Anna: Good day and welcome to Astronomy Daily.
I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm, um, avery. It's Monday, the 20th of
July, 2026, and here's a lovely bit of
timing to start us off. 57 years ago
today, two human beings first set their boots
down in the dust of another world.
Anna: Apollo 11, 20
July 1969. And on the very
anniversary of that first arrival, our
lead story today is about an arrival of a
different kind. A young private company half
a world away announcing itself to the cosmos
for the first time.
Avery: Plus a spacecraft that swung past Mars and
came away with a scientific treasure chest.
A, uh, Mars rover reading a 4 billion year
old diary of cosmic violence. A nearby
world that looks like it's holding onto an
atmosphere, shrimp learning to
Anna: eat in weightlessness, and black holes
that ring like bells. Quite the menu.
Let's get into it.
So our lead On Saturday morning,
18 July, a rocket called
Vikram 1 lifted off from the Satish
Dhawan Space center at Sri
Harikoda on India's east coast.
And 17 minutes later, mission Control could
say the words everyone had been holding their
breath for brand success.
Avery: And the reason that matters, Anna, is who
built it. Bikram 1 was developed by
Skyroot Aerospace, a private company out of
Hyderabad founded back in 2018 by two
former ISRO engineers. This wasn't a
government launch. This was India's first
ever private orbital rocket reaching space.
Anna: Which puts India in a very small club.
With this flight, India becomes just the
third nation on Earth with a private orbital
launch capability alongside the United States
and China. That's the whole company on that
list. 3.
Avery: The rocket itself is a neat piece of
engineering. It's about 22 meters tall, four
stages, three solid, one liquid, and
it can put around 350 kilograms into
low earth orbit. The mission was named
Agaman, which is Sanskrit for arrival,
hence our episode titled Today.
Anna: And it delivered a genuinely charming
payload. Multiple technology demonstration
satellites went up to about
450km, including a
satellite from G' Raha Space, a debris
capture robotic arm from a company called
cosmoserve, and Sky Root's own
scope satellite.
Avery: But my favorite bits are the symbolic ones.
There was a handwritten postcard from Prime
Minister Modi carried to orbit. There was
a floral artwork called Cosmic Bloom.
And then there's this. An 18 karat
gold micro rocket carrying
microscopic sculptures of three giants of
Indian science. Sivi Raman, Bikram
Sarabhai and A.P.J. abdul
Kalam.
Anna: Each sculpture smaller than a grain of rice.
Avery: Smaller than a grain of rice. I love that
you launch your first orbital rocket and you
find room to honor the people whose shoulders
you're standing on. The rocket is even named
after Sarabhai, often called the father of
India's space program.
Anna: It's a beautiful gesture, and it caps a
journey that began with Sky Roots suborbital
Vikram s back in 2022.
This is the moment they graduate from reached
space to reached orbit. One Sky Root
commentator called it the dawn of a new space
era. And for India's commercial sector, that
doesn't feel like hyperbole.
Avery: Now, meanwhile, on the other side of the
launch world, we're all still waiting on a
rather larger rocket.
Anna: We are Starship Flight 13.
Longtime listeners know we've been tracking
this one. SpaceX tried to fly it on Thursday,
but the countdown aborted right at T0
when a few of the 33 Raptor engines
engines on the super heavy booster didn't
light, the vehicle safely detanked, no harm
done.
Avery: And Elon Musk said afterwards that to be
confident of a clean flight, two Raptors
would be pooled and replaced. So the target
has been sliding around. But as we record,
the working date is no earlier than the 23rd
to 24th of July.
Anna: So keep your eyes on this space literally
later this week, when Flight 13 does
fly, it's aiming to deploy the first batch of
the big new V3 Starlink satellites
and eventually to attempt catching the upper
stage with the launch tower. But, uh, for
today, the launch success story belongs to
Skyroot.
Avery: Small rocket, huge milestone.
Sometimes that's exactly how history arrives.
Story two takes us out into the solar system
with NASA's Psyche spacecraft. The mission on
its way to that strange metal rich asteroid
on also called Psyche, out in the main belt.
