Anna: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Astronomy
AstroDailyPod. I'm Anna.
Avery: And I'm Avery. And Anna, uh, I feel like we
need to issue a weather warning today. A
space weather warning.
Anna: Very on brand for us. It's Monday,
August 17th, series five, episode
169. And yes, there is genuinely
a solar storm rolling in as we speak, though.
Uh, we'll get to that.
Avery: We will. But first, our main storey today
is one of my favourites in a while. NASA just
funded a concept for little spherical robots
to go exploring the caves
Anna: of Titan, which sounds like science fiction
and is, in fact, just science.
Avery: Just science. Then we've got SpaceX
quietly breaking its own launch record twice
in one night, 38 minutes apart.
Rocket Lab picking up its biggest defence
contract yet for something called flat
alights, which is a genuinely fun word to
say. And then we'll close out with that solar
storm, because depending on where you live,
you might want to look up
Anna: tonight, a very Monday lineup. Let's get
into it.
Avery: Okay, so start us off. What exactly did
NASA fund here?
Anna: So this is a, uh, NASA Innovative Advanced
Concepts Grant, NIAC for short. That's
NASA's Programme for Funding the genuinely
weird early stage. This might not work, but
if it does, it's a game changer. Ideas. And
the one that just got a phase one grant is
called sparc, which stands for Solid State
Propulsion for Autonomous Reconnaissance of
Karst. Karst being
Karst is the geology term for terrain
shaped by dissolving rock on Earth. That's
usually limestone, and it's what gives you
sinkholes, underground rivers, cave systems,
all of that. Titan, Saturn's biggest
moon, has its own version, except instead of
water carving through limestone, it's liquid
methane and ethane carving through water ice,
which behaves like rock at Titan's
temperatures.
Avery: Right, because it's what, minus
179 degrees Celsius out there?
Anna: Roughly, yeah. Properly cryogenic.
So Titan's got these liquid methane lakes and
rivers on the surface, and scientists think
underneath there's a whole hidden landscape
of sinkholes and caves, the same way you'd
get in, say, Kentucky or Slovenia, just
running on an entirely different chemistry.
Avery: Um, and that's the terrain a normal rover
just can't deal with.
Anna: Exactly. You can't drive a wheeled rover into
a cave mouth or over a sinkhole edge. And
flying a fixed rotorcraft in there is its own
nightmare of collision risk. So the team
behind sparc, led by Daniel Drew, an
assistant professor at the University of
Hawaii, working with Ethan Schaller and Jacob
Israelovitz at JPL and Michael
Molaska at the Blue Marble Space Institute of
Science came up with something different.
Small spherical robots that basically fly
themselves through the terrain using electric
propulsion. No propellers, no moving parts to
break.
Avery: No moving parts. So how do they actually
move?
Anna: This is the clever bit. It's called
electrohydrodynamic propulsion, or
ehd. It's a solid state electric
thruster, similar in principle to the ion
windlifters people have been experimenting
with here on Earth for years. Except this
team is adapting it for Titan's specific
atmosphere. Drew's own description of the
advantage is basically the whole pitch. He
says the design gives you persistence,
manoeuvrability, robustness to the
challenging near cryogenic conditions, and
minimises downwash disturbance of, uh,
scientifically important hydrocarbon
layering.
Avery: Break that last bit down for me. Downwash
disturbance.
Anna: So if you fly a normal propeller drone into
one of these caves, the propwash, the air
it's pushing down and around would stir up
and disturb the very hydrocarbon layers on
the ground that scientists want to study
undisturbed. A solid state thruster
barely moves the surrounding atmosphere in
the same way, so it can hover and inspect a
site without messing up the science.
Avery: That's such a specific, very tightened
problem to have to design around.
Anna: It really is. And it's a good reminder that
Titan is nothing like Mars M with the Moon.
In terms of engineering constraints, it
actually works in the aerobots favour in one
big way, though. Titan's atmosphere is denser
than Earth's at the surface and gravity is
only about a seventh of Earth's. So flying
there is weirdly easier than flying
here. You get more lift for less power.
Avery: So it's almost the perfect place to fly a
fleet of tiny spherical drones. Other than
the fact that it's over a billion kilometres
kilometres away and colder than anywhere on
Earth has ever been.
Anna: Just a few small logistical issues.
But it's not the first time JPL's circled
this exact problem either. There was an
earlier concept called shapeshifter
cobots that could roll as a sphere, fly
independently, link into daisy chains to
descend into caves, or reconfigure into
a swimming probe for the lakes. That one
dates back to around 2019, led by
JPL's Ali Aga, and it never
fl but it shows. This has been a recurring
puzzle for mission planners. How do you
actually get eyes into Titan's caves
and under its lake surfaces?
Avery: So SPARC is sort of the next generation
attempt at solving the same problem, right?
Anna: A ah, more focused, more mature approach to a
piece of that puzzle. And in terms of where
this sits right now, this is a NIAC Phase
1 award, which is nine months of funding to
mature the concept and prove out the physics.
If it clears that bar, it can apply for a two
year phase two grant. This is very early
stage. We're talking design studies and lab
testing, not hardware headed to the launch
pad.
