Astronomy Daily: Space News Updates

Astronomy Daily · S05E150 · “Lucky Thirteen” · Saturday 25 July 2026. Your Weekend Wrap: Starship Flight 13 finally flies and floats, the strongest exomoon candidate yet, a robotic satellite-servicer on its way to GEO, and what the Moon’s far side reveals about Earth — plus a both-hemispheres skywatch. In this episode Chapter Segment 00:00 Cold open & headlines 01:30 LEAD: Starship Flight 13 f...

Astronomers have confirmed the first moon-like object beyond our solar system — and immediately discovered our vocabulary cannot handle it. A Jupiter-mass world orbits a brown dwarf, which orbits a red dwarf, seventy light-years away. Is it a moon? A planet? Something we have not named yet? Also on today’s show: the Milky Way’s most powerful particle accelerator is confirmed in the direction of Al...

Astronomy Daily S05E148 — "Far Side" Thursday 23 July 2026 Starship gets a second shot at Flight 13 — with a schedule caveat worth knowing about. The first far-side lunar samples reveal that Earth has been quietly shielding the side of the Moon that faces us. Astronomers debate whether the lunar far side should be closed to industry. The Milky Way's only helium nova finally steps out from behind t...

Astronomy Daily — S05E147: "Space Mechanic" Wednesday 22 July 2026 A spacecraft with robotic arms is on its way to geostationary orbit to keep other satellites alive. A discarded rocket stage is two weeks out from hitting the Moon, and twenty-three astronomers have just asked the world to watch. Plus the first binary star system where both stars exploded, the first complete magnetic map of a galax...

Astronomy Daily · S05E146 · “Postcards from Mars” · Tuesday 21 July 2026 NASA’s Psyche probe phones home from its Mars flyby — data and a spellbinding month-long time-lapse — as Europe’s Plato planet-hunter clears its final test. From the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting: a CubeSat that could give us hours of solar-storm warning, and a new way to forecast the Sun’s next acti...

Astronomy Daily S05E145 — “Arrival” — Monday, 20 July 2026. On the 57th anniversary of Apollo 11, we cover a first-of-its-kind launch, a Mars flyby science haul, a four-billion-year-old Martian record, a habitable-zone world with a likely atmosphere, shrimp feeding in simulated microgravity, and the new science of listening to black holes ring. In This Episode (01:30) India goes private in orbit —...

Astronomy Daily — The Weekend Space and Astronomy News Wrap | Saturday 18 July 2026 | S05E144 Anna and Avery wrap the biggest week in space news this year: brand-new research warning that extreme solar storms may hit harder than our models assume, and the delightful news that South African rooibos tea seeds are headed for the International Space Station — plus the four stories that defined the wee...

Astronomy Daily — S05E143 | Friday 17 July 2026 | "A World With Air" Anna and Avery bring you a genuine milestone: the first atmosphere ever detected on a rocky planet in the habitable zone of another star. Plus Starship's last-second launch abort, the New Jersey bedroom meteorite carrying life's ingredients, the earliest galaxy-building ever seen, metallic dunes on Mars, and a Moon–Venus meeting...

Anna and Avery kick off with a decade-long game of cosmic hide-and-seek that has finally ended: Beta Pictoris d, the faintest exoplanet ever directly imaged from Earth, found lurking in more than ten years of archival images — and orbiting a star in the southern constellation Pictor. Then it's the completion of VLASS, the sharpest radio map of the whole sky ever made, arriving just as the Rubin Ob...

Astronomy Daily — S05E141 | Wednesday 15 July 2026 Anna and Avery bring you the biggest space and astronomy news of the day: Starship Flight 13 is cleared for Thursday after the FAA closes its Flight 12 investigation and SpaceX reveals exactly what went wrong; NASA astronaut Anil Menon rides a Soyuz to the ISS on his first flight; astronomers finally find the first of Omega Centauri’s 10,000 "miss...

Astronomy Daily — S05E140 | Tuesday 14 July 2026 | Hosts: Anna & Avery Space mirrors are officially cleared for launch — and astronomers are sounding the alarm. In today's episode, Anna and Avery unpack the FCC's approval of Reflect Orbital's Eärendil-1, the first of a proposed constellation of sunlight-reflecting satellites, and what tens of thousands of orbital mirrors could mean for the nig...

Astronomy Daily S05E139 — Monday, 13 July 2026   Starship could fly again as soon as Wednesday — carrying its first-ever real payload. Japan quietly joins the reusable rocket club just a day after China. SpaceX asks regulators for a jaw-dropping 100,000 satellites. Physicists may have heard the accumulated whispers of every star that ever exploded. Isar Aerospace signs a $150 million deal to launc...

Astronomy Daily S05E138 — Weekend Space and Astronomy News Wrap — Saturday, 11 July 2026   China nets a rocket booster from the sea for the first time ever, we remember space pioneer Wally Funk, and we recap the week's four biggest stories: Euclid's 31 ancient quasars, mystery metal spheres on a Queensland beach, JWST's unexplained substance on Titan and Pluto, and New Horizons waking from hiberna...

