Astronomy Daily: Space News Updates

Today's episode — S05E175, Monday August 24, 2026: Main story: China delays Chang'e-7's launch by about a month. The Chang'e-7 lunar south pole mission's launch window opened today, August 24, but a tropical system (reported as Tropical Depression/Storm Narra) over the Gulf of Tonkin, alongside a cited safety and reliability review, forced a scrub with no immediate new date. Because the mission's...

Anna and Avery cover China's Chang'e-7 mission — a four-vehicle lunar south pole expedition, including a leaping hopper robot, that a Brown University scientist calls the most ambitious robotic Moon mission any nation has ever attempted, with its launch window opening Monday. Then: this week's biggest hardware stories, catching up on Starship's Ship 40 (still marooned off Christmas Island), LandSp...

Anna and Avery cover how NASA, working with South Korea's Danuri orbiter, pinpointed and imaged the exact crater left by a SpaceX Falcon 9 stage that struck the Moon on August 5th. Plus: the private rescue mission for NASA's ailing Swift telescope has officially failed, astronomers may have caught dark matter bending a black hole's jet, and Rocket Lab launches its ninth radar satellite for Japan's...

Anna and Avery cover LandSpace becoming the first Chinese commercial company to land an orbital-class rocket booster — a big step for the country's private space sector. Plus: astronomers find a "mega-Earth" 23 times more massive than our planet that shouldn't be able to exist, a star weaving impossibly close to our galaxy's supermassive black hole that could reveal its spin within a decade, and n...

Anna and Avery cover Sophie Adenot becoming the first French woman ever to conduct a spacewalk — a historic EVA that ran into some antenna trouble along the way. Plus: a trillion-mile river of gas that explains why some planetary systems end up tilted, an honest update on Starship's Ship 40 as it turns out the recovery saga wasn't quite finished, and SpaceX quietly closing in on 11,000 satellites...

Anna and Avery close out a three-week saga: SpaceX has recovered Starship's Ship 40 from the Indian Ocean after a soft splashdown, a difficult tow, and a moment where recovery odds looked as low as 18%. Plus: a dead star in the Helix Nebula previews our own Sun's five-billion-years-from-now fate, new evidence the Milky Way was built in part by an ancient galactic collision, and China's fast recove...

Anna and Avery cover NASA's newly funded concept for spherical, propeller-free "aerobots" that could one day explore the methane-carved cave systems of Saturn's moon Titan. Plus: SpaceX breaks its own launch-turnaround record with two Falcon 9 missions 38 minutes apart, Rocket Lab lands its biggest-ever defense contract to build "Flatellites" for the U.S. Space Force, and a geomagnetic storm arriv...

Today's episode — S05E168, Saturday August 15, 2026, our "Weekend Wrap": **Main story: a magnetar confirms 90-year-old vacuum birefringence prediction.** A team led by Rachael Stewart (George Washington University), using NASA's IXPE spacecraft, found the strongest evidence yet that extreme magnetic fields polarize light passing through empty space — confirming a 1936 prediction by Werner Heisenbe...

Anna and Avery break down JWST's discovery of MoM-BH*-1, the earliest known "black hole star" — a black hole shrouded in dense gas, glowing from just 660 million years after the Big Bang, that might explain how supermassive black holes grow so fast. Plus: the Perseid meteor shower's spectacular overnight peak, a new satellite built to watch other satellites in geostationary orbit, and veteran NASA...

Anna and Avery break down yesterday's total solar eclipse — a 182-mile-wide shadow that swept from the Arctic through Greenland and Iceland to northern Spain, giving millions of people up to 2 minutes 18 seconds of totality. Plus: astronomers find three supermassive black holes sharing one distant galaxy (two are about to merge), Virgin Galactic pushes commercial spaceflight back to February 2027,...

In this episode •      Shadow Day: the only total solar eclipse of 2026 crosses Arctic Russia, Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain today — the first total eclipse over western mainland Europe since 1999 (Spain’s first since 1905, Iceland’s since 1954). Max totality ~2 min 18 s. Reykjavík ~17:48 UT; northern Spain ~18:27–18:33 UT (Sun very low, ~4–10° up). Live via NASA, timeanddate and t...

Astronomy Daily · S05E164 “Eclipse Eve” · Tuesday 11 August 2026. Sources are primary/agency where possible; aggregator dates were checked against originals. In this episode •    LEAD — The 12 August total solar eclipse: the only total eclipse of 2026 and the first over mainland Europe since 1999. Totality arcs from Siberia over the North Pole to eastern Greenland, western Iceland, northern Spain...

Astronomy Daily · S05E163 · “The Long Way Home” · Monday 10 August 2026. Sources verified against primary / institutional outlets. Starship “lost at sea” (Flight 13) •    Flight 13 launched 24 July 2026 from Starbase, South Texas; the upper stage (“Ship,” Ship 40, ~52 m) made the softest Starship water landing yet in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia — and, in a program first, survived intact...

