Anna: Somewhere above your head right now, about
36,000 km up,
there is a graveyard shift going on.
Hundreds of satellites still working,
still useful, and slowly running out of
fuel.
Avery: And as of last night, there is finally a
mechanic on the way.
Anna: Good evening and welcome to Astronomy Daily.
I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm Avery. Coming up, a spacecraft
with arms launches on a mission to keep other
spacecraft alive. A rocket stage is two
weeks out from hitting the moon and
astronomers have just put out a call to arms
about it.
Anna: We've got two stars that were born together,
lived together and then died in sequence,
leaving behind the first pair of
supernova remnants ever traced back to
a single binary.
Avery: The first complete magnetic map of a galaxy
cluster, an asteroid breakup that may have
bombarded three worlds and helped freeze our
own.
Anna: And a sky watching window that is closing
faster than you'd like.
Avery: Let's get into it.
Anna: So Avery, here's a problem that has quietly
bothered the satellite industry for about
60 years. You build a satellite, you
spend hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
You put it in geostationary orbit
35,786
km up where it hovers
over the same patch of ground forever. And
it works beautifully for 15 years
and then it runs out of fuel.
Avery: And um, that's, uh, it. The hardware is fine.
Anna: The hardware is often perfectly fine. The
cameras work, the transponders work, the
solar panels work. But without propellant,
it can't hold its position. So it drifts
and it becomes junk. You throw away a
working satellite because the tank is empty.
Avery: That is a spectacularly wasteful way to run
an industry.
Anna: It is. And last night, Northrop
Grumman launched the most serious attempt yet
to fix it. At 05:15 in the
evening Eastern Time on Tuesday 21st
July, the Falcon 9 lifted
off from Space Launch Complex 40 at
Cape Canaveral carrying the Mission Robotic
Vehicle plus three Mission Extension
pods.
Avery: Mission robotic vehicle. What does it
actually look like?
Anna: Picture a satellite bus with two
arms, two robotic arms, each
about 3 meters long,
built by the United States Naval Research
Laboratory and supplied through DARPA's
Robotic Servicing of Geostationary
Satellite program.
Avery: So this is a genuinely dexterous machine, not
just the tug that bolt on.
Anna: That's the distinction that matters. The MRV
can inspect, it can relocate, it can
repair, it can upgrade. And its
headline job on this mission is to pick up
those three mission extension pods and
install them on client satellites that are
running low on propellant.
Avery: So the pods are the actual fuel solution.
Anna: Think of them as jetpacks. Each pod
clamps onto a satellite and takes over orbit
control and momentum management. Using
electric propulsion, each one can handle a
satellite of about 2,000kg.
That's a typical big geostationary bird
and give it up to eight more years of life.
Avery: Eight years on a satellite that was
otherwise finished.
Anna: Eight years. And the MRV M itself
carries something called a ah, Passive
Refueling Interface, which is the first
refueling interface approved by the US
Space Force. So the servicer is
itself designed to be refueled later.
Avery: Now, Northrub have done a version of this
before, haven't they?
Anna: They have, and this is why they're the ones
doing it. Mission extension vehicle 1
launched in October 2019, the
first commercial satellite servicing
spacecraft ever. And four months later, it
docked with communications satellite
Intelsat 901 in geostationary
orbit. MEV 2 followed in
August 2020.
Avery: So what's different this time?
Anna: Those earlier vehicles were one to one.
One servicer went to one satellite, docked
with it, and stayed there doing the work
itself. The MRV is one to
many. It carries pods, installs them,
and moves on. It's the difference between a
tow truck that has to stay attached to your
car forever and. And a mechanic who fits a
new part and drives off to the next job.
Avery: That scales.
Anna: That scales. And there's a nice detail on
the launch itself. The Falcon 9 booster
B1069 was flying its
32nd mission and it was
deliberately expended. No landing.
Avery: Why give up a booster with 31 flights on it?
Anna: Because geostationary transfer orbit is
demanding. Getting that much mass that
high needed every bit of performance the
rocket had, and there wasn't propellant left
for a landing burn. SpaceX made the trade.
Avery: So when does the actual servicing start?
Anna: Not for a while. The MRV and the three
pods each separate and then climb to
geostationary orbit under their own
solar electric propulsion. And that
climb takes up to a year. Servicing
operations are expected to begin in
2027. After the initial checkouts,
the RSGS program gets handed over to
the US Space Force.
Avery: A year of just going up slowly
and efficiently.
