Anna: A 4 ton piece of rocket has just
carved a fresh crater into the Moon. And for
once we had the telescopes pointed right at
it.
Avery: Sodium and lithium glowing in the plume. A
spacewalk happening as we speak, and a star
that died in a way nobody expected.
Anna: Good day and welcome to Astronomy Daily.
I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm avery. It's Thursday the 6th of
August, 2026, and there is a lot of
sky to get through.
Anna: We lead on the Moon, we go live to the space
station, we witness a supernova at
first light and we meet the crew heading up
next month. Then we point you at the sky
north and south for what is shaping up to be
the biggest week of the year.
Avery: Let's get into it.
Yesterday morning at about half past six
Universal Time, a spent SpaceX Falcon
9 upper stage, catalog number
2025
010D, slammed into the
far western edge of the Moon, close to
Einstein Crater, at somewhere near five and a
half thousand kilometers an hour.
Anna: And this is the one we flagged for you
yesterday and said, come back tomorrow. Well,
it's confirmed. It hit almost
exactly where and when the independent
tracker Bill Gray of Project
Avery: Pluto said it would, which is the first
remarkable thing. This wasn't a planned
impact. Nobody steered it in. A, uh, private
citizen with orbital mechanics software
called the shot to within a minute or two
days ahead, though, where
Anna: did this thing come from? Rewind to January
2025. A Falcon 9 lifts
off carrying two commercial moon landers.
Firefly's Blue Ghost, which went on to make
the first fully successful commercial soft
landing that March and ispace's
resilience land.
Avery: The upper stage does its job, flings both
landers onto a lunar trajectory, and then
it's just left there, out of fuel,
adrift, and that messy gravitational
neighborhood between the Earth and the Moon.
Anna: And here's the physics that traps it, because
it surprised me. For a normal mission close
to Earth, you nudge the stage down and it
burns up in the atmosphere. Cheap, tidy.
But a stage that's already been flung toward
the Moon would need almost as much fuel to
come home safely as it took took to get out
there in the first place.
Avery: And that feel is long gone. So it
drifts for 18 months until a
mixture of solar activity and plain old
gravity bends its path just enough to put
it on a collision course. Now, normally,
that's the end of the story. A dead rocket
hits the Moon, nobody sees it, we all move
on. But this time, astronomers turned
it into an experiment.
Anna: This is the part I love. The European
Southern Observatory pointed Its Very Large
Telescope in Chile at the impact site. And it
caught the flash chemically in the plume
thrown up by the collision. The telescope
detected glowing sodium and lithium for
something like five to ten minutes afterward.
Avery: And the two elements tell two different
stories. The sodium almost certainly came
from the lunar soil, itself vaporized on
impact, but the lithium, that most likely
came from the rocket.
Anna: So the telescope is effectively reading the
wreck's chemistry from 400,000
kilometers away. You're watching a rocket
cremate itself into the moon and picking out
the ingredients in the smoke.
Avery: And then NASA steps in for the long game.
Their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter had
already photographed this patch of ground
before the impact. A clean before
shot.
Anna: And over the coming weeks, it'll go back and
photograph the fresh crater, maybe 20
meters across for the after.
Avery: Which gives scientists something they almost
never get. A known object of known
mass hitting at known speed in
known spot with pictures of the ground before
and after.
Anna: And that matters well beyond this one rock.
Engineers have computer models that predict
how a hollow human made object deforms
the ground when it hits. Up to now, those
models have been mostly untested against a
real measured impact.
Avery: This is the calibration. Every future lunar
lander team, NASA's Artemis crews, the
commercial landers, they all need to know how
the surface behaves and how far debris flies
to work out safe landing margins. This crater
helps write those numbers down.
Anna: There's a bigger conversation underneath it
too, isn't there? The space junk. One this
was accidental, harmless in the sense that
nobody was hurt and no satellites were
threatened. But it's a reminder that we are
now leaving hardware scattered through the
whole Earth Moon system.
