No Course Correction Needed: Artemis II Day 3 Update + Comet MAPS Perihelion Report

Welcome back to Astronomy Daily, the show that gets you caught up on the Cosmos every single day. I'm Anna, and. I'm Avery and friends. What a day to be a space fan. It is day three of the Artemis two mission. Four humans are right now hurdling toward the Moon and we have a lot to cover. A record breaking rocket launch, brand new lunar science, a stunning discovery about dead stars, and the best chance all year to spot the planet Mercury with your naked eye. Plus we promise you an update on comment maps yesterday, and we are delivering the solar plunge has happened, the verdict that's still coming in. Stay with us, let's get into it. Projectory so perfect, NASA canceled its own burn. We are now into day three of the Artemis two mission, and the headline today is honestly almost too good to believe. ASA had planned a trajectory correction burn for this evening, a small engine firing to nudge Oryan onto the path to the Moon, and they didn't need it. Flight controllers in mission control at Johnson's Space Center looked at the data and made the call cancel the burn. Orian is already on the precise trajectory it needs. As Howard, who, the Orion Spacecraft program manager, put it, it's really good to see that we don't need these minor correction burns. It shows that our navigation performance and our ability to get ranging has been outstanding. This was the first of three planned trajectory correction burns. The others are still on the schedule if needed, but this is a genuine vote of confidence in the precision of the entire mission so far. Meanwhile, what were Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cock, and Jeremy Hansen actually doing today? Mission Control woke them up playing in a day Dream by the Freddie Jones Band, which is a great alarm clock choice, and then they got to work. Day three was all about medical readiness. The crew demonstrated CPR procedures in weightlessness and checked out Ryan's onboard medical kid, a thermometer, blood pressure monitor, a steposcope, and otoscope. They also tested Orion's optical communication system, successfully transmitting high definition video back to ground stations in the United States. But the really exciting part, the lunar science team back on Earth is already building what they call the Lunar targeting plan. They're selecting specific geological features on the Moon's surface, craters, ancient lava flows, ridges that the crew will observe and photograph during their six hour fly by window on Monday. And Avery has been doing the math on what Monday actually means. Well, it's history. On Monday, April sixth, the Artemis two crew will swing around the far side of the Moon, briefly out of contact with Earth entirely, and at their farthest point they will be two hundred and fifty two thousand, seven hundred and fifty seven miles from home. That breaks the all time human spaceflight distay since record set by the crew of Apollo thirteen back in April nineteen seventy fifty six years. We've been waiting fifty six years to break that record, and it gets better. During the lunar flyby, Oryan will enter a solar eclipse, the Sun moving behind the Moon from the crew's perspective. The crew will use that window to look for meteoroid impacts flashing on the lunar surface and to try to photograph the deep space sky without the Sun in the way. We'll have full Day four and Monday fly by coverage in Monday's episode. Right now four humans traveling toward the Moon and everything is going exactly to plan. Next the solar plunge has happened. Now we wait, all right, we promise you this and here it is your Comet Maps update. Yesterday we introduced you to Comet C twenty twenty six, a one known as Maps, a rare kreutz sungrazer, discovered in January by a team of French astronomers in Chile. We told you it was about to make one of the most dangerous journeys in the Solar System, a pass within one hundred and sixty one thousand kilometers of the Sun's surface, closer than most comets ever come. And we promise to bring you the latest today. So here's where we are at fourteen twenty two UTC today. That's right in the middle of the day in Australia. Comet Maps reached perihelion. It passed through the lower corona of the Sun. The plunge is done. And the verdict that is genuinely still coming in because right now Maps is in the Sun's glare, basically invisible to ground based observers. We're relying on spacecraft imagery, particularly from Soho's Lasco coronograph, to track what happened. The big question has shifted. It's no longer just did it survive, It's what kind of show will it put on? There are several scenarios. If the the nucleus survived intact, Maps could emerge in the next day or two as a stunning naked eye comet. Some predictions put its potential brightness at magnitude minus five brighter than venus. Others suggest it could reach magnitude minus fifteen, brighter than the full moon at perihelion. It may have even been briefly visible in daylight. Even if the nucleus broke apart, which is what happens to most sungrazers, the story isn't necessarily over. A