Anna: Electric propulsion is patient. And at the
end of it, for the first time, there's a
repair capability parked permanently in
the most valuable orbital real estate we
have.
Avery: Right from a machine built to preserve
spacecraft to a spacecraft that is about to
be very thoroughly destroyed.
Anna: This is one we've been tracking.
Avery: It is, and I want to be upfront about that.
We covered this back in June in episode
125. But there is a genuine reason
to come back to it, because the science
community has just done something about it.
The short version for anyone joining us
since. In January 2025,
a Falcon 9 launched two commercial
lunar landers, Firefly's Blue Ghost
and ispace's Hakuto R mission
2. It did its job, but the upper
stage, cataloged as
2025010 d
never came home. Instead of burning up in our
atmosphere, it ended up in a long looping
orbit through the Earth Moon system. And
somebody noticed.
Anna: The independent astronomer Bill Gray, who
runs Project Pluto and tracks this sort of
high orbit debris. His software flagged an
impact on the 5th of August. This year
that stage hits the Moon.
Avery: So what's new? Three things. First, a
new preprint has just gone up on Arxiv and it
is signed by 23 astronomers. It is
essentially a call to arms. They're asking
the scientific community, professional and
amateur, to point everything they've got at
the moon on the 5th of August.
Anna: Because this is a rare thing, because
Avery: we almost never get this. We get natural
impacts on the Moon all the time, but we
don't know when they're coming here. We know
the object, we know its mass, we know its
structure, we know its velocity and we know
the time to within about a second. That is an
artificial impact experiment we didn't have
to pay to set up.
Anna: And the timing has been tightened, hasn't it?
Avery: That's a second u, uh, thing. Gray's latest
published calculation, dated the 17th of July
puts the impact at 6, 34 and
32 seconds UTC. Earlier coverage
back in May was quoting 644.
So if you've got the old number written down,
update it am the third. The third is
the actual physics prediction and this is the
part I find genuinely interesting. The paper
models what happens on contact. This thing
is roughly 12 meters long and about
4,000 kilograms and crucially, it's
hollow. It's a tank. So the
prediction is that it crushes rather than
punching deep like a can
Anna: rather than a bullet.
Avery: Exactly like a can. And the result of
that is a relatively shallow crater. They're
estimating 20 to 30 meters across, but a
a very large ejecta plume,
kilometers of debris thrown up off the
surface.
Anna: So the plume might be the visible part.
Avery: That's the hope, and it's a subtle bit of
reasoning. The impact site is near the crater
Einstein right on the moon's western limb,
about the 10 o' clock position on the disk.
As you look at it now, that's awkward because
it's on the sunlit part of the surface and no
impact Flash, artificial or natural,
has ever been recorded on the lit face of the
Moon.
Anna: The glare defeats you, but being on the limb
helps.
Avery: Being on the limb might save it, because
rocks thrown up from a site that close to the
edge rise off the Moon entirely. And
once they're off the limb, they're
silhouetted against black sky, catching
sunlight. So you might not see the flash, but
you might see the plume.
Anna: Who else is watching?
Avery: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will
image the site before and after, which gives
a clean comparison. And South Korea's
Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter is going to attempt
to observe as well. There's precedent for the
afterimage too. When a Chinese rocket stage
hit the far side in 2022, LRO
found the site and it had made not one
crater, but two.
Anna: And there's a longer term payoff to
Avery: all this, and this is why the paper matters.
Beyond the spectacle, they want to test a
method for pinpointing exactly where an
object strikes the Moon using the
observations. If you can nail that down
against a known impact, you've validated a
technique. And that feeds directly into
planning seismic experiments on the lunar
surface for future missions.
Anna: Now the practical question, who actually gets
to see this?
Avery: And, um, this is where our North American
listeners want to pay attention, because this
one is squarely yours.
6:34 UTC on the 5th of August
is 29 minutes past 2 in the morning, Eastern
Time. 1:34 Central,
12:34 Mountain. And on the west coast
it's still the night before. 11:34 in the
evening on the 4th,
Anna: middle of the night, but the Moon is well up.
Avery: The Moon is well placed across the continent,
and the paper specifically identifies
observers in the Americas as the ideal group.
If you have a telescope and you've ever
wanted to contribute to something real, this
is the night they are explicitly asking
amateurs to take part.
Anna: And for those of us further around the globe,
less kind.