Avery: It even nudges into space law and believe it
or not, space archaeology, how we treat what
we leave up there. But for today, the
headline is the good news version. A piece of
junk became a free science experiment and the
observatories were ready.
Anna: A rocket that delivered two landers to the
moon 18 months ago finally arrived itself
the hard way, right on schedule,
Avery: from the moon back to low Earth orbit.
Because as we speak, two astronauts are
outside the International Space Station.
Anna: This is US Spacewalk 96,
NASA's Jessica Mair, the station commander,
and Anil Menon went out the hatch this
morning around 8:35 Eastern in the United
States for a spacewalk expected to run about
six and a half hours, streaming live on NASA
as we go to air.
Avery: And the job is genuinely important, if not
glamorous. They're modifying one of the
station's power channels so it can accept A
new rollout solar array later this year,
which is the station investing in itself for
its final act. The ISS is now slated for
a controlled D orbit around 2030. And
these power upgrades keep it healthy and
productive right to the end.
Anna: Now, the human story here is lovely for Anil
Menon. This is his very first spacewalk, and
Avery: his path here is remarkable. He's a
physician, an emergency medicine doctor who
was a first responder after the earthquakes
in Haiti and in Nepal. He was also
SpaceX's very first flight surgeon before he
joined NASA's astronaut class. The person who
signed off that crews were medically fit to
fly, and he
Anna: only arrived at the station a few weeks ago
on a Soyuz in mid July. And there's a
nice family footnote. His wife, Anna Menon,
flew on the Polaris dawn mission back in
2024, the flight that carried out the first
commercial spacewalk.
Avery: So spaceflight really is the family business.
We'll keep an eye on how the EVA wraps up.
And there are two more of these spacewalks
coming this month on the 13th and the 25th.
Now to something that only happens if you're
very quick and a little lucky. Astronomers
have caught a massive star at the very first
instant of its death.
Anna: This dropped today, two research teams
publishing together. And it starts back in
March, when China's Einstein probe and X ray
telescope spotted a brief flash of soft X
rays from a galaxy about 500 million light
years away.
Avery: Within the hour, telescopes on the ground
swung around to look and watch watched a
supernova rapidly brighten. It's now
cataloged as SN
M2026GZF.
Anna: And that opening X ray flash has a name,
the Shock Breakout. Picture the core
of a giant star collapsing. That
launches a shock wave that tears outward
through the star. And the breakout is the
instant that wave finally bursts through the
surface. First light the starting gun,
and it's
Avery: fiendishly hard to catch. It lasts seconds to
hours. And in 20 years, astronomers have only
clearly bagged a couple in X rays. So
having two teams capture this one from the
first flash onward is a real event.
Anna: But here's the twist, and it's a good one.
This was a particular kind of supernova, A,
uh, broad, lined type 1C. That
family usually comes with fireworks. Narrow
jets of material moving near the speed of
light and often a, uh, gamma ray burst. The
brightest explosions in the universe.
Avery: This one had none of that. No gamma ray
burst, no lasting jet, and the faintest
opening X ray flash ever tied to this type.
Even though the explosion itself was
Powerful,
Anna: which makes it uh, a kind of missing link. An
explosion that looks like the jet and gamma
ray crowd in visible light but behaves like a
quieter cousin at higher energies. It hints
there's more than one way for a massive star
to go.
Avery: And a nice detail for the telescope nerds
among us. The follow up leaned on the big US
survey facilities, including the brand new
Vera Rubin Observatory. Exactly the kind
of fast all sky work these observatories
were built for.
Anna: For our next story, let's head Back to the
ISS. Let's meet the crew heading up next.
NASA and SpaceX are now targeting 12
September for Crew 13 flying up on
the Dragon capsule named Grace or
aboard
Avery: Commander Jessica Watkins of NASA, a uh,
geologist. And this is a milestone for her.
She becomes the first NASA astronaut to fly
on Dragon twice alongside her
pilot
Anna: Luke Delaney, a uh, former naval aviator
and this will be his first trip to space.
