'Hey, Let's Go to the Moon' — Artemis II Launch Day

Wherever you are in the world right now, whether you're waking up to launch day in North America, into the thick of it in Europe, or winding down your evening in Australia. Today is the day. After years of delays, setbacks, hydrogen leaks and hard won fixes, four astronauts are counting down to humanity's most ambitious journey in over half a century. Tonight, Florida, time they go to the Moon. Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily guide to everything happening in space, from our cosmic backyard to the edge of the universe. I'm Avery and I'm Anna. On today's episode, we count down to the Artemis two launch with everything you need to know before tonight's historic liftoff, a sunngrazing commet faces its moment of truth just days from now. Astronomers raise the alarm as plans for one million new satellites threaten the night sky, the Interstellar Visitor three iatl US leaves its legacy, and more. Let's dive in. As we record this episode, the clock at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is taking toward one of the most significant human space flight events in decades. Tonight at six twenty four pm Eastern daylight time, which is early Thursday morning for listeners in Australia. NASA's Artemis to mission is targeting liftoff, and if that goes ahead as planned, four astronauts will be on their way to the Moon for the first time since Apollo seventeen in December nineteen seventy two. That's fifty four years avery fifty four years since a human being has ventured beyond low Earth orbit, and tonight, barring any last minute technical issues or a change in the weather that changes the mission has an eighty percent chance of favorable weather conditions. The US Space Force's forty fifth Weather Squadron has been tracking the Florida skies closely, with cumulus clouds and ground winds as the primary concerns, but conditions are looking good. The crew is extraordinary. Commander Read Weisman leads the mission. Victor Glover is the pilot and he'll make history as the first person of color to travel beyond low Earth orbit. Mission specialist Christina Coach will become the first woman, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, the first non American, rounds out the crew. These are four of humanity's best, and they carry the hopes of the entire planet on their shoulders. So what actually happens tonight? The Space Launch System or SLS is the most powerful operational rocket NASA has ever built. At liftoff, it generates nearly nine million pounds of thrust, accelerating the Orion spacecraft and its crew to around five miles per second in just eight minutes. After reaching space, the crew won't head straight for the Moon. Instead, they'll spend their first twenty four hours in a high Earth orbit, a safety five first approach that gives them time to verify that Orion's life support systems are working perfectly. Can this spacecraft scrub carbon dioxide? Can they drink water? All of that gets checked before they commit to the lunar coast. During that first day, pilot Victor Glover will also manually fly Oryan close to the upper stage of the rocket, a proximity operations demonstration that rehearses the delicate maneuvering future missions will need for docking with space stations or the space Axe Linar Lander. Assuming all systems check out, the crew will then fire Orion's main engine about twenty five hours after launch, a six minute burn that boosts their speed by around nine hundred miles per hour and pushes them out of Earth orbit, beginning a four day coast to the Moon. On flight day six, Orion will reach its farthest point from Earth, sailing some five thousand miles beyond the Moon itself. That will shatter Apollo thirteen's distance record from nineteen seventy, making this crew the most remote human travelers in history. And here's something remarkable. Because of the timing of this April first launch, roughly twenty one percent of the lunar farside will be in sunlight as they swing around the Moon. Some of those regions have literally never been seen by human eyes, and a coach and her crewmates will be at the windows with cameras capturing views of the Moon that no person has ever witnessed. The mission lasts ten days in total, with splashdown planned off the coast of San Diego on April tenth. For our listeners tuning in from the US, the launch window opens tonight at six twenty four pm Eastern and stays open for two hours, so there's time to find your spot. For our UK and European listeners, that's eleven twenty four pm BST, and for our Australian and New Zealand audience, set your alarm for nine to twenty four Australian Eastern daylight time Thursday morning. NASA's full coverage is streaming on NASA Plus, YouTube and Amazon Prime from seven forty five am Eastern tonight. This is not one to sleep through. There's something Commander Reid Wiseman said when the crew arrived at Kennedy Space Center last week that really captures the moment he stepped off the plane, looked at the reporters gathered