Avery: And I'll be straight about it. For us In
Australia, that's 4:34 in the afternoon,
broad daylight, New Zealand early evening,
no good either. The UK and Europe get half
past seven in the morning, which is also
daylight. So the live event belongs to the
Anna: Americas, but the aftermath belongs to
everyone.
Avery: The aftermath belongs to everyone. The
LRO before and after imagery, the crater
measurements, the analysis of how well the
predictions held up, and frankly, the
question sitting underneath all of this is
global. We are about to start putting people
back on the Moon and we are currently hitting
it with our own rubbish by accident, without
warning.
Anna: Alright, Avery, moving on to our next story.
More than Half of all stars are in multiple
systems, two or more suns orbiting each
other. And for the really massive stars, the
ones destined to explode, that fraction is
even higher.
Avery: So most supernovae should have had a sibling.
Anna: That is exactly the implication. And yet,
until this week, astronomers had never found
a single case where both stars in a binary
exploded and both left behind remnants we
can still see
Avery: not one out of how many.
Anna: We've cataloged around 300 supernova
remnants in our galaxy. Not one confirmed
sibling pair. And the reason is a bit
embarrassing, actually. One of them was
probably sitting in plain sight the whole
time.
Avery: Go on.
Anna: The Jellyfish Nebula
IC443 in the
constellation Gemini, about 6,000
light years away. It is one of the best
studied supernova remnants in the sky and
one of the brightest gamma ray sources of its
kind. If you could see it with your eye, it
would look bigger than the full Moon.
Avery: And, um, something was hiding behind it.
Anna: Next to it, there's a much fainter object
called G189 6
3. It was first picked up in
1994 by the German ROSAT
satellite as a faint X ray glow.
And later the Russian German spectrum
Rontgen Gamma Observatory saw shell like
structures in it, which suggested it was also
a supernova remnant. But it sits right
up against the glare of the jellyfish, and
that glare drowns it.
Avery: So how did they finally separate them?
Anna: 16 years of data from NASA's Fermi
Gamma Ray Space Telescope. The team led
by Miltiades Michaelides, a
postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, essentially
subtracted the jellyfish out, isolated
its gamma ray emission and looked at what was
left underneath.
Avery: And, um, there was something left.
Anna: There was G
189.63 is
independently producing gamma rays. Which
matters enormously because gamma rays mean
particle acceleration, and particle
acceleration is what a supernova remnant
does. It's the shock wave doing work.
Avery: Mikhail Adiz had a nice way of putting that,
didn't he?
Anna: He compared it to a drop of water falling on
a still lake. The ripples spread out from
the point of contact. A supernova remnant
does exactly the same thing. And if you can
see the ripples, you know, something dropped.
Avery: So we have two remnants next to each other.
How do we know they're related rather than
just an accident of line of sight?
Anna: This is the elegant part. There's a filament
of gas arcing between them. And that
filament is where the shock wave from
G189.6 3
has slammed into the same molecular cloud
that the jellyfish is pushing against.
Avery: Same cloud so same distance, same
cloud.
Anna: Same distance, same neighborhood. They're not
one in front of the other. They're genuinely
next door to each other. And that's what
makes the shared origin story credible.
Avery: So walk me through the story they're
proposing.
Anna: A tale of two massive stars
born together, gravitationally bound,
orbiting extremely closely, perhaps
only a few times the Earth's sun distance
apart. Close enough that material was likely
flowing from one to the other. And then the
bigger one runs out of fuel and detonates.
Avery: And, um. The explosion breaks the
partnership.
Anna: The explosion breaks the partnership. The
binary is disrupted and the surviving
companion is essentially kicked flung
off through the galaxy on its own. It keeps
traveling, and tens of thousands of years
later, it explodes too.
Avery: How far apart did they end up?
Anna: The centers of the two explosions are now
somewhere between 30 and 50 light years
apart. Two stars that were once close enough
to be exchanging material, now separated
by that gap. And each marked by its own
expanding shell.
Avery: What were they?
Anna: The jellyfish's progenitor is thought to have
been something like 15 to 25 times
the mass of the Sun. Its companion at
least 20. Both were probably tens
of thousands times more luminous than the
sun. And both may now be neutron
stars.
Avery: And, um, publication status because I know
this was previewed at a conference.
Anna: Good flag. Miltiais presented the results at
the American Astronomical Society meeting in
Pasadena back in June. What's happened this
week is the peer reviewed paper. It's in
Nature communications with the Stanford
release. And wider coverage landing on the
21st.
Avery: And one for our listeners. Can we go and look
at any of this?