S05E137: Euclid uncovers 31 ancient quasars including the two most distant ever observed, Roman Space Telescope reaches a major pre-launch milestone at Kennedy Space Center, China details its plans for a sunward asteroid early-warning network, Hayabusa2 reveals asteroid Torifune is a two-lobed “snowman” contact binary, NASA's GRITSS CubeSat launches to sharpen global positioning precision, and we...

Astronomy Daily S05E136 — Thursday, 9 July 2026   An MIT physicist proposes a shoebox-sized satellite that could catch a hidden nuclear weapon in orbit, NASA's New Horizons wakes up after its longest hibernation ever nearly six billion miles from home, an Antarctic telescope catalogues over seven thousand galaxy clusters, Japan's ispace books cargo space on a SpaceX Starship Moon mission, a Falcon...

Astronomy Daily — S05E135 — Wednesday, July 8, 2026 1. World's First Commercial Nuclear-Powered Satellite Reaches Orbit SpaceX's Transporter-17 rideshare mission carried City Labs' BOHR CubeSat to orbit on July 7, the first commercially built satellite to fly a nuclear-powered payload — a tritium betavoltaic cell that generates electricity continuously, day or night, regardless of sunlight. Key po...

Astronomy Daily S05E134 — Tuesday, 7 July 2026   Mysterious metal spheres wash up on a Queensland beach and turn out to be re-entered rocket debris, Hayabusa2 beams home stunning close-ups of asteroid Torifune, new VLT chemistry reveals interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS may be one of the oldest objects ever studied, TESS finds its first exoplanet using Einstein's gravitational microlensing, JWST spots s...

Today on Astronomy Daily: Japan's Hayabusa2 pulls off a nail-biting high-speed asteroid flyby, James Webb finds the same unexplained chemical mystery on Titan AND Pluto, a neutrino detector may have caught the universe's oldest supernova echo, a wild new theory tries to solve the black hole information paradox, we wrap up the weekend's aurora action, and we look at when NASA's New Horizons might f...

Astronomy Daily — S05E132 — Weekend Space and Astronomy News Wrap — Saturday, July 4, 2026 It's the Fourth of July weekend edition of Astronomy Daily! This week's wrap covers the successful launch of the Swift rescue mission after a week of delays, the historic start of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's decade-long sky survey, an aurora-triggering geomagnetic storm timed for the holiday weekend, a p...

Astronomy Daily S05E131 — Friday, July 3, 2026   1. Swift Rescue Mission — Grounded Mid-Flight •    Katalyst Space Technologies' LINK spacecraft was set to launch aboard a Pegasus XL rocket, air-launched from Northrop Grumman's Stargazer aircraft over Kwajalein Atoll. •    Thursday's attempt (July 2) got airborne after two prior weather scrubs, but was aborted mid-flight when engineers spotted an...

Astronomy Daily S05E130 — Thursday, July 2, 2026   A quick update on Swift's third launch scrub, a solar flare that could spark aurora for July 4th weekend, a hot Jupiter breaking the rules of physics, Amazon Leo's final Atlas V flight, patriotic Chandra imagery, a look back at a third galaxy missing its dark matter, and NASA's cheeky World Cup wager involving the Moon.   In This Episode ●       ...

A landmark day in space news: the Vera Rubin Observatory officially begins its ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, NASA reveals it may send a spare nuclear-powered Mars rover to the Moon's south pole, Blue Origin shows off its rebuilt launch pad a month after the New Glenn explosion, Rocket Lab strikes an $8 billion deal to acquire Iridium, a brief Swift/LINK scrub update, and scientists hol...

Astronomy Daily S05E128 | Tuesday, June 30, 2026  Hosts: Anna & Avery | astronomydaily.io | @AstroDailyPod In today's episode: 🚀 NASA's Swift Observatory Rescue Mission Launches  After weeks of anticipation, NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is set for a historic rescue mission. The robotic spacecraft, Link, designed by Catalyst Space Technologies, will attempt to stabilize Swift's orbit,...

Astronomy Daily S05E127 | Monday, June 29, 2026 Hosts: Anna & Avery | astronomydaily.io | @AstroDailyPod   In today's episode:   RAD-BAARG — The Bow-and-Arrow Galaxy A citizen scientist scanning LOFAR radio telescope data spotted a galaxy like nothing seen in 25 years — RAD-BAARG stretches 1.8 million light-years and shows what may be the clearest radio signature of a giant cosmic bow shock ev...

Weekend Space & Astronomy News Wrap | Saturday, June 27, 2026   It's our Saturday wrap — and what a week it's been for space and astronomy! Join Anna and Avery for two brand-new stories plus the four biggest headlines from the past five days.   THIS WEEK'S STORIES   🚀 NASA's Daring Swift Rescue Mission Launches Today NASA's Swift Boost mission launched this morning, sending the LINK robotic s...