross shaped cable tensioned net
mounted on a purpose built recovery
vessel called the Linghong Zhe, or
Navigator.
Avery: And here's the bit that makes engineers sit
up. This was the rocket's maiden flight.
No one has ever nailed a first stage booster
recovery on the very first attempt before.
Not SpaceX, not Blue Origin.
Anna: China's other reusable contenders, The Long
March 12A and the Commercial Zhuque 3,
both reached orbit on their debut flights
last December. But neither one stuck the
landing. This is the one that finally worked.
First try.
Avery: The recovery ship itself is no small thing
either. 144 meters long, 50
meters wide, over 25,000
tons, fully loaded. MHM uses LiDAR at
each corner to track the falling booster's
position and attitude in real time. And the
net's cables absorb all that kinetic energy.
So the rocket ends up just hanging there
motionless, dead center.
Anna: Casc, the state owned China
Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation,
says the net approach actually has real
advantages over the SpaceX style vertical
leg landing. It simplifies the booster's
structure, cuts weight and is more forgiving
of landing position errors because the net
system can adjust to catch it.
Avery: This makes China only the second nation on
Earth to achieve controlled recovery of an
orbital class rocket booster. And The Long
March 10B becomes the sixth launch system
in history to pull it off after the space
Shuttle Falcon 9, Electron
Starship and New Glenn.
Anna: There's a bigger picture here, too. The Long
March 10B is a commercial cousin of the
Long March 10A and 10, the
Rocket family being built to carry Chinese
astronauts to the moon before 2030.
So every piece of reusable technology proven
here feeds directly into that crewed
lunar program.
Avery: CASC says they're aiming to actually reuse
this very booster by the end of the year.
Shares in Chinese aerospace firms jumped on
the news with a couple of them hitting daily
trading limits.
Anna: A genuinely big moment for global
spaceflight, and a reminder that the reusable
rocket club, once a club of exactly
one, just got a lot more interesting.
Now into our weekly highlights, the biggest
stories from the past five days, starting
with one we told you about earlier this week.
A genuinely staggering haul of ancient
quasars
Avery: ESA's Euclid Space Telescope has
discovered 31 previously unknown
quasars from the universe's first billion
years, and two of them are the most ancient
ever recorded. Full stop.
Anna: A ah, quasar happens when huge amounts of gas
and dust spiral into a
supermassive black hole at a galaxy's center.
The friction and gravity heat that material
to millions of degrees, and the result can
outshine its entire host galaxy by
a factor of a thousand.
Avery: These two record breakers, catchily named
Euclid
J17.29.027
56410.18.1
and Euclid
J1253.0.8.557
054.3.2.3
were shining when the universe just
670 million years old
that's about 5% of its current age.
Their light has been traveling towards us for
roughly 13 billion years.
Anna: The previous redshift record, set back in
2021, was 7.64.
These two come in at 7.77 and
7.69, both beating it.
Avery: But honestly, the record breakers aren't even
the most important part of this story. Lead
researcher Demeng Yang of Leiden University
points out that finding the first 10 or so
quasars this old took astronomers
more than a decade of painstaking work.
Euclid found more than that in about
Anna: a year, which means for the first time,
scientists have something like a real
population to study a true census of the
early universe's quasars, rather than just a
handful of freakishly bright outliers that
happen to be easy to spot.
Avery: And that matters, because how these monster
black holes got so big so fast
so early in cosmic history remains one
of the biggest open puzzles in astrophysics.
Highlight number two takes us to home turf
here in Australia, and it's a story that had
a lot of listeners messaging us this week.
Anna: Dick's Large, metallic spherical
objects washed ashore at Forest beach north
of Townsville in Queensland. And
understandably, that triggered a HAZMAT
response. While authorities worked out
exactly what they
Avery: were dealing with, speculation ran wild
for a bit. Everything from weather balloons
to something rather more exotic. But the
answer turned out to be space related after
all, just not alien. They were
identified as pressure vessels, remnants of a
rocket that had re entered the atmosphere and
broken apart.
Anna: These composite overwrapped pressure vessels,
COPVs for the acronym lovers, are used
to store gases like helium or nitrogen under
high pressure aboard rockets. They're built
tough, specifically so they can survive
extreme pressure differentials, which
unfortunately also means they're pretty good
at surviving RE entry.
Avery: It's not actually the first time debris like
this has turned up in Australian shores, but
six at once, all in one spot,
definitely got people's attention up in North
Queensland.
Anna: Uh, a good reminder that as launch rates
climb worldwide, this kind of re entry debris
story is only going to become more common.
And it's exactly the sort of local angle we
love bringing you here on the show.
Avery: ILI3 is one of our favorite kinds of
story. A, uh, genuine unsolved scientific
mystery. New analysis of James Webb
Space Telescope data has turned up an
unexplained absorption feature. A specific
field fingerprint in the light at
5.11 micrometers, showing up
on the surfaces of both Titan, Saturn's
big hazy moon, and Pluto, way out
at the solar system's edge.
