'We Came Back as Best Friends' — Artemis II Speaks | Blue Origin Sunday | FYST Opens

They came back as best friends, and yesterday they told the world exactly what it felt like to fly around the Moon. The crew of Artemis two has held their first full press conference since splashdown, and what they said will give you chills. Also on today's show, Blue Origin is on the launch pad, ready to make history on Sunday with the world's first reuse heavy lift rocket booster. A brand new telescope has opened its eyes at nearly four miles above sea level in the Chilean Andes and astronomers have just found the missing fuel that powered the universe's greatest star making frenzy. I'm anna, this is Avery and this is Astronomy Daily for Friday, the seventeenth of April twenty twenty six. Let's get into it. Let's go, well, where do we even begin. Less than a week after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, the four astronauts of NASA's Artemis two mission sat down at NASA's Johnson's Space Center in Houston yesterday afternoon for their first full press conference, and it did not disappoint. I have to say watching the clips, these four people look like they've been on a journey together that nobody else on Earth can fully understand. That's exactly what Commander Reid Wiseman said. He told the room, we are bonded forever. I mean, that's the closest four humans can be and not be a family. We launched as friends and we came back as best friends. That is genuinely moving, and from someone who just flew a quarter million miles from Earth, you believe every word. The four crew. Wiseman, Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Cock, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen covered everything their experience aboard Orion's Integrity Capsule, the view of the Moon from closer than any human eyes have seen it in more than fifty years, what it felt like to be so far from home. Victor Glover said he was grateful in a way that was simply too big to hold inside one body. His words, and Hansen spoke about looking out the window and seeing the depth of the galaxy and a powerful sense of what it means to be human. Pac had one of the most touching moments of the entire press conference. She said her nurse on the Navy recovery ship asked her for a hug after they came out of the water, and she called it one of many great human moments that Booke ended the mission. She said, Artemis two taught her the true meaning of being part of a crew. Now, and this is the bit that really fires up the imagination. Wiseman was asked directly is landing on the Moon actually achievable soon? His answer was emphatic. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here. It is not the leap I thought it was. It's going to be extreme technically challenging, but this team needs to show up every day knowing it is absolutely doable, and it's doable soon. He even went further. He said, if they had a lunar lander aboard integrity like the Apollo ten crew did back in nineteen sixty nine, they would have taken it down to the surface. If you had given us the keys to the lander, we would have landed on the moon. Wow. And Henson back that up, saying the teams need to be willing to take a little more risk and solve problems in real time. Wiseman also had high praise for the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch system. His personal opinion, and he was clear. It was just his opinion was that NASA could put the Artemis three Orion on the SLS tomorrow, launch it and the crew would be in great shape. This vehicle really handled very well. NASA has confirmed that Artemis three preparations are already underway at the Vehicle Asssembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, with that mission targeting a low Earth orbit demonstration in mid twenty twenty seven, and the lunar landing now penciled in for Artemis four in early twenty twenty eight. The crew is currently undergoing post flight reconditioning, physical evaluations and lunar science debriefs. Back in Houston, scientists say the findings from this mission will keep them busy for months, possibly years. And as for those four astronauts, they earned a good long. Rest, best friends. At four miles above sea level in the Pacific. What a story. Where are we going to now, avery Blue Origin? That's right, moving from the Moon to the launch pad, because Blue Origin is about to do something genuinely historic. Yesterday at Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex thirty six, Blue Origin successfully completed a static fire test of its new Glen rocket Ahead of the NG three mission, which is currently targeting a sun morning liftoff at six forty five am Eastern Time. And what makes this mission truly special isn't just where it's going, it's what's powering it. This will be the first time New Glen's first stage has ever been reused. The booster, affectionately named never Tell Me the Odds, previously flew on the NG two mission back in November twenty twenty five, delivering NASA's twin Escapade March Probes two orbit and then successfully landing on the drone ship Jackline. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp confirmed that while it is indeed the same boostershell, the company chose to replace all seven BEE four engines and test some upgrades, including a new thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles. The static fire test yesterday ran for thirty eight seconds, with all seven engines performing nominally and hitting one hundred percent thrust for twenty two of those seconds. NG three's payload is a Block two Bluebird satellite for Texas company ASTC Space Mobile, part of their direct to cell phone internet constellation. The Block two Bluebird is one of the largest commercial satellites in orbit, boarding a staggering twenty four hundred square foot antenna. Blue Origin also announced this week that it's building a second launch facility for New Glen at Vandenberg Space for Space in California, which will give the rocket polar orbit capabilities. Each New Glen first stage is designed to fly at least twenty five times, So Sunday goes well, Never tell me the Odds has a long career ahead of it. We will absolutely be watching that one Sunday morning. Fingers crossed. Now here's a story that feels like science fiction, except it's very very real. I love this one. How high do you have to build a telescope before you're basically in space? Well, the new Fredjung's Submillimeter Telescope or FYST pronounced FEAST sits at eighteen thousand, four hundred feet above sea level. That's higher than the Mount Everest base camp. It's so high that every single person who attended the inauguration ceremony on April to ninth had to pass a medical exam and carries supplemental oxygen the entire time they were up there. That's an extraordinary commitment to cutting edge science. Also oxygen at a telescope opening. That's a first. Beast sits on the summit of Saro Chahanantor in Chile's at Akama Desert, already one of the driest clearest places on Earth for astronomy. The telescope's six meter primary mirror was built in Germany from a special steel alloy called invar tozen because it barely expands or contracts with temperature changes. It was then disassembled, shipped across the Atlantic by cargo vessel, trucked three hundred miles across the Andes, and reassembled at the summit. The heaviest single piece weighed sixty tons. The logistics alone are mind boggling, and this project has been third thirty four years in the making. Cornell University scientists first imagined it back in nineteen ninety two. It's a project of the Cornell led CCAT Observatory collaboration involving institutions from Germany, Canada and Chile, and what it will actually do is fascinating. FEAST operates in submillimeter wavelengths, a part of the spectrum that passes straight through dust that blocks visible light. That means it can see star formation happening inside dense molecular clouds. It will map galaxy clusters across cosmic history. It will probe the epic of reionization, the period after the Big Bang, when the first stars lit up the universe. And its instrument, PRIMECAM, can hold up to seven interchangeable detector modules with over one hundred thousand superconducting detectors. They say its mapping speed is more than ten times faster than any previous submillimeter observatory. Martha Haynes, president of the CCAT board, said, and I love this quote. When we first went there and realized what an exceptional site, Sero Chehantur might be, submillimeter astronomy as a field wasn't advanced enough for us to be able to build the telescope and its instruments. But now it is, and we have fyst to show for our patients and determination. Thirty four years of patience. That's dedication. First Light is expected in the coming months when it opens its eyes, a whole new window on the universe opens with. It now for discovery that rewrites what we thought we knew about the early universe, and that involves some seriously epic cosmic structures. Astronomers have long theorized that early galaxies must have been surrounded by vast reservoirs of hydrogen gas, the raw fuel for making stars. During a period astronomers call cosmic Noon roughly ten to twelve billion years ago, galaxies were forming stars faster than it any other time in cosmic history. To do that, they needed enormous supplies of hydrogen. But here's the problem. Until very recently, astronomers had only found about three thousand of these hydrogen halos, called Lieman alpha nebulae. The theory said they should be everywhere, The data said we can only find the handful. Well, consider that mystery solved. A team using data from the Hobby Eberley Telescope Dark Energy Experiment HETDX has just published a landmark study in the Astrophysical Journal reporting the discovery of over thirty three thousand of these hydrogen halos. That's a tenfold increase overnight. From three thousand to thirty three thousand. That is not a small revision to the textbook. That's a whole new chapter. Lead author Aaron Menta Cooper, hetdex's data manager put it beautifully. We've been analyzing the same handful