Anna: Right, and to get there, Psyche needed a
gravitational boost. Back on 15
May, it swung past Mars for a gravity assist
dealing a little of the planet's orbital
momentum to slingshot itself onward. And
this week, JPL released the full science hall
from that flyby, which is
Avery: really a dress rehearsal that turned into a
bonus science session. Because a flyby like
this is the perfect chance to switch on your
instruments against a real planetary body and
check that everything works before you arrive
at your actual target in 2029.
Anna: And everything did work. The gamma ray and
neutron spectrometer got its first proper
workout measuring a real world. But the
headline for me is the magnetometer. Because
during the Mars pass, it made its first ever
measurement of the magnetic environment
around another body.
Avery: And that instrument really matters for the
mission's big question. When Psyche reaches
the asteroid, one of the things scientists
most want to know is whether it has or once
had magnetic field, because that would be a
fingerprint of a molten metal core, a clue
that this object might be the exposed heart
of a shattered baby planet.
Anna: So proving the magnetometer works cleanly at
Mars gives the team real confidence. For
2029, JPL also released a, uh,
lovely timelapse of Mars growing and then
shrinking in the spacecraft's view as it
swept past.
Avery: It's a good reminder that, um, on these long
cruises, the journey itself does science. You
don't just coast to the destination, you
rehearse, you calibrate. And sometimes you
get a free look at a neighbor along the way.
Anna: Story three keeps us at Mars, but on the
surface with the Perseverance Rover, which
has been climbing the rim of Jezero Crater.
Avery: And it's found something remarkable up there.
A new study in the Journal of Geophysical
Research Planets, led by researchers at
Imperial College London, describes a
75 meter thick stack of rock on the crater
rim that they're calling the Broom Point
member.
Anna: And this stack is essentially a diary,
layer after layer of what geologists call
breccia rock that's been smashed,
melted and welded back together by repeated
asteroid impacts. And the timing is the
astonishing part. This terrain is older than
Jezero Crater
Avery: itself, which makes it some of the oldest
ground any Mars rover has ever laid its
instruments on. We're talking roughly 4
billion years back in a chapter of solar
system history, sometimes called the era of
heavy bombardment, when impacts were
relentless.
Anna: So perseverance is effectively reading a
weather report from the most violent period
the inner solar system has known. Each
layer records another blow. And because
Earth's surface has been endlessly recycled
by plate tectonics and erosion, we've lost
almost all of our own rocks from that age.
Avery: That's the quiet profundity of it. Mars kept
the receipts that Earth threw away to
understand the bombardment that shaped our
own young planet, the very era when life may
have been getting started here, we may have
to read the story off the rocks of Mars.
Anna: And these are exactly the kinds of samples
Perseverance has been caching for a future
return to Earth. Imagine getting a four
billion year old page of that diary into a
laboratory.
Avery: Story four is a big one for the exoplanet
hunters. And Ana, Uh, I want to flag
something right up front for our regular
listeners.
Anna: Please do, because this could sound familiar
and it isn't exactly.
Avery: A few days ago, in Friday's episode, we led
with a story about the first detection of an
atmosphere on a rocky world. This is a
completely different planet, a different
research team, and a different paper. So
don't adjust your sets. This is fresh news
about a different world.
Anna: The world in question is LHS
1140 B, a super Earth about
49 light years away, orbiting a small
red dwarf star. And it's long been one
of the most tantalizing planets we know
because it sits in the habitable zone where
liquid water could in principle exist.
Avery: And in a new paper in the journal Science
published on 16 July, a team
led from Harvard detected helium
escaping from the planet. They used the
Magellan Clay telescope in Chile to catch it.
Anna: Now, on its own planet, losing gas might
sound like bad news for an atmosphere, but
here's the clever twist. Given how old this
system is, the planet should have lost all
its primordial helium long ago. The
fact that we can still detect it escaping
means something must be replenishing it.
Avery: And that points to a substantial actively
maintained atmosphere, rather than a bare
airless rock, which is exactly the property
you need if a habitable zone planet is going
to be genuinely habitable. An atmosphere
regulates temperature, shields the surface,
and can hold onto water.
Anna: This has been one of the great open questions
for planets around red dwarf stars. Those
stars are prone to flares that can strip a,
uh, planet's air away. So finding strong
evidence that LHS 1140 B
is holding onto and refreshing an
atmosphere is a genuinely significant step.
Avery: It moves this world from promising a dress
toward address. Worth a very close look.
And you can bet the James Webb Telescope's
name is already on the waiting list.