Anna: Not this month. Wherever you are. Gemini
is close to the sun at the moment. So it's
lost in the glare globally. But it comes
back. And this is one where Northern
hemisphere listeners get the better deal.
From North America and Europe, Gemini
rides high overhead through winter
December into March. And the jellyfish
sits. Beautifully placed for a telescope or a
long exposure.
Avery: And from down here we still get it.
Anna: Just lower from Australia and New Zealand,
Gemini comes up in the northern sky through
our summer. Visible, worth hunting,
but closer to the horizon. Either way, put
it on the list for the end of the year. And
bear in mind the jellyfish is faint. It would
be bigger than the full moon if your eye
could pick it up. But it needs photography or
a decent aperture to show itself.
Avery: Anna, uh, here's something we know exists but
have never actually been able to draw.
Galaxy clusters. The largest
gravitationally bound structures in the
universe. Hundreds or thousands of
galaxies plus enormous clouds of hot gas,
plus dark matter Are threaded through
with magnetic fields.
Anna: We've known that for decades.
Avery: What we have never done is map the shape of
one across an entire cluster from the
middle right out to the edge.
Anna: And now somebody has.
Avery: A team led by Andrea, uh, Boton at innaf,
Italy's National Astrophysics institute, Has
reconstructed the magnetic field of Galaxy
cluster Abell 2255. And I
want to be precise about that name because at
least one outlet has got it wrong this week
and called it Abell 2142.
It is Abell 2255,
about a billion light years away.
Anna: Why that cluster?
Avery: Because it's famously messy in radio.
Abell 2255 has long been known for
its complexity. It's full of strange, diffuse
radio structures, Halos and filaments, which
is exactly what you want if you're trying to
trace magnetic fields, because those
structures are made by energetic electrons
spiraling along magnetic lines.
Anna: So the radio emission is the field
effectively made visible.
Avery: It's the tracer. Electrons corkscrewing
along magnetic lines give off radio waves.
So if you can see the emission finely enough,
you can work backwards to the field. The
problem has always been that these signals
are extraordinarily faint.
Anna: What did they observe with lofar, the
Avery: low frequency array, the European radial
telescope spread across a continent. And
these are the deepest radio observations ever
made of a galaxy cluster that was combined
with a new data analysis technique. And
between them, that's what cracked it.
Anna: And what does the map show?
Avery: This is defining in some regions of the
cluster, the magnetic field lines are
strikingly coherent. They follow very
specific directions stretching radially
outward along the extended radial structures.
Anna: They're not random, which tells you something
made them that way, which tells you
Avery: something is organizing them. And Boton's
conclusion is that the shape of the field is
intimately linked to the motion of the gas it
sits in. The field gets stretched and
compressed by the movements associated with
the cluster's own formation.
Anna: So the cluster assembling itself is what
shapes the magnetism?
Avery: That's the argument, and it's the first
observational evidence of it. The same
violent process that builds a galaxy cluster,
Gas falling in, sloshing, colliding,
merging, is the process that combs the
magnetic field into the pattern we now see.
Anna: And that ties into the radio halos question.
Avery: It does. Bolton says they believe the
mechanism that switches on these gigantic
radio emissions is linked to the formation
process of the clusters themselves. So the
map isn't just a pretty picture. It's the
evidence for the engine.
Anna: The. It's a lovely Example of the thing radio
astronomy does best, showing you a
Avery: structure that is completely invisible, is a
billion light years away, is bigger than
anything else in the universe, and has been
sitting there the entire time. Published in,
uh, Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Anna: Every if you want to know what has hit the
Earth, don't look at
Avery: the Earth because the Earth keeps erasing it
constantly.
Anna: Plate tectonics, volcanism, weather,
water, erosion. Craters get buried,
distorted, subducted, destroyed. The
practical consequence is that geological
evidence for impacts older than about
650 million years is
extremely scarce here.
Avery: And the Moon doesn't do any of that.
Anna: No plate tectonics, no flowing water, no
meaningful atmosphere. The Moon just keeps
the receipts. And when you read those
receipts carefully, there's a spike. When,
uh, around 800 million years ago,
there's a surge in large lunar impacts. And
it shows up in two independent ways. One
is the estimated ages of big craters,
including copernicus, which is 93
kilometers across. The other is impact
glass.
Avery: Explain impact glass.