there, and simply said, Hey, let's go to the Moon. That's the spirit of this mission. After years of delays, technical setbacks, and the quiet determination of thousands of engineers and scientists, tonight we go back. Well, all eyes are on Artemis two tonight. There's another dramatic cosmic event unfolding just days away, one that's been building since January. Comet C twenty twenty six a one known as Maps, is a sungrazing comet that will reach Perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, on April fourth. And when we say close, we mean terrifyingly close, just one hundred and sixty thousand kilometers above the Sun's surface. That's less than half the distance from Earth to the Moon. Maps belongs to the Krutz family of comments, a group of sungrazers, all believed to be fragments of one enormous parent comet that shattered centuries ago. The most famous member of this family was comet ike Ya Seki in nineteen sixty five, which briefly outshone the full Moon in daylight. Maps was discovered back in January at the AMACS One Observatory in the Autocoma Desert in Chile, and what immediately excited astronomers was just how far from the Sun it was when they found it. Most cruit sungrazers are only spotted days before perihelion. Maps was discovered eighty one days out, a record for this comet family. The James web telscope has already observed it, estimating a nucleus roughly four hundred meters across, comparable to Comet Lovejoy, which famously survived its own solar encounter in twenty eleven against all expectations. And that's the critical question hanging over Maps right now. Will it survive. The Sun's corona is a brutal environment extreme heat, tidal forces, and radiation pressure that can shred a comet nucleus apart. Most cruds comments simply disintegrate, but some don't. If Maps holds together, models suggest it could briefly brighten to magnitude minus five to minus ten, potentially visible in broad daylight near the Sun. Even if it breaks apart, observers may still see a dramatic headless wonder a glowing tail persisting in the sky after the nucleus is gone. For our Southern Hemisphere listeners in Australia and New Zealand, you've had the best seats in the house over the past few weeks as Maps has been well placed in your evening sky. The comment is currently entering Soho's field of view, and from April seventh, if it survives, it may reappear in the post sunset sky with a dramatic tail. Fingers crossed. We'll have a full update on Comet Maps in tomorrow's episode one, once we know what happened at Perihelion. For now, the cosmic drama is about to. Peak, from the inspiring to the deeply concerning and This is a story that should matter to every person who has ever looked up at the night sky. Two extraordinary proposals are currently sitting before the US Federal Communications Commission the FCC that could fundamentally and permanently alter the appearance of our skies, and astronomers around the world are sounding the alarm. The first proposal is from SpaceX, which has applied to launch one million satellites You heard that right, one million into low Earth orbits as AI data centers in space. The second comes from a startup called reflect Orbital, which wants to place fifty thousand mirror satellites in orbit, specifically designed to beam reflected sunlight back down to Earth. According to calculations from the Royal Astronomical Society, each of those mirror satellites would be four times brighter than the full Moon as seen from the ground, and the atmospheric scattering of that reflected light could make the entire night sky three to four times brighter than its natural state. The response from the scientific community has been swift and emphatic. The Royal Astronomical Society, the European Southern Observatory, and the International Astronomical Union have all filed formal objections with the FCC. A major study published in Nature found that if current Mega constellation proposals are completed, one third of all Hubble space telescope images would be contaminated by satellite trails. More alarming, still, over ninety six percent of exposures from future space observatories like NASA's Sphrix mission would be affected. This isn't just a problem for professional astronomers. Light pollution from satellites affect wildlife, disrupts bird migration patterns, collapses nocturnal ecosystems, and disconnects billions of people from one of humanity's oldest share experiences. Simply looking up at the stars. The night sky is a world heritage. As the Royal Astronomical Society put it, deploying more than one million bright satellites would, in their words, utterly destroy it. Both proposals are now closed to public comment, but the fight for protecting our skies is far from over. This is a story we'll be watching closely on Astronomy Daily. We followed the journey of interstellar Comet three i at lists closely throughout season five, from its discovery last July to its Parahelian passage in October, its close encounter with Mars, and its remarkable flyby of Jupiter just a few