Artemis 2 Delayed, SpaceX Unveils Stargaze Safety System

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Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your source

for the latest space and astronomy news.

I'm Anna.

And I'm Avery.

We're here to bring you today's cosmic headlines

on this Wednesday, February 4th, 2026.

We've got a packed show today with some significant developments.

Asa's Artemis 2 mission has hit another speed bump

with their moon rocket experiencing

some familiar issues during testing.

BaseX is making headlines on June fronts today,

launching an innovative new space safety system

while also dealing with the temporary grounding

of their Falcon 9 rocket.

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted something extraordinary

in the early universe, a rare five-way galaxy merger

that's challenging our understanding of cosmic evolution.

Scientists have finally cracked a 50-year mystery

about why nearby galaxies seem to be fleeing from us,

and it involves a massive cosmic void.

And we'll wrap up with fascinating new research

on runaway stars, massive stellar objects racing

through the Milky Way at incredible speeds.

Let's dive in.

Our top story today comes from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida,

where Artemis 2 mission has been delayed

by at least a month following issues

during a critical wet-dress rehearsal test.

This is the mission that will send four astronauts

on a flyby of the moon, the first crude lunar mission

in over 50 years.

The crew includes NASA astronauts Reed Weisman, Victor Glover,

Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hanson.

So what happened during this test?

NASA concluded a 49-hour practice countdown on Tuesday

after loading 700,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen

and liquid oxygen into the massive space launch system rocket.

And early in the tanking process, as we reported yesterday,

they detected a hydrogen leak from the interface

that routes cryogenic propellant

into the rocket's core stage.

Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, yes.

These hydrogen leaks are reminiscent of the issues

that plagued the Artemis one launch attempt back in 2022.

However, there's some good news.

They did resolve the issue during this test

and actually achieved full tanking on the first try,

which NASA considers a tremendous success.

That's actually quite significant progress.

The resolution involved stopping the hydrogen flow,

allowing the interface to warm up,

so the seals could receipt,

and then adjusting the flow of propellant.

It worked, but it raised concerns about launch day operations.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced

they're moving off the February launch window

and targeting March for the earliest possible launch.

The first opportunity next month is Friday, March 6th,

at 8.29 p.m. Eastern time,

with the window extending through March 11th.

There were other issues too, weren't there?

I read about problems with a valve

and some communication dropouts.

Right, a valve associated with the Orion crew module

hatch pressurization had to be retorked

and closeout operations took longer than planned.

Pulled weather affected several cameras and other equipment,

and perhaps most concerning,

there were dropouts in audio communication channels

that have been recurring over the past few weeks.

What's the crew saying about all this?

Commander Reed Wiseman posted on social media

expressing immense pride in seeing the rocket

reach 100% fuel load,

especially knowing how challenging

the scenario was for the launch team.

He said they're jumping back into training tomorrow

to start preparations for March.

And NASA's planning another wet dress rehearsal

before the actual launch, correct?

That's right, launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson

confirmed they'll conduct another wet dress

before proceeding with the actual launch.

The team needs to fully review all the data from this test,

mitigate each issue,

and return to testing before setting

an official target launch date.

It's a delay, but safety has to converse,

especially with a crude mission to the moon.

From the moon to low earth orbit,

SpaceX has just unveiled a revolutionary

new space safety system called Stargaze

that could fundamentally change how we manage

the increasingly crowded space around our planet.

This is fascinating technology, Anna.

Stargaze is a space situational awareness system

that uses data from nearly 30,000 Star trackers

across the Starlink satellite constellation

to continuously monitor objects in low earth orbit.

30,000 Star trackers, that's an incredible network.

And they're detecting approximately 30 million

transits daily across the fleet.

That's a several order of magnitude increase

in detection capability compared

to conventional ground-based systems.

The need for this kind of system

has never been more urgent.

Practices like leaving rocket bodies in LEO,

operators maneuvering satellites

without sharing trajectory predictions

and anti-satellite tests have all heightened collision risks.

Conventional methods typically observe objects

only a limited number of times per day

causing large uncertainties in orbital predictions.