Avery: Is there any actual mission this could hook
into or is it purely conceptual?
Anna: For now, the obvious one people are asking
about is Dragonfly. That's NASA's
rotorcraft lander that's actually built and
funded targeting a Titan launch around
2028. Drew's been fairly
upfront that integration with Dragonfly
specifically isn't confirmed. This is really
a technology maturation project first
looking for a ride on whatever future Titan
mission makes sense, which could be an add on
to Dragonfly or something entirely separate
down the line.
Avery: Why does any of this matter? Beyond tiny
robot spheres are cool though, like
scientifically. What's actually at stake in
those caves?
Anna: A few things. One basic geology.
Understanding how karst terrain forms in an
entirely different chemical system tells us a
lot about how erosion and landscape evolution
work in general, not just on Titan
2. And this is the bigger one. Titan's
subsurface, especially anywhere liquid
water might mix with those organic
hydrocarbons, is one of the more interesting
astrobiology targets in the solar system.
It's not Europa or Enceladus with their
subsurface oceans, but Titan has its
own complex organic chemistry happening on
the surface and possibly just beneath it.
And caves are exactly the kind of sheltered,
chemically rich environment where you'd want
to look closely.
Avery: Tiny spherical robots floating into
alien sinkholes, hunting for the building
blocks of life. When you put it that way,
it's, uh, a pretty great pitch for nine
months of NIAC funding.
Anna: It really is. And this is exactly the kind of
storey I love bringing you because 90%
of these NIAC Phase 1 concepts never
fly. But the ones that do reshape
entire mission architectures years later.
Worth keeping an eye on SPARC as it moves
through a view.
Avery: Okay, moving on from tiny robots on
Titan to something happening a lot closer to
home. SpaceX broke its own turnaround record
this weekend.
Anna: Twice in one night, and not by a little.
Avery: So Saturday night, August 15th, SpaceX
launched two separate Falcon 9 missions from
opposite coasts just 38 minutes apart.
First one lifted off at 9:12pm, um, eastern
from Cape Canaveral's Space Force Station in
Florida, carrying eight Global Star
telecommunications satellites deployed over
about a six minute span. Then at
9:50pm Eastern. So barely more than half
an hour later, A second Falcon 9 went up from
Vandenberg Space Force Base in California,
carrying a classified U.S. space Force
mission called USSF 366.
Anna: Classified as in we don't fully know what's
on it.
Avery: Right. Though the reporting suggests it's
likely built on the Starshield platform.
That's SpaceX's national security variant of
Starlink. But the headline here isn't really
the payloads, it's the timing. 38
minutes between liftoffs from two different
coasts beat SpaceX's own previous record
of 65 minutes, which was set back in August
2024.
Anna: So they shaved 27 minutes off their
Avery: own record, which doesn't sound like much
until you think about what has to happen in
that window. Different pads, different
states, different mission control teams,
weather, range, safety clearances, all of
it lining up almost simultaneously.
Anna: And both boosters landed successfully too,
right?
Avery: Both stuck the landing. The Global Star
Booster completed its 14th flight and the
USSF 366 booster landed on the drone
ship. Of Course I Still Love youe Out in the
Pacific. That one was on its 18th flight.
Anna: 18 flights on a single booster is
wild to say out loud. And now it's just
Tuesday. Well, Saturday.
Avery: Just another day at the office for Falcon 9.
And that's really the bigger storey
underneath the record. This pushes SpaceX's
2026 tally to 96 Falcon
9 launches so far this year, with
roughly three quarters of those dedicated to
building out the Starlink constellation.
Anna: 96 launches and we're not even through
August.
Avery: At, uh, that pace, they're on track to
comfortably beat last year's total. It's
honestly gone to the point where a single
Falcon 9 launch barely makes news anymore.
It takes something like 2 and 38 minutes from
opposite coasts to actually stand
Anna: out, which says a lot about how normalised
orbital class rocket launches have become in
the space of about a decade.
Avery: It really does. We'll keep watching to see
how long that 38 minute record holds, because
at, uh, this cadence, I wouldn't bet on it
lasting past the end of the year.
Anna: Speaking of defence contracts and companies
racing to build out Constellations, Rocket
Lab just landed its biggest one yet.
Avery: I need everyone to appreciate that name for a
second.
Anna: It's a great name. So this is a
$397 million contract from
the US Space Force awarded earlier this month
for Rocket Lab to build and launch a batch of
satellites called Flat Alights. Flat
Panel Satellites, hence the name for a
programme called SBAMTI M
Space based Airborne Moving Target
Indicator.
Avery: Which is exactly what it sounds like tracking
moving airborne threats from space.
Anna: Right. It's about building a space based
sensing layer that can watch contested
airspace in near real time. Rocket Lab
CEO Peter Beck put it this way. He said
we are proud to contribute to the deployment
of a resilient space based sensing layer
that will enhance the Joint Force's ability
to operate in contested airspace.