post perihelian breakup can produce what astronomers call a headless wonder, a bright, glowing tale with no nucleus behind it. Sometimes those can be spectacular in their own right. Maps belongs to the Krutz sun Grazer family, the same family as comet ikeas Seki in nineteen sixty five, one of the brightest comets of the twentieth century, and comet Lovejoy in twenty eleven, which survived its own brush with the Corona and went on to da Southern Hemisphere observers, and. That is the key phrase, Southern Hemisphere. If Maps emerges from the glare as expected, the window to see it from the ground opens around April sixth to tenth. Look west after sunset low on the horizon in Australia and across New Zealand. You are perfectly placed for this. Venus will be your guide star bright in the western evening sky, and Maps, if it survived, should appear nearby. We will have the latest on Monday's episode. This story is very much not over. Atlas five lifts its heaviest payload ever, twenty nine Amazon Leo satellites. While all eyes were on the Moon this morning, there was a rocket launch happening simultaneously that setter record of its own. In the early hours of this morning one forty five am Eastern time, a United Launch Alliance Atlas five rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space for station in Florida. Its cargo twenty nine Amazon Leo satellites, and that payload, twenty nine satellites packed into one rocket, made history. It is the. Heaviest single payload the Atlas five has ever flown. This is Mission LA zero five for Amazon LEO, the satellite Internet constellation, previously known as Project Cooper. Amazon renamed the constellation in November last year, and they're building it at pace. With today's launch, they now have around two hundred and forty one satellites on orbit out of an eventual constellation of more than three thousand, two hundred. The Atlas five flew in its most powerful configuration, the five to five to one variant, with five solid rocket boosters strapped on and Ula engineers made specific modifications to the Centaur upper stage and its dispenser system to carry the extra load. These twenty nine satellites went up on a northeast trajectory to a low Earth orbit of around four hundred and fifty kilometers. Amazon has an FCC deadline looming. They need to have half of their constellation operational by July twenty twenty six, which puts them in a serious race. Multiple Atlas five and Vulcan Centaur launches are planned this year, plus missions on Arion six, New Glen and Falcon nine. The Atlas five is one of the most reliable rockets ever built. This was its one hundred and second mission, and while the Vulcan Centaur is taking over as the primary heavy lift vehicle going forward, today proved the old workhorse has still got it okay. Our next story, Moon's Hot Cold Divide may be wrong. Blue Ghost rewrites lunar science with the. Artemis two crew heading toward the Moon right now. This next story feels especially timely because new data from the Moon's surface is challenging something scientists thought they understood for decades. Firefly Aerospace's Blue ghosts lander touched down in the Moon's Mari Chrisium, the Sea of Crises, back in March of twenty twenty five. It operated for a full lunar day, drilling into the surface and sending back over one hundred and ten gigabytes of data. And now a year on, scientists are presenting the first major scientific results, and they are surprising. The long standing view of the Moon has been this The near side, the face we always see from Earth, is geologically hot. It's dominated by ancient volcanic planes, and beneath the surface there's a concentration of heat producing radioactive elements, particularly thorium. In a region called the Prosilarum creep terrain. The far side, by contrast, is cooler, older, more heavily cratered. Blue Ghost was specifically sent to land outside that hot region in mare Chrisium, well away from the creep zone, precisely to test whether the temperature difference was as dramatic as scientistics pres affected. The answer has upended the model. Blue Ghosts heat probe found that the underground temperature at mari Chrissium is not significantly different from what Apollo astronauts measured at their landing sites deep inside the supposed hot zone. As Saichi Nagihara, the principal investigator of Blue Ghost's heat probe at Texas Tech University, put it, we may have to abandon that binary. What does this mean? Heat producing elements like thorium may be more widely distributed beneath the lunar surface than anyone thought, and one possible explanation is that volcanic activity in some regions wasn't driven by those radioactive elements at all. It may have simply been easier for magma to break through in places where the crust was thinner. It's a fundamental rethink of how the Moon formed and evolved, and it has direct implications for where future crude missions might land and what they'll find. Blue Ghost Mission I, expected to launch later this year, will land on the lunar far side, giving scientists the next data point in this evolving picture. Onwards the story five. Let's simply