What makes Stargaze particularly powerful

is that it provides conjunction screening results

within minutes compared to the current industry standard

of several hours.

That speed can be the difference

between a successful collision avoidance maneuver

and a catastrophic impact.

SpaceX actually shared a real world example

that demonstrates just how critical the system is.

In late 2025, a Starlink satellite encountered

a conjunction with a third-party satellite

that was performing maneuvers,

but whose operator wasn't sharing a femoris data.

A femoris data, that's the trajectory prediction information, right?

Exactly.

So initially, the close approach was anticipated

to be about 9,000 meters away,

considered a safe missed distance

with zero probability of collision.

But then, just five hours before the conjunction,

the third-party satellite performed a maneuver

that collapsed the anticipated missed distance to just 60 meters.

60 meters?

That's terrifyingly close in space terms.

Stargaze quickly detected this maneuver

and published an updated trajectory to the screening platform,

generating new conjunction data messages

that were immediately distributed.

The Starlink satellite was able to react

within an hour of detecting the maneuver,

planning an avoidance maneuver

to reduce collision risk back down to zero.

And here's the really important part.

SpaceX is making this data available

to all satellite operators free of charge.

Starting this spring,

satellite operators who submit their own trajectory predictions

to the platform will receive

conjunction data messages against Stargaze data.

It's been in close beta

with over a dozen participating satellite operators

and the response has been positive.

SpaceX is drawing a parallel to commercial aviation.

There are hundreds of thousands of sites daily,

but they avoid collisions

because a broadcast or location

and flight plans to other aircraft.

SpaceX is calling on all spacecraft operators

to follow the same minimal standard

of sharing predicted trajectories.

Starlink updates and shares their ephemera

as publicly every hour as an example.

This is the kind of collaborative approach

we need as space becomes more congested.

It's not just about protecting SpaceX's massive constellation,

it's about creating a safer orbital environment for everyone.

Speaking of SpaceX,

the company has temporarily grounded its Falcon 9 rocket

following an issue with the upper stage

on a recent Starlink launch

and the timing couldn't be more critical.

This happened on Monday, February 2nd,

a Falcon 9 successfully delivered

25 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit as planned.

But after deploying the payloads,

the rocket's upper stage failed to perform its d-orbit burn.

That d-orbit burn is designed

to bring the spent upper stage down

for controlled destruction in Earth's atmosphere.

Without it, we have another piece of debris in orbit,

exactly the kind of problem that Stargaze

is designed to help monitor.

The good news is the upper stage

did manage to passivate itself by venting propellant,

which lowered its paraget to about 110 kilometers.

According to satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell,

it will re-enter quickly.

But SpaceX has grounded the Falcon 9 fleet

while teams review data to determine root cause

and corrective actions.

And here's where the timing gets tricky.

The crew 12 astronaut mission

to the International Space Station

is currently scheduled to launch on February 11th,

just eight days from now.

Crew 12 is particularly important

because it will restore the ISS

to its normal complement of seven crew members.

The station has been operating with a skeleton crew

of just three astronauts since January 15th.

When the four crew 11 astronauts departed

in the first ever medical evacuation from the ISS.

NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kishatriya

confirmed that NASA teams from the commercial crew program

are embedded in the investigation

alongside SpaceX and the FAA.

He said they're pressing towards the crew 12 window,

but the launch will be contingent

on the return to flight rationale.

It's worth noting that the Falcon 9

has an incredible safety record.

Last year alone, it launched a record breaking 165 times

with all mission successful.

Just a single mission experienced a significant anomaly,

a starlink launch where a booster toppled

after landing at sea.

That March 3rd incident was traced to a fuel leak

in one of the booster's nine Merlin engines,

which led to a fire that weakened a landing leg.

SpaceX halted launches for a week at that time as well.

The question now is whether they can resolve

this upper stage issue quickly enough

to meet the February 11th crew 12 launch date.

If not, those three astronauts on the ISS

will have to wait a bit longer for reinforcements.

From orbital mechanics to the deepest reaches of space,

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The James Webb Space Telescope

has spotted something extraordinary,

a five-way galaxy merger in the early universe

that's challenging our understanding of cosmic evolution.

