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Hey there, space fans.
I'm Anna.
And I'm Avery.
Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily dose
of space and astronomy news.
It's Thursday, January 22nd, 2026.
And boy, do we have a packed episode for you today?
We really do.
We're covering everything from blue origins
ambitious new satellite internet network
to an update on that historic medical evacuation
from the International Space Station.
Plus, we'll celebrate a special birthday for a lunar legend.
That's right.
We've also got some fascinating science stories,
including new insights into Saturn's moon and celadus.
Surprising discoveries about plasma waves at Mercury
and groundbreaking observations of solar flares.
Do buckle up.
Let's dive right into today's space headlines.
All right, Anna, let's kick things off
with some major news from Blue Origin.
Jeff Bezos' space company just announced
a new satellite internet network called TerraWave.
And the numbers are pretty staggering.
They really are.
We're talking about data speeds up to six
terabytes per second.
That's seriously impressive.
How does that compare to what's available now?
Well, for context, SpaceX's Starlink currently
maxes out at 400 megabits per second for consumers.
Though they're planning to upgrade
to one gigabit speeds in the future.
But six terabytes per second,
that's in a completely different league.
So this isn't really targeting the same market
as Starlink then.
Exactly.
Blue Origin is very clear about this.
TerraWave is geared toward enterprise customers,
data centers, and government applications.
It's meant to add a space-based layer
to existing network infrastructure,
particularly for reaching locations
that traditional methods can't access.
What's the architecture looking like?
How many satellites are we talking about?
The constellation will use a mix of 5,280 satellites
in low-earth orbit, and 128 in medium-earth orbit.
The low-earth orbit satellites will use RF connectivity
with maximum data transfer speeds of 144 gigabits per second.
While the medium-earth orbit satellites
will use optical lengths to achieve
those incredible six terabits per second speeds.
When can we expect to see this actually deployed?
Blue Origin plans to start deploying
the first satellites in late 2027.
They haven't given a timeline for the full build-out yet,
which makes sense given the scale of the project.
This is interesting timing, too, isn't it?
Because Jeff Bezos' other company, Amazon,
just rebranded their satellite network as Leo.
That's right.
Leo will have around 3,000 satellites in low-earth orbit
offering more traditional broadband speeds to consumers.
So taken together,
Amazon's Leo and Blue Origin's TerraWave
could provide pretty robust competition
to SpaceX's Starlink across different market segments.
It's really shaping up to be an exciting era
for satellite internet.
The competition should drive innovation
and hopefully improve service for everyone.
Absolutely.
And it shows how Blue Origin is evolving beyond
just their space tourism flights with New Shepherd.
With the successful launches of their new Glen Rocket,
landing the booster on just a second attempt,
and now this satellite network announcement,
they're really becoming a multifaceted
commercial space player.
Great point.
All right, let's move on to some news
from closer to home,
or at least from low-earth orbit.
Avery, we need to talk about the unprecedented
medical evacuation from the International Space Station.
This was a historic moment
and not in a way anyone wanted.
Well, today we have a bit of an update
as the astronauts have made their first live appearance
since returning to Earth.
You're absolutely right, Anna.
For the first time in over 25 years
of continuous human presence on the ISS,
and the first time in NASA's entire history,
a space mission was cut short due to a medical issue.
The four astronauts of crew 11 splash down
in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California
on January 15th, about a month earlier than planned.
Can you tell us who was on this crew?
The crew included NASA astronauts,
Zena Cardman and Mike Fink,
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut,
Kimeya Yui, and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov.
They'd been on the station for 167 days,
having launched back in August 2025.
And NASA still hasn't disclosed
which crew member had the medical issue
or what the condition was.
That's correct.
They're protecting the astronaut's medical privacy.
What they have said is that the crew member is stable
in that this wasn't an emergency situation,
despite bringing the entire crew home early.
How did this unfold?
What were the warning signs?
The first public indication came when NASA
canceled a planned spacewalk on January 8th
due to a medical concern.
Mike Fink and Zena Cardman were supposed to venture
outside the station to work on the power system.
The next day, NASA made the decision
to bring the entire crew home early.
That must have been a difficult decision to make.
Absolutely.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman emphasized
that while they have medical equipment
and trained crew members aboard the ISS,
the capability to properly diagnose
and treat this particular condition
simply doesn't exist on the station.
He called it a controlled medical evacuation,
not an emergency deorbit.
What's particularly interesting to me
is what the crew member said
at their press conference yesterday.
They seemed remarkably positive about the experience.
They really did.
Mike Fink, who was the ISS commander during this mission,
said the way the crew and ground teams handled everything
made him more confident about human space exploration,
not less.
He specifically mentioned this boat's well
for the upcoming Artemis program.
I remember reading that they used
the portable ultrasound machine on the ISS
during this incident.
Right, Fink mentioned that during the press conference.
He emphasized that while the ultrasound
was extremely helpful,
the ISS doesn't have the capacity
for a larger imaging equipment like MRI machines.