This weekend on Astronomy Daily: the Inouye Solar Telescope reveals whirlpools on the Sun’s surface for the first time, a Falcon 9 upper stage carves a fresh crater on the Moon, Voyager 2 pulls off a daring "Big Bang" power swap 21 billion kilometres away, and the LINK spacecraft wins its de-spin battle in the race to save NASA’s Swift. Plus your both-hemispheres guide to the 12 August total solar...

Astronomy Daily · S05E161 · “The Colour of Empty Space” · Friday 7 August 2026. Hosts: Anna & Avery. astronomydaily.io · @AstroDailyPod ① Vacuum birefringence: reading a magnetar ●        NASA’s IXPE, with NICER and the Parkes/Murriyang radio telescope (NSW), measured the polarised X-rays of magnetar 1E 1547.0−5408. ●        Result: soft X-ray polarisation ~65% at 2 keV, rising to nearly 80% a...

Astronomy Daily · S05E160 · 6 August 2026. In this episode: a Falcon 9 upper stage confirmed to have struck the Moon; a live ISS spacewalk; supernova SN 2026gzf caught at first light; SpaceX Crew-13 previewed; and a both-hemispheres guide to the 12 August eclipse and Perseids. FALCON 9 LUNAR IMPACT (LEAD) ●        Spent upper stage 2025-010D struck near Einstein Crater (~19.4°N, 93.3°W) at ~06:35...

Astronomy Daily S05E159 — Wednesday, 5 August 2026. In this episode: a power-saving “Big Bang” keeps Voyager 2 doing science, direct-to-phone satellites reach orbit, Curiosity finds a vast honeycomb field on its 14th Martian anniversary, and NASA’s Aspera prepares to hunt the universe’s missing gas. ① Voyager 2’s “Big Bang” power save •   JPL engineers freed up power by simultaneously switching of...

S05E158 — “The Crater Makers” · Tuesday 4 August 2026. Four stories on cosmic impacts — and a new map of the X-ray sky — plus a both-hemispheres skywatch. ① A dead Falcon 9 is about to crater the Moon ●        A spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage (catalogued 2025-010D) is predicted to strike the Moon near Einstein Crater on 5 Aug 2026 at ~06:35 UTC — the second documented uncontrolled rocket impact...

Astronomy Daily · S05E157 · “The Edge of Everything” · Monday 3 August 2026   In this episode •      The largest galaxy, measured at last. Ultra-deep imaging of IC 1101 in the Abell 2029 cluster has traced its outer edge for the first time: an edge radius of ~260 kpc, a diameter near 520 kpc (~1.7 million light-years), and ~3.4 trillion solar masses in stars — about 17× the width of the Milky Way....

Astronomy Daily S05E156 — Weekend Space & Astronomy News Wrap. Saturday, 1 August 2026. In this episode •    The first “self-driving” telescope — a SkAI deep-learning system (Northwestern / UChicago / Fermilab) schedules and re-plans observations in real time on the Dark Energy Camera at the Blanco 4-m, Cerro Tololo, Chile — matching human schedulers across two runs. •    Betelgeuse's companio...

S05E155 · Friday 31 July 2026 · Astronomy Daily with Anna & Avery. Four stories and a both-hemispheres skywatch. Australian English. ① Asteroid (44) Nysa — the first three-lobed world, and its hidden moon ●        trilobate body — three lobes joined by two narrow necks; a candidate “first” of its kind. ●        A new ~1 km moon, S/2026 (44) 1, was found orbiting ≥170 km out — spotted using hig...

Astronomy Daily S05E154 — “The Reach of a Giant.” Thursday, 30 July 2026. Hosted by Anna and Avery. In this episode •    A supermassive black hole caught heating and stirring an entire galaxy cluster — turbulence reaching ~300,000 light-years, about 100× more energetic than expected (XRISM / quasar H1821+643). •    Why some “clean” white dwarfs are secretly feasting: magnetic fields funnel shredde...

Astronomy Daily · S05E153 · Wednesday 29 July 2026. Four stories from the frontier of space and astronomy, plus a both-hemispheres look at the sky — and news of our brand-new website. In this episode •  Betelgeuse is not alone. ESO’s VLT/SPHERE has captured the clearest direct image yet of Betelgeuse B, the long-suspected companion to the famous red supergiant — ending a roughly century-long searc...

Astronomy Daily S05E152 — “Reading the Heat” · Tuesday 28 July 2026. Hosts Anna & Avery. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has taken the first-ever temperature reading beneath the surface of Io, Jupiter’s volcanic moon — and the technique behind it could reshape how we study icy ocean moons and even volcanoes on Earth. We also look at why JWST’s “Little Red Dots” might be globular clusters being born, th...

Astronomy Daily · S05E151 · “The Faint Little World Has Its Day” · Monday 27 July 2026 · Hosts Anna & Avery. Pluto has its brightest night of the year — so we go deep on the world nobody can agree how to label. Then a crew comes home after 241 days, the galaxy’s most common planet turns out to maybe hide oceans of molten rock, and the first black hole ever photographed gets a sharper, two-colo...