Anna: Two worlds that could hardly be more
different. Titan has a thick nitrogen methane
atmosphere and lakes of liquid
hydrocarbons. Pluto is airless, well,
near enough bitterly cold and covered in
nitrogen and methane isis. And yet this
same unexplained signature shows up on both.
Avery: Researchers have already ruled out the usual
suspects. The known ices, the known
hydrocarbons. Nothing quite
matches.
Anna: The leading candidate at the moment is a
class of molecules called Allenes, but that's
not confirmed, and scientists are the first
to say so.
Avery: What's exciting is what it might mean if it
does turn out to be something new. Uh, a
shared chemical process happening
independently on two very different distant
world could tell us something fundamental
about the kind of chemistry that's possible
out at the cold, dark edges of a solar
system.
Anna: We'll definitely be keeping an eye on this
one as more analysis comes in.
Avery: And our final highlight from the past week
takes us out to the true edge of the solar
system, where an old friend has just opened
its eyes again.
Anna: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, the
mission that gave us our first close up look
at Pluto back in 2015 and then
flew past the Kuiper Belt object arrokaph uh
in 2019, has emerged from a
321 day hibernation period.
Avery: It's currently around 5.9 billion
miles from Earth out in the Kuiper Belt, well
beyond Pluto's orbit. Putting a spacecraft
into hibernation between observation
campaigns is standard practice for these
ultra long durations. It
conserves power, reduces wear on the systems
and honestly gives the ground team a breather
too.
Anna: Now that it's awake, the team can resume New
Horizons ongoing science campaign,
including its unique measurements of the
solar wind and the heliosphere from m a
vantage point no other operating spacecraft
can match.
Avery: It's a lovely reminder that some of our most
valuable space explorers are the ones that
just keep going decade after
decade, quietly rewriting what we know about
the outer solar system.
Anna: And to wrap things up today, we wanted to
take a moment for something a little
different. A tribute.
Avery: Wally Funk, full name Mary Wallace
Funk, passed away this week in her home in
Grapevine, Texas at the age of 87.
Anna: If that name doesn't immediately ring a bell,
her story absolutely should. Back in
1961, Funk volunteered for a
privately run program that tested whether
America's best female pilots could pass
the same rigorous physical and mental tests
NASA gave its male astronaut candidates.
Avery: She was the youngest of the group that became
known as the mercury 13. And by every
account, she was extraordinary at it. She
outperformed, uh, many of the men on the very
same tests.
Anna: But in 1961, NASA
simply wasn't selecting women as astronauts.
None of the mercury 13 ever flew for the
agency. Funk applied to NASA four
times over the following decades and was
turned down every time, at one point being
told she didn't have the right engineering
degree. So she went out and started working
toward one anyway.
Avery: She never stopped flying. Over her lifetime,
she logged more than 19,600
flight hours, became the first female
civilian flight instructor at a US military
base, the first woman inspector for the
FAA, and personally trained more than
3,000 pilots.
Anna: And then, 60 years after that first round
of astronaut testing, she finally got her
ride. In July 2021, Blue
Origin founder Jeff Bezos invited her
aboard as an honored guest on the New
Shepard NS16 flight alongside
himself and his brother Mark.
Avery: At 82 years old, Wally
Funk became the oldest woman ever
to fly to space. A record she
still holds 11 minutes, a
few precious moments of weightlessness, and
six decades of waiting finally
answered.
Anna: Blue Origin posted a tribute, calling her a
pioneer in every sense of the word, and
NASA's own administrator, Jared Isaacman
wrote that her passion for flight and
exploration will keep inspiring generations
of Americans.
Avery: A friend and caregiver in Grapevine described
her as the most eternally optimistic person
she'd ever met, someone who was told
no more times than most of us could bear
and simply never let it stick.
Anna: Fly Wally Clear skies always
now, just
Avery: before we go, let's lighten the mood and send
you outside this weekend because there's a
lovely little sky show on offer.
Anna: Before dawn today, July 11, early
risers got treated to a beautiful lineup. Low
in the east northeast, a, uh, slender
crescent moon joining Mars, the bright orange
star Aldebaran, and the Pleiades and Hyades
star clusters all in the same patch of sky.
Avery: If you missed it this morning, the wider
grouping is still worth a look over the next
few mornings. Get out about 90 minutes
before sunrise, find a clear eastern
horizon and bring binoculars if you've got
them for a closer look at the Pleiades.
Anna: Southern Hemisphere viewers. That's an easy
one for us here at home. No special gear
required, just a decent horizon and a bit of
patience.
Avery: A gentle, pretty way to close out the week.
Anna: And that's this week's weekend space and
astronomy news wrap A world first rocket
recovery, a farewell to a true space
pioneer, ancient quasars mystery M
Spheres, an unsolved mystery on two
worlds and an old spacecraft waking back
up.
Avery: If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit
subscribe wherever you're listening and leave
us a review. It genuinely helps new listeners
find the show.
Anna: I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm Avery. We'll see you next time on
Astronomy Daily.