Zena Cardman also pointed out that
as we venture beyond low-earth orbit to the moon
and eventually Mars,
having better diagnostic and treatment tools on board
will be a critical challenge to solve.
How has this affected operations on the ISS?
Oh, their departure left only three people on the station,
two Russian cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut
who derived on a Soyuz capsule in November.
That significantly reduced from the typical crew of seven,
which means fewer experiments and less maintenance
can be performed.
The next crew rotation, crew 12,
is scheduled to launch no earlier than February 15th.
Despite the challenging circumstances,
this really demonstrates the professionalism
and preparedness of our space programs.
Exactly.
As Cardman emphasized, astronauts are the eyes
and ears for researchers on the ground.
And this experience will undoubtedly inform
how we prepare for longer duration missions
further from Earth.
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All right, shall we move on to a much happier space story?
Absolutely.
This past Tuesday, January 20th marked
the 96th birthday of Buzz Aldrin,
the second man to walk on the moon,
and now the oldest living astronaut.
What an incredible milestone.
Buzz Aldrin born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr.
on January 20th, 1930, in Glenrich, New Jersey,
made history alongside Neil Armstrong
during the Apollo 11 landing in 1969.
He was 39 years old when he stepped onto the lunar surface.
I love the story behind his nickname.
Did you know that his sister couldn't pronounce brother
properly and called him buzzer,
which got shortened to Buzz?
I did, and he liked it so much,
he legally changed his first name to Buzz in 1988.
Now it's worth noting that this past year
hasn't been easy for Aldrin.
He lost his wife, Anka Fauer, last fall,
after a battle with cancer.
They'd been married on his 93rd birthday in 2023.
That's heartbreaking, but it sounds like he's surrounded
by family now.
Yes, his family posted an update in late December
showing he's spending time with his children
and grandchildren in Los Angeles,
and they're planning to move him closer
to family in Southern California.
Despite his age and recent loss,
he remains a cheerleader for NASA and space exploration.
Speaking of which, the timing of his birthday
is pretty special with the Artemis II mission coming up.
Absolutely.
The Artemis astronauts wished him a happy birthday
this past weekend from Kennedy Space Center
as their Orion spacecraft atop the space launch system
rocket rolled out to launch pad 39B.
It's the same pad that launched many Apollo missions.
The Artemis II crew, NASA astronauts Reed Wiseman,
Victor Glover, Christina Koch,
and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hanson
could launch as early as February 6th.
They'll be the first humans to return
to the vicinity of the moon since 1972.
And they'll make history too.
Victor Glover will be the first black astronaut,
Christina Koch, the first woman,
and Jeremy Hanson, the first non-American
to travel that far from Earth.
What really struck me was how the Artemis astronauts
talked about their connections to the Apollo program.
Me too.
Reed Wiseman shared this great story
about almost missing a call from Apollo 10's
General Tom Stafford on the day he was selected
for Artemis II.
He thought it was a telemarketer,
but Stafford called to congratulate him.
And Wiseman said the Apollo astronauts
are just so excited that were headed back to the moon.
Victor Glover mentioned carrying a bag of wisdom quotes
from Apollo 9's Rusty Schweikert to the space station.
And he's planning to take it to the moon as well.
And Christina Koch talked about Fred Hayes
from Apollo 13 teasing her about breaking their distance record.
She said that moment brought her into the Apollo camaraderie,
and she promised to carry that spirit forward.
Jeremy Hanson's story is my favorite, though.
He saw a picture of buzz or kneel on the moon as a kid,
turned his treehouse into a spaceship,
and here he is now about to go to the moon himself.
It really shows the lasting impact of the Apollo program.
Of the 12 men who walked on the moon,
only four are still alive.
Buzz Aldrin at 96, David Scott at 93,
Charles Duke at 90, and Harrison Schmidt at 90.
Buzz Aldrin truly is a living legend,
and his enthusiasm for the future of space exploration
is inspiring.
Happy 96th birthday buzz.
Dear here, now let's shift gears
and head out to Saturn's moon Enceladus.
Anna, this next story is about one of the most exciting places
in our solar system when it comes to the search for life.
Saturn's moon Enceladus.
Oh, I love Enceladus.
Those gorgeous plumes shooting out from the South Pole
are just mesmerizing.
What's the new development?
A team of Japanese scientists has developed
a new method for analyzing those plumes
that could help us determine whether Enceladus's subsurface
motion is habitable.
They're proposing to use Raymond Spectroscopy
to estimate the pH levels of the water
being ejected from the moon.
Raymond Spectroscopy, can you explain what that is
for our listeners?
Sure, Raymond Spectroscopy is a technique
that uses laser light to identify
the molecular composition of materials.
It's been used on several planetary missions,
including on the Perseverance rover currently on Mars.
The technique can identify different chemical compounds,
and in this case, different pH levels.
And why is pH so important for habitability?
Well, the pH level tells us how acidic or alkaline
the water is, which is crucial for understanding
whether life as we know it could potentially exist there.