call this one stellar science. Pulsars are broadcasting from the edge of their magnetic. Reach down to a discovery that overturns decades of thinking about some of the most extreme objects in the universe, and it has an Australian fingerprint on it. Pulsars are the class remnants of dead stars. They're among the densest objects we know of. A teaspoon of pulsar material would weigh around ten million tons on Earth. As they spin, they sweep beams of radio waves across the cosmos, like cosmic lighthouses, and a special class called millisecond pulsars spins hundreds of times per second, so regularly that they rival atomic clocks in their precision. For decades, the textbook answer to where those radio pulses come from was simple. Near the surface, close to the magnetic poles. That's where scientists assumed all the action happened. A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has just rewritten that. Professor Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and doctor Simon Johnson from Australia's own CSIRO analyzed radio observations of nearly two hundred millisecond pulsars and compared them with gamma ray data from NASA's Fermi Space telescope. What they found, about one third of millisecond pulsars are broadcasting radio waves from two completely separate regions at once, not just the magnetic poles, but also from a distant swirling zone of charged particles called the current sheet right at what's called the light cylinder. That's the boundary where the pulsar's magnetic field would need to travel faster than light just to keep pace with the spinning star. As doctor Johnston it, these tiny, fast binning stars are even more complex and surprising than we thought, broadcasting from both their surfaces and from the very edge of their magnetic reach. The practical consequences are significant because the radio signals are spreading out over a wider range of directions than previously understood. More pulsars should be detectable than scientists thought, and that's good news for projects like pulsar timing arrays, networks of pulsars used as detectors for gravitational waves rippling across the universe. A great piece of science and a proud moment for CSIRO, Australia's National Science Agency. And finally, today an invitation to go outside and look up, because right now Mercury is putting on its best performance of the entire year, and we have the best seats in the house. Mercury reached what astronomers call greatest elongation on April third, the point where it appears farthest from the Sun in our sky. This is the year's greatest elongation for Mercury, full stop, the best it will get all of twenty twenty six. Here's the key thing about Mercury. It's always close to the Sun in our sky, which makes it genuinely difficult to spot. Most people have never actually seen it. Greatest elongation is your best window. The planet pulls as far from the Sun's glare as it ever gets, giving you a brief clear opportunity before it slips back. Right now, Mercury is sitting about twenty eight degrees from the sun rising in the eastern sky before dawn. Look east about thirty to forty minutes before sunrise. You're looking for a steady point of light magnitude around zero point four, which is bright enough to see with the naked eye under decent conditions. It's sitting low on the horizon, just above Mars and the constellation Aquarius. And here's the Southern Hemisphere advantage. This is specifically the best morning apparition of mercury for the Southern Hemisphere in twenty twenty six from Australia and New Zealand. The geometry of the ecliptic gives us a steeper angle to the horizon. Mercury climbs higher and stays out of the murk longer than it does for Northern hemisphere observers. If you have binoculars or a small telescope, there's a bonus. Mercury is currently showing a half illuminated face what astronomers call a quarter phase. You can see it going through phases just like the moon, which is something a lot of people don't realize about. Mercury and keep. Watching the eastern sky over the next couple of weeks, because Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune will gather in a tight cluster on the morning of April eighteenth. Three of those four will be visible to the naked eye, close enough to cover with three fingers held at arm's length. A lovely little planetary alignment to chase. So this week, look east before sunrise for Mercury, look west after sunset for any sign of comet maps emerging from the Sun's glare, and keep an eye on Monday's episode for everything you need to know about the Artemis two lunarflyby. And that is your Astronomy Daily for Saturday, the fifth of April twenty twenty six. A crew heading to the Moon, a comment that may be putting on the sky show of the decade, a record breaking rocket launch, science from the lunar surface, a pulsar discovery out of Australia, and Mercury waiting for you in the dawn sky. We'll be back Monday with day four and five of Artemis two and the latest on comet maps. If you're heading outside tonight, clear skies. Everyone from all of. Us at Astronomy Daily, keep looking up Sunday. Stars Stars so Stories, The Soul m