Then Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space
Agency, a fighter pilot, and Sergey
Tetteryatnikov of Roscosmos, a former
submariner, both also flying for the very
first time.
Avery: It's a 180 day stay and it's worth
noting the mission was actually moved earlier
from November into September as NASA
pushes to lift its launch cadence across the
board.
Anna: And for our North American listeners, one
very on brand detail from the briefing. When
the crew rolls out to the pad, they'll be
riding in cybertrucks only
Avery: in this era of spaceflight. We'll bring you
the launch when it's locked.
And that brings us to the sky because next
Wednesday 12 August is the biggest, biggest
sky watching day of the year. And it deserves
a proper look for both halves of the planet.
Anna: Two headline events land almost
first, a uh, total solar eclipse. The moon's
shadow sweeps down over the Arctic, across
eastern Greenland and western Iceland and
then across northern Spain and a corner of
Portugal. That narrow path of totality is
the only place the sun goes fully dark, up to
2 minutes and 18 seconds of it. It's the
first total eclipse over mainland Europe
since 1999.
Avery: Now for our audience in North America, you
are not in the path of totality but much of
the north gets ah, a partial eclipse. And
here are your details. It runs across the
afternoon of the 12th. The deepest bite in
the lower 48 is up in northern Maine, around
29% of the sun covered near Presque Isle
just after 2pm Eastern New York sees
Anna: a uh, modest partial, roughly 9%
starting near 1:07 in the afternoon Eastern
Time. Boston about 16%
Bangor, around 24%. Head into
Canada and it grows Montreal near
18%, and St. John's in Newfoundland,
over half the sun covered. West of the Great
Lakes, though Chicago and beyond, it fades
to essentially nothing.
Avery: And, um, if you're not in the partial zone at
all, NASA streams the whole thing live from
1:15pm Eastern.
Anna: And this is the line we never cut. A partial
eclipse is never safe to look at with the
naked eye. You must use certified eclipse
glasses or a safe solar filter that meets the
ISO 123122
standard. Every moment the sun is even partly
uncovered, a, um, 99% covered sun
can still burn your eyes. Only inside the
path of totality. And only during those brief
seconds of total darkness can you look
unaided.
Avery: The second headline is a gift to the whole
planet. Though it leans north, the Perseid
meteor shower peaks the Same night, the 12th
into the 13th. And this year it peaks under a
new moon. No moonlight to wash them out.
Anna: Dark, perfect skies for the northern
hemisphere. That could mean up to 100 meteors
an hour from a dark site. Now, honestly,
southern friends, the Perseids are a northern
shower. The point they radiate from barely
clears our horizon, so we see very few.
I won't oversell it.
Avery: So what does the southern hemisphere get?
Quite a lot, actually. Look before dawn and
there's a planet parade strung along the sky.
Saturn is superb right now, riding high and
heading towards opposition. Mars is up there
too, with Mercury low and Uranus and Neptune
for those with binoculars and a telescope.
Anna: And Venus is the jewel of the evening,
brilliant in the western twilight after
sunset and actually better placed for us in
the south than for far northern viewers.
Add the winter Milky Way overhead here in
Australia, Scorpius and Sagittarius
blazing, and it's a glorious few weeks of
stargazing
Avery: and one to circle for the Americas,
especially north and south. On
28 August, a deep partial lunar
eclipse with 96% of the moon sliding
into Earth's shadow. Very nearly a total
blood moon. And it favors the whole of the
Americas.
Anna: So wherever you are, get outside this week.
And that's the show for today. A rocket
arrived at the moon, a star showed us its
first light, and there are astronauts outside
the station as you listen.
Avery: Full links and sources are in your show notes
and over at astronomydaily IO and you
can find us anywhere you get your podcasts
and on socials. Astrodaily Pod,
we're back tomorrow.
Anna: Until then, from Anna and Avery
and clear, uh, skies.