Anna: When something hits hard enough, the heat
melts. Rock that melt cools into
glass, and the glass locks in a, uh, chemical
timestamp. The Apollo missions brought a lot
of it home. And when you look at the age
distribution of that glass, you see the same
spike at 800 million years.
Avery: So two different methods agree that something
happened, but nobody knew what.
Anna: Nobody knew what. That's the puzzle that's
been sitting there for decades. And a new
paper led by Dr. William Bakke at the
Southwest Research Institute in Boulder
proposes a specific culprit, which is
an asteroid called Eulalia, or rather
the parent body of the family of asteroids we
now call Eulalia. Uh, because the object, its
no longer exists. It was catastrophically
broken apart in a collision in the main belt.
Avery: And the location of that breakup matters.
Anna: The location is everything. It happened right
next to what's called the J3 to one resonance
with Jupiter. And a resonance like that is
essentially a gravitational trapdoor.
Material that wanders into it, gets its
orbit, pumped up by Jupiter and flung into
the inner solar system.
Avery: So the shrapnel had a delivery mechanism
waiting right there.
Anna: It had an open door right next to it. And the
simulations show what happened in two phases.
Half the fragments reached the resonance
almost immediately. That's the prompt
bombardment Planetary shrapnel sprayed across
the inner solar system.
Avery: And, um, the other half, over the
Anna: following 100 to 150 million
years, another quarter of the fragments
drifted into the resonance more slowly,
pushed by something called the Yarkovsky
effect, which is what, in plain terms it's
sunlight doing work. A rotating asteroid
absorbs sunlight on one side and
reradiates that heat as it turns. That
reradiation gives an incredibly gentle
push. On a human scale, it's nothing. Over
a hundred million years, it can move an
asteroid's orbit enough to drop it into a
trapdoor.
Avery: So this wasn't one bad afternoon. This was a
long siege.
Anna: That's the reframing, I think, is genuinely
important here. Not an event, an episode,
a bombardment that opened suddenly and then
kept going for well over 100 million years.
Avery: And what does that mean for Earth?
Anna: Here's the number that changes the scale of
it. For every large impact recorded on the
moon, roughly 20 similar or larger
impacts hit the Earth, where a bigger target
with stronger gravity.
Avery: 20 to 1.
Anna: 20 to 1. So a spike on the Moon
means a barrage down here. And now look
at what else was happening around 800 million
years ago. That is the run up to one of the
most dramatic climate episodes in our
planet's history. Widespread global
cooling and major shifts in the biosphere.
Avery: Is he climbing a causal link?
Anna: He's careful. And I want to be careful too.
Bakke's phrasing is that given the peak of
this barrage coincides with a period of
widespread cooling and major shifts in our
biosphere, it is tempting to suggest the
former produced the latter. That is a
hypothesis flagged as tempting, not a
conclusion.
Avery: Because so far, only one impact has ever
been firmly tied to a biological outcome.
Anna: Pictxulub, 66 million years ago.
The end of the dinosaurs. That's the one.
Everything else is inference.
Avery: So how would you ever test this?
Anna: This is my favorite part of the paper. And
it's the reason to keep an eye on this story.
We have asteroid samples on Earth right now.
Hayabusa2 brought material back from
Ryugu in December 2020. Osiris
Rex brought Bennu back in September
2023. Both are under analysis.
Avery: And if they carry the Eulalia fingerprint,
Anna: if the mineralogy matches the Eulalia
family, then we are holding in a laboratory
physical samples of the material that rained
on solar system 800 million
years ago. That would turn a dynamical
model into a direct compositional record.
Avery: That's a remarkable thought. Brains in a lab
in Japan and Texas. That might be pieces of
the thing that helped freeze the Earth.
Anna: Published in the Planetary Science Journal by
Botke, with Volkerlitsky, Dykhuis and
Zellner.
Avery: Great.
And our next story comes with a deadline.
Wherever in the world you're listening.
Anna: What's the urgency?
Avery: The moon first quarter was yesterday,
the 21st. Tonight it's a waxing
gibbous. And every night from here it gets
brighter and stays up longer, building to the
buck. Moon full at 4:36 in the afternoon
UTC on Wednesday the 29th.
That's 10:36 in the morning Eastern time in
the States and 12:36 on Thursday
morning for us in Australia.
Anna: And that matters because of what's peaking.
Avery: The southern Delta Aquariates peak falls
on the 30th, effectively the same night as
the full moon. So the peak is going to be
washed out, which means the practical advice
is the same for everybody. Don't wait for
peak night. This week is your window in the
small hours while the moon still sets and
leaves you real darkness before dawn.