Avery: And um, the flat design is the interesting
engineering choice here is flat
panel
Anna: satellites stack far more efficiently inside
a rocket fairing than traditional boxy
satellite designs. So you can pack a lot more
of them per launch. It's the same basic logic
SpaceX used when it redesigned Starlink into
a flat pack form factor. Each flat
alight is also fitted with low latency high
bandwidth communications alongside its threat
detection sensors. So the whole constellation
can talk to itself and to the ground quickly.
Avery: Um, and these are flying on Neutron Rocket
Lab's new rocket, the one we were just
talking about on Thursday's episode that's
still hedging on a 2026 debut.
Anna: Exactly the same Neutron. So there's a
nice bit of continuity here. The rocket
itself still doesn't have a confirmed first
flight date, but customers keep signing up to
fly on it anyway, stacked in a Starlink
style configuration once it does get off the
ground.
Avery: That's either a huge vote of confidence or a
slightly nerve wracking amount of manifests
riding on a rocket that hasn't flown yet.
Anna: A bit of both, honestly. But it does make
sense in context. This is Rocket Lab's
largest defence contract to date, and it's
not their only one this year. Add up the
other government contracts they've announced
in 2026. 190 million,
90 million and $266
million. And combined with this deal of
397 million, that's
$943 million in defence
funding secured this year alone.
Avery: Just shy of a billion dollars all in
2026.
Anna: Which tells you Rocket Lab's strategy of
leaning hard into national security work
alongside Electron's commercial track record
is really paying off. It's positioning them
as a legitimate second option to the primes
in this space, not just a smaller player
nipping at SpaceX's heels.
Avery: Reputation and revenue building up nicely
while Neutron itself is still on the ground.
We'll see if that first flight finally
happens before the manifest gets too long to
wait for.
Okay, last storey for today and this one's
genuinely live. As we're recording, there's a
geomagnetic Storm expected to hit Earth
today, August 17th.
Anna: This is the space weather warning I teased at
the top.
Avery: It is. So the setup is a double coronal
mass ejection, 2 CMEs combined with the high
speed solar windstream all heading our way.
Forecasters including the British Geological
survey are predicting G1 to G2 level
geomagnetic storming. So minor to
moderate on the scale that runs up to G5.
Anna: And the timing, when's this actually supposed
to arrive?
Avery: The geomagnetic background's already been a
bit unsettled since yesterday the 16th. But
the main impact is expected in the second
half of today as the bulk of that solar
material reaches Earth.
Anna: So basically tonight, depending on your time
Avery: zone, basically tonight, and the fun part for
listeners is the aurora. Potential
forecasters are calling for possible displays
at high latitudes based on similar recent
storms this season. Uh, that's put places
like Scotland, Northern England, Northern
Ireland, Alaska, Canada and the
northern tier of the U.S. from Washington
state to Maine in the potential viewing zone.
And in the Southern hemisphere, keep an eye
out if you're in southern New Zealand or
Tasmania.
Anna: Solid excuse to step outside tonight if
you're anywhere in that band.
Avery: Definitely worth a look. This is coming off a
pretty active stretch from the sun generally
one active region in particular. Sunspot
AR4507 fired off
at least 10 C class flares in a single
24 hour window between the 15th and
16th including the strongest one, a uh,
C3.7 right around
3:31 UTC on the 16th.
Anna: O M, M or X class flares in that batch.
So nothing extreme but a genuinely busy sun
which tracks.
Avery: We're in an active phase of the current 11
year solar cycle and there's been a steady
run of filament eruptions, flares and Earth
directed CMEs over the past few months. This
is very much part of that pattern, not uh, a
one off.
Anna: I did see one slightly funny detail
in the coverage Space weather experts
advising that people who are sensitive to
weather changes or who have cardiovascular
conditions might want to keep stress low,
stay hydrated and go easy on caffeine and
alcohol
Avery: during the storm, which is genuinely sound
advice regardless of what the sun's doing.
But sure, blame uh, it on the cme.
Anna: Also worth flagging. Forecast models don't
fully agree yet on exact timing, so
this could still arrive a little later or
even end up being more of a glancing blow
than a direct hit. Space weather forecasting
is still much fuzzier than the terrestrial
kind, so no guarantees,
Avery: but if you're in the right latitude band and
the sky's clear tonight. It's worth stepping
outside and looking up,
Anna: which is basically our whole show in one
sentence.
Alright, that's our four storeys for today.
Quick recap. NASA's funded an early stage
concept called Sparc. Spherical propeller
free aerobots that one day fly into the
methane carved caves of Titan.
SpaceX broke its own launch turnaround record
with two Falcon 9 missions just 38
minutes apart from opposite coasts, Rocket
Lab landed a $397 million
Space Force contract to build flat satellites
for airborne threat tracking. And there's a
geomagnetic storm arriving today that could
bring Aurora to parts of the northern and
southern high latitudes tonight.
Avery: If you enjoyed today's episode, the best
thing you can do for us is leave a rating or
review wherever you're listening and share
the episode with a fellow space nerd. You can
find full show notes, sources and links for
every storey we covered today at
astronomydaily IO and find us on social
media. We're AstroDaily Pod pretty
much everywhere.
Anna: We'll be back tomorrow with another episode.
Until then, keep looking up. Tonight
especially.
Avery: See you next then. Um, clear skies.