weeks ago. Now, as the comet exits our solar system for the last time, NASA has opened its complete archive of three Eye Atlas observations to the public. A treasure trove gathered by more than a dozen missions, the. Data is extraordinary. New findings from Alma the atacomma large millimeter array, reveal that three iye atlasts is quote bursting with methanol, far more than astronomers typically see in comments from our own solar system. That chemical fingerprint suggests the comment formed in a planetary system with very different physical conditions polder temperatures, a different chemical inventory around a star we may never identify. As lead researcher Nathan Roth of American University put it, observing three I Atlas is like taking a fingerprint from another solar system. Three I at Liss is only the third known interstellar object ever detected passing through our Solar system, following Umuamua in twenty seventeen and Borisov in twenty nineteen, but it's been observed by more spacecraft than any interstellar object in history Hubble, James Webb, Tess SPHEREx, Mavin, Parker Solar Probe, SOHO, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, even Perseverance paused its exploration of the Martian surface to photograph it. That fleet of eyes has produced a data set that scientists say will continue to yield discoveries for decades. The comet will reach the inner or cloud around the year twenty one eighty nine and the outer edge of the Oor cloud roughly eight thousand years from now, then drift on through the galaxy forever. We won't see it again, but what it's taught us will stay with us all. Right, moving on. It's called Earth's twin similar in size, similar in mass, and the closest planet to us in the Solar System. But Venus could hardly be more different from Earth. New science coverage this week digs into exactly what makes Venus so extreme, and the numbers are genuinely staggering. The surface of Venus bakes at an average of four hundred and sixty four degrees celsius, hot enough to melt lead. The atmospheric pressure on the surface is ninety two times that of Earth at sea level. Equivalent to being nearly a kilometer underwater. It's no wonder the longest any spacecraft has ever survived on the Venusian surface is just over two hours, achieved by the Soviet Venera probes in the nineteen seventies and eighties. The planet has crushed, melted, or fried everything we've ever sent there. Why does this matter right now? Because Venus is getting renewed scientific attention NASA's Da Vinci and Veritas missions, though Veritas face delays, represent a growing recognition that understanding Venus is critical to understanding why Earth turned out so differently. Two rocky worlds, similar starting conditions, yet one became a paradise for life and the other became a furnace. Unlocking that mystery could tell us an enormous amount about the habitability of planets across the galaxy and what to look for in our search for life beyond our Solar system. And, finally, a wonderfully elegant piece of lateral thinking from the world of planetary science. New research touggests that ordinary telecommunications grade optical fiber, the same technology that carries the Internet around the world, could be used to map the Moon's deep interior and identify its lava tubes. Two new journal papers propose deploying fiber optic cables across the lunar surface to detect seismic signals. Because optical fiber is exquisitely sensitive to stretching and bending, even at microscopic scales, it can act as a distributed sensor network, picking up moonquakes and the subtle reverberations that reveal what lies beneath. And what lies beneath matters enormously, not just for science, but for the future of human settlement. Lunar lava tubes, which could be enormous, potentially kilometers wide, might offer natural shelters for future astronauts shielded from radiation and temperature extremes. The beauty of this idea is its simplicity. Fiber optic cable is robust, lightweight, already mass produced and thoroughly understand. Using it for lunar seismology is a genuinely creative solution, applying Earth technology to one of the Moon's most fundamental scientific mysteries. Ahead of Artemis three and the planned lunar surface missions, this kind of thinking is exactly what the science needs, and. That's Astronomy Daily for Wednesday, April first. What a day to be alive and to be looking up. In a matter of hours, four human beings will either be on their way to the moon or the world will be holding its breath for the next attempt. Either way, the countdown is on and we'll have full Artemis to mission coverage intomorrow's episode. Watch the launch live on Nasaplus YouTube or Amazon Prime. Coverage starts at seven forty five am Eastern tonight. All story links and sources are in the show notes at Astronomy Daily dot io. And if today's episode moved you, please share it because this is history and history deserves an audience. Keep looking up. We'll see you tomorrow. Start day. Star is the Toll Star Is the Toll Star? Is the