of objects. For the past twenty or so years, het Decks is letting us find many more of these halos and measure their shapes and sizes. It's allowed us to create an amazing statistical catalog. And the halos themselves are extraordinary. Some are simple football shaped clouds wrapped around the single galaxy, but others, the ones the team loves most, are sprawling, irregular blobs containing multiple galaxies with tendrils of hydrogen gas extending hundreds of thousands of light years into space. Menta Cooper described them as looking like giant amibas. The heat Deck survey has captured nearly a half petabyte of data, covering a region of sky equivalent to more than two thousand full moons, and the instrument produces one hundred thousand spectra in a single observation. The scale is unprecedented. What this means going forward is that astronomers now have the statistical sample they've always needed to really understand how galaxies grew. These halos aren't rare curiosity cities. They're the normal environment of young galaxies. They were always there, We just head into tools to find. Them until now. All right, this next one requires you to put down the podcast and go outside. Ideally tonight. NASA has flagged that today, Friday, the seventeenth of April is potentially your best opportunity to spot comet c SLASH twenty twenty five R three, which some skywatchers think could be the brightest comet of the year. The commt will make its closest approach to Earth on April twenty seventh, coming in within about forty four million miles of our planet, but tonight's timing is being highlighted specifically because of where the comet sits in the sky and the quality of the viewing geometry. A quick heads up on brightness. The comet is expected to reach around magnitude eight, which means you will need a binoculars or a small telescope to spot it. It won't be a naked eye spectacle, but through optics it should show a nice coma and possibly a tail. For viewers in the Northern Hemisphere, you're looking in the eastern Predon sky through the constellations Pegasus and Pisces. This window runs through the end of April. For us in the Southern Hemisphere, stay tuned. The comet shifts to evening visibility in early May, which is actually when it will be most accessible for southern. Skies, and tonight is particularly special because it's also the new Moon, which means no lunar glare washing out the sky if you're in a dark location. Tonight is genuinely one of the best nights this month for any kind of deep sky observation, commet or otherwise. So charge up those binoculars and maybe set an alarm for a couple of hours before sunrise. And finally, a word for our Aurora watching listeners, because the sun has had a busy few days. Over the past week, the solar phar site has been popping off with a series of large coronal mass ejections, three significant blasts in quick succession. While these events originated on the side of the Sun facing away from Earth, so they pose no direct threat, there's a separate source of solar activity that is heading our way. A co rotating interaction region essentially a region of compressed solar wind where fast moving solar wind catches up with slower material ahead of it, combined with a high speed stream from a coronal hole, is expected to reach Earth later today or tomorrow. Base weather forecasters are predicting unsettled to active geomagnetic conditions with a chance of reaching G one minor geomagnetic storm levels tonight. And tomorrow Saturday. Conditions may escalate further with the possibility of G one to G two moderate storm levels as that fast solar wind continues to arrive. What does that mean for Aurora watchers? If you're at latitudes above about fifty degrees so Canada, Northern Europe, New Zealand, South Island, keep your eyes on the southern or northern horizon, depending on your hemisphere, and are you ready to act? D one to G two storms can produce displays visible well away from the polar regions. And for those of US further north or south. Even in Australia, a G two storm has occasionally produced Aurora at mid latitudes. Not a guarantee, but worth a check on your Aurora alert apps tonight and Saturday night. The Sun never sleeps, and apparently neither do we. And that is a wrap on Astronomy Daily for Friday, the seventeenth of April twenty twenty six. What an episode Moon Travelers reflecting on the journey of a lifetime. A rocket ready to make history on Sunday, a telescope, the height of the Cosmos, hydrogen halos, the size of small galaxies, a comet to chase tonight, and an Aurora alert for the weekend. Is there anything the universe doesn't have on offer right now? Honestly, never a dull moment. If you enjoyed today's show, please take a moment to leave us a rating or review wherever you listen. It really does make a difference, and find us on Instagram, TikTok x, and Tumblr. We're at astro Daily Pod. We love hearing from you. Until next time, keep looking up. There's a lot going on out there. This has been Astronomy Daily, Goodbye for now. Sunny Day. Stars to Start