Anna: And this is a shower that favors us.
Avery: It does. From Australia, New Zealand and
southern Africa, the radiant sits high close
to overhead, which is why the shower gets
underrated. In the north, under genuinely
dark skies, you might see 15 to 20
an hour. And they're lovely meteors. Long,
graceful streaks rather than quick flashes,
and known for persistent trains, those
glowing trails that hang in the air for a
second or two afterwards.
Anna: And northern listeners aren't shut out of
Avery: this one, not at all. And I want to be clear
about that, because this shower gets written
off in the north too readily. If you're in
North America, particularly the southern
states, Texas, Florida, Arizona, the
Gulf coast, the Delta Aquarids are a
genuinely worthwhile watch. The radiance
sits low in your southern sky rather than
overhead, so you'll see fewer of them. But
the ones you do catch travel long paths
across the sky, and they can be spectacular.
Best time is after midnight through to dawn.
Southern Europe, the Mediterranean, North
Africa. Same deal.
Anna: And where do people look?
Avery: The radiant is in Aquarius, near the star
Delta Aquarii. Use Fomalhaut to find
the region. But honestly, don't stare at
the radiant. Lie back, take in as much sky as
you can and let them come to you. Parent body
is suspected to be Comet
96PMachholz. There are also
the Alpha Capricornids building to the 30th
and 31st. Far fewer meteors, but
few famous for slow, brilliant fireballs that
can punch straight through moonlight.
Anna: And for the north, there's something
considerably bigger coming.
Avery: There is, and if you're listening in North
America or Europe, you should be planning for
this. Now, two things land together on the
12th of August 1st, the Perseids Peak.
And this year the moon is new that same day,
which means A properly dark sky that
is the best Perseid year in some time. And
the second, a, uh, total solar
eclipse, the first on mainland Europe
since 1999 and the first in Spain
since 1905. Totality sweeps
across the Arctic, Greenland, Iceland and
northern Spain. And in Spain, it happens
close to sunset, with the sun only a few
degrees above the horizon, which could be
extraordinary.
Anna: North America doesn't get totality this time.
Avery: No, and I won't oversell it, but there is a
real partial eclipse across much of the
continent. Alaska gets the deepest view
near sunrise. Atlantic Canada gets
roughly half the sun covered at maximum in
the afternoon. New England and the
northeastern states get a smaller bite. And
there's some coverage visible right across
every Canadian province and the northern
contiguous states, though.
Anna: Dig out the glasses.
Avery: Dig out the eclipse glasses from 2024 and
check their ISO 1, uh,
23122 certified.
It will not get dark even with 50%
coverage. The remaining sun is blindingly
bright, so there is never a safe moment to
look without protection and the lovely
detail. If you're standing in the path of
totality in Spain or Iceland, there's a
genuine chance of a Perseid streaking pass
during those two minutes.
Anna: And tonight for everyone, the Milky
Way
Avery: from the Southern Hemisphere, the galactic
core is riding high overhead right now. One
of the real privileges of our winter, and
it's at its best. From the Northern
Hemisphere, it's lower in the south towards
Sagittarius. But on a dark night, it's still
magnificent. And before dawn, Saturn and
Mars are in the eastern sky for both
hemispheres.
Anna: One more thing before we go.
Avery: The launchers SpaceX is targeting Thursday
the 23rd for Starship Flight 13.
Window opening at 6:45 in the evening
Eastern Time. That's 5:45 Central,
3:45 Pacific and Friday morning,
quarter to nine for us in Australia. 20
Starlink V3 satellites aboard. Second
flight of the V3 vehicle dead and alarm.
And as always with starship, check before you
commit the date has already moved twice.
Anna: That's Astronomy daily for Wednesday 22
July, a mechanic on its way to
geostationary orbit, a rocket stage
two, two weeks from making a new crater, and
23 astronomers asking the world to watch
two
Avery: stars that died in sequence and left their
remnants side by side. The first magnetic
map of a galaxy cluster and an asteroid
breakup that may have been raining down on us
while the Earth froze.
Anna: Donotes sources and links are all at
astronomydaily IO and you can find us
at astrodaily Pod across the socials.
Avery: If you enjoy the show, a, uh, rating or
review genuinely helps other people find us.
Astronomy Daily is part of the bytes.com
podcast network.
Anna: I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm, um, Avery. Get outside this week. It
won't be dark for long.
Anna: Clear skies.