Anna: Dory5 is a little lighter and I have
to say, rather delightful.
Avery, we need to talk about
spacestream.
Avery: Words I did not expect to say today, but here
we are. Researchers at the Okayama University
of Science in Japan have published the first
results from something called the Space
Aquaculture Project. And the question they're
asking is deeply practical. Can we grow
seafood in space?
Anna: Because if we are serious about long stays on
the moon or Mars, we can't just keep shipping
up freeze dried meals forever. We need
closed loop food systems, little self
sustaining ecosystems that recycle nutrients.
And a food chain needs more than just plants,
right?
Avery: So the team built a clever device, a high
speed clinostat, essentially a rig that
spins at around 130 rotations per
minute to simulate the effects of
microgravity here on the ground. And into
that they placed juvenile shrimp along with
tiny brine shrimp Artemia as their food.
Anna: And the Key finding is, charmingly,
the shrimp could still feed. Catching and
eating prey when your body doesn't know which
way is down is not trivial. A lot of
feeding behavior relies on gravity cues. But
the shrimp managed what suggests
crustaceans
Avery: could be a viable link in a future space food
chain. And it's the published paper in the
journal Microgravity Science and Technology
that makes this more than a fun idea. It's an
actual first data point.
Anna: A prawn on the barbie Orbital edition.
Somewhere down the line, an astronaut's
dinner might start life spinning in a lab
like this one.
Avery: Clear skies and apparently clear water.
And for our last story, we go to the most
extreme physics in the universe. Because it
turns out, black holes ring.
Anna: They do. When two black holes spiral
together and merge, the newborn black hole
that results doesn't just settle down
quietly. It, for a fraction of a second,
wobbles, it vibrates, and it sheds
that energy as gravitational waves at very
specific frequencies. Scientists call it the
ring down.
Avery: And the analogy everyone reaches for is a
bell. Strike a bell and it rings at
particular tones that depend on its shape,
its size, its material. A black
hole is much simpler. Its ring depends on
essentially just two things, its mass and
its spin.
Anna: And that simplicity is the gift. A major
new review, bringing together researchers
from the University of Birmingham, Johns
Hopkins and the University of Lisbon in the
journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, lays
out how black hole spectroscopy is
maturing from a beautiful theory into a real
working experimental science.
Avery: And the reason it matters is that it's one of
the cleanest tests of Einstein we have.
General relativity makes a very precise
prediction for what those ring down tones
should be. If we listen carefully and the
tones match, Einstein passes another
brutal exam. If they don't quite match,
then we
Anna: might be hearing the first whisper of new
physics. A crack in the theory under the most
extreme conditions imaginable.
Avery: And we're on the cusp of hearing this
properly. Today's detectors catch hints of
the ring, but the next generation, the
Einstein telescope, cosmic explorer and the
space based LISA mission, will hear these
black hole bells with real clarity.
Anna: It's a wonderful thought. The most silent,
invisible objects in the cosmos, and we're
learning to listen to them chime before we
go, our sky watch. And this one's for our
friends down south, which is a lot of us.
Avery: There's a large coronal hole on the sun
that's rotated around to face Earth, and it's
sending a stream of fast solar wind our way.
The forecaster is expected to arrive around
the 21st to 22nd of July.
Anna: So midweek, which brings a chance,
and I'll stress chance of some minor
aurora australis activity for the fall far
southern latitudes. We're talking Tasmania,
the south of the south island of New Zealand,
and similar high magnetic latitude spots.
Avery: Let's keep expectations sensible. This is a
modest event, not one of the great storms
we've had this cycle. Geomagnetic activity in
the kp3.5 range, so no
guarantees of curtains of light. But if
you're somewhere dark and far south midweek,
it's worth a look toward the southern horizon
after dark.
Anna: And with solar maximum conditions still
lingering, these chances keep coming around.
Wrap up warm. It is winter down here after
all.
Avery: That's our lot for today. From India's first
private rocket reaching orbit. To shrimp
learning to dine in free fall. To black holes
ringing across spacetime. What a spread.
Anna: Thanks for spending part of your day with us.
You can find us at astronomydaily,
IO and on all the socials at
AstroDailyPod We're back tomorrow.
Avery: Um, until then, I'm Avery.
Anna: And I'm Anna. Clear skies everyone.
Avery: Mhm.