This is remarkable, Anna.

The system consists of five compact,

actively star-forming galaxies that were emerging

when the universe was only about 800 million years old.

That's just 6% of the universe's current age.

And the level of complexities

was really stunning astronomers.

These five galaxies are packed into

a remarkably small region of space.

They're separated by only tens of thousands of light years.

To put that in perspective,

that's far closer together

than most neighboring galaxies in the modern universe.

Dr. Weta H.U. from Texas A&M University,

the studies lead author,

explained that what makes this remarkable

is that a merger involving such a large number of galaxies

was not expected so early in the universe's history.

At that time, galaxy mergers were thought to be simpler,

usually involving only two to three galaxies.

But it's not just the number of galaxies

that's impressive.

These five galaxies are producing stars

at a combined rate of roughly 250 solar masses per year.

That's far exceeding typical star formation rates

for that era.

In this rapid stellar production

has already enriched the system

with heavier elements like oxygen,

materials forged in stellar interiors

and dispersed through galactic interactions.

The presence of these elements

indicates that multiple generations of stars

had already lived and died.

The really fascinating part

is that gas containing oxygen and hydrogen

extends beyond the galaxies themselves.

This suggests that gravitational interactions

are pushing enriched material into intergalactic space,

showing how early mergers may have shaped

not just galaxies,

but the larger cosmic environment.

This discovery really disrupts

the standard model of galaxy assembly.

That model proposes a gradual buildup

where small galaxies merge over long periods

to form the larger systems.

But this five-way merger demonstrates

that complex multi-galaxy interactions

were already underway less than a billion years

after the Big Bang.

Professor Casey Papa-Vitch,

a co-author on the study,

emphasized the implications.

By showing that a complex,

merger-driven system exists so early,

it tells us our theories of how galaxies assemble

and how quickly they do so need to be updated to match reality.

This adds to the growing body of evidence from JWST

that the early universe was capable of producing

massive mature-looking galaxies at astonishing speed.

Matter in the early universe appears

to have clustered more rapidly and efficiently

than our simulation suggested.

The study was published in Nature Astronomy,

and it's another example of how JWST

is fundamentally changing our understanding of the cosmos.

Dicking with cosmic mysteries,

scientists have finally solved a 50-year-old puzzle

about why nearby galaxies appear to be fleeing

from our own Milky Way,

and the answer involves a massive cosmic void

right in our neighborhood.

This is one of those mysteries that's

been nagging at astronomers for decades, Avery.

Most large galaxies near the Milky Way,

with the exception of Andromeda,

appear to be moving away from us

and seem largely unaffected by the gravitational pull

of our local group of galaxies.

The local group being the Milky Way and Andromeda

and dozens of smaller galaxies.

So what's the solution?

Led by E. Wood Wempey at the Captain Institute in Gronegan,

an international research team

used advanced computer simulations

and discovered that matter just beyond the local group

forms a broad, flat structure, stretching tens of millions

of light years across.

And here's the key.

Vast empty regions lie above and below this structure.

So we're basically living on a cosmic pancake

surrounded by voids?

That's actually a pretty good analogy.

This flat distribution of matter

is the only way to accurately account

for both the combined mass of the Milky Way and Andromeda

and the unexpected motions of nearby galaxies.

But how does this flat structure explain

why galaxies are moving away from us?

It comes down to the local void, a vast empty region

discovered back in 1987 by Brent Tully and Rick Fisher.

The local void extends approximately 60 megaparsecs

or about 200 million light years beginning

at the edge of the local group.

The local void is growing because there's

very little matter inside it to exert gravitational pull.

Our Milky Way sits in what's called the local sheet,

a flat array of galaxies that bounds the void.

And this local sheet is rushing away

from the void center at 260 kilometers per second.

How fast is that affecting the Milky Way?

The Milky Way's velocity away from the local void

is 970,000 kilometers per hour.

That's 600,000 miles per hour.

It's astonishingly fast.

So the new simulations show that this hidden geometry,

the flat plane of dark matter beyond the local group

with voids above and below,

is what's driving these galactic motions?

Exactly.

When researchers included this configuration

in their simulations, they closely

matched the observed positions and speeds of nearby galaxies.

It provides a coherent explanation for motions

that have puzzled astronomers for half a century.

This is connected to research about the Hubble tension, too,

isn't it?

The discrepancy and measurements of the universe's expansion

rate?

That's right.

Some researchers have proposed that if we're

inside a large local void, it could affect

how we measure cosmic expansion, making the local universe

appear to be expanding faster than it actually is.

Though that particular idea remains controversial

and needs more evidence.

What's remarkable is that we're learning

our immediate cosmic neighborhood is far more structured

and dynamic than we previously understood.

We're not just floating in a uniform sea of galaxies.

We're on a sheet of matter bordering a massive void.

And that void is shaping our galaxy's journey

through space in fundamental ways.

For our final story today, we're

turning to some of the fastest objects in our galaxy,

runaway stars that are racing through the Milky Way

at incredible speeds.

Researchers from institutes across Spain

have just completed the most extensive observational study

to date of these stellar speedsters,

analyzing 214 O-type stars, the brightest

and most massive class of stars in our galaxy.

These aren't just fast-moving stars, Avery.

We're talking about stars with velocities

that often exceed 700 kilometers per second.

That's fast enough to escape the Milky Way's gravity entirely.

The term runaway stars was first used back

in the early 1960s by Dutch astronomer Adrian Blau.

He observed stars moving at unusually high speeds

and proposed the originated in binary systems

and were ejected when the companion star collapsed

and exploded in a supernova.

By 2005, astronomers discovered even faster runaway stars,

leading to the designation hyper-velocity stars.

These objects are fascinating because of the influence

they have on galactic evolution.

By escaping their systems of origin,

these stars irradiate gas and dust

in the insert stellar medium,

eventually seeding it with heavy elements

after they go supernova.

This affects how future stars and planets will form.

So what did this new study reveal?

The team used data from ESA's Gaia Observatory

and the IACOB spectroscopic database

to analyze these 214 O-type stars.

They found that most runaway stars rotate slowly,

while those that rotate faster

are more likely to be linked to supernova explosions

in binary systems.

And here's an interesting finding,

the highest velocity stars tend to be single,

suggesting they were ejected from young clusters

through gravitational interactions.

So there are actually two different mechanisms

creating runaway stars?

Exactly.

Some are explosively ejected by supernova in binary systems,

while others are gravitationally ejected

from close encounters with star clusters.

The study helps clarify the relative contributions

of these two mechanisms.

Lead author Mar Caratero Castrillo,

now at the European Southern Observatory,

called this the most comprehensive observational study

of its kind in the Milky Way.

By combining information on rotation and binaryity,

they're providing unprecedented constraints

on how these runaway stars are formed.

The team also identified 12 runaway binary systems,

including three X-ray binary sources

that contain neutron stars or black holes,

and three additional systems that are likely candidates

for hosting black holes.

Perhaps the strongest evidence

for multiple ejection mechanisms was this.

Virtually no stars in the study

exhibited both high velocities and rapid rotation.

If all runaway stars came from the same process,

you'd expect to see some with both characteristics.

Future Gaia data releases and ongoing spectroscopic studies

will help astronomers trace these stars

back to their birthplaces within the Milky Way,

which will confirm which mechanism

was responsible in each case.

And there might be another fascinating angle

to this research.

Understanding these systems could shed light

on another role they may play in galactic evolution,

potentially distributing the basic ingredients of life

throughout the Milky Way as they travel.

Cosmic messengers carrying the seeds of life

across the galaxy, that's a beautiful thought to end on.

And that wraps up today's episode of Astronomy Daily.

From NASA's Moon Mission Delays

to SpaceX's new safety innovations

from ancient galaxy mergers to mysteries

in our cosmic neighborhood,

it's been quite a journey through the cosmos today.

Thanks for joining us.

For more space news, visit our website at astronomydaily.io

where you can explore our full archive

and stay updated on the latest cosmic discoveries.

You can also find us on social media at AstroDailyPod

across all major platforms.

Until next time, keep looking up.

Astronomy Daily.

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