Scientists have estimated that Enceladus's plumes
likely have a pH somewhere between A and 12,
which is weakly to strongly alkaline.
So how do they test this method?
The researchers conducted laboratory experiments
using carbonate salty fluid samples at different pH levels.
They placed these samples in a vacuum chamber
to simulate Enceladus's surface conditions,
letting the fluid evaporate and freeze,
leaving only the salt deposits behind.
Then they used ramen spectroscopy instruments
configured to simulate how they'd work
on a future space mission.
And were they successful?
They were.
The ramen spectroscopy successfully
identified the different pH levels
in each of the salt deposit samples.
The researchers concluded that this technique
could identify carbonate minerals on Enceladus's surface
and potentially estimate the pH of the subsurface ocean.
This is particularly clever, because it means
we wouldn't necessarily need to drill through the ice
to sample the ocean directly.
Exactly.
The plumes are constantly depositing material on the surface,
so a lander could analyze these deposits
and learn about the ocean below.
It's a much more accessible approach
than trying to penetrate kilometers of ice.
Remind me, what do we already know about Enceladus
from the Cassini mission?
Well, Cassini discovered the plumes back in the mid-2000s
and even flew through them.
The mission found mostly water ice,
but also salt-rich ice grains, organic molecules,
hydrogen gas, and evidence of heat,
all indicative of active geology
and a warm subsurface ocean.
And the presence of hydrogen gas was particularly exciting
because it could be produced by hydrothermal vents
on the ocean floor, right?
Exactly.
That could provide a source of chemical energy
for potential microbial life,
similar to what we see around hydrothermal vents
in Earth's deep oceans.
Being able to measure the pH more accurately
would be another crucial piece of the habitability puzzle.
This really makes me excited for future missions
to Enceladus.
Hopefully we'll see a dedicated mission there
in the coming decades.
Absolutely.
The technology is there.
We just need the mission.
All right, let's head to Mercury for our next story.
Avery, this next story reveals some surprising connections
between Mercury and Earth.
It turns out these two very different planets
have more in common than we thought
when it comes to their magnetospheres.
That's right, Anna.
An international team of researchers has discovered
that natural electromagnetic waves
called chorus emissions occur in Mercury's magnetosphere
with strikingly similar characteristics
to those found around Earth,
despite Mercury having a magnetic field,
only about 100 as strong.
Chorus waves, that's such an evocative name.
Can you explain what these are?
Sure.
Chorus waves are plasma waves that sound like bird song
when converted to audio frequencies.
They're created when electrons in a planet's magnetosphere
interact with electromagnetic waves,
producing these characteristic rising and falling tones.
And why do we care about these waves?
On Earth, they play a crucial role
in the Van Allen radiation belts.
They can both accelerate particles to create the belts
and also cause particles to rain down into the atmosphere,
depleting them.
Understanding these waves is important
for space weather forecasting
and protecting satellites from radiation.
So how did researchers make this discovery at Mercury?
They used data from the Beppi-Colombo missions
Magneto-Sphiric Orbiter called Mio
during six flybys of Mercury between 2021 and 2025.
They combined this with decades of data
from Earth's Geotale satellite,
which operated from 1992 to 2022.
Why was Geotale particularly useful for comparison?
Great question.
Geotale observed Earth's Magneto tail
from about 10 Earth radii away,
conditions that actually resemble Mercury's
much smaller, more compact, Magneto-Sphir.
This made it an excellent benchmark for comparison.
What exactly did they find?
The team identified rapid, rising
and falling frequency sweeps at Mercury,
indicating the same kind of nonlinear coupling
between electrons and waves that we see at Earth.
They also found that the emissions were concentrated
in the dawn side sector,
just like at Earth where energetic electrons
preferentially stream through the Magneto-Sphir.
What surprised me about this is that Mercury
has almost no atmosphere.
I would have thought that would make a big difference.
That's what scientists expected too.
Earlier theories suggested that Mercury
wouldn't have the cold or low-energy electrons
necessary to generate chorus waves.
But this discovery confirms predictions from 2025
that these electrons do exist around Mercury.
So what does this tell us about how universal
these plasma processes are?
It demonstrates that the mechanisms responsible
for generating chorus emissions
can operate across vastly different planetary environments
from Earth with its strong magnetic field
and thick atmosphere to Mercury with its weak field
and virtually no atmosphere.
It's a universal plasma process.
This has implications for other planets too, doesn't it?
Absolutely.
The researchers mentioned that this opens up
systematic comparative studies of a rural
and radiation processes at multiple planets,
including Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
By understanding how these emissions work
across different planetary systems,
we can build a more complete picture
of plasma physics throughout the solar system.
And Mio is scheduled to enter Mercury orbit in late 2026,
right?
That's correct.
Once an orbit, Mio will be able to make
much more detailed observations of how these emissions vary
with location and how they interact
with electron populations around Mercury.
We should learn a lot more in the coming years.
It's amazing how studying one planet helps us
understand others.
All right, let's wrap up with some solar science.
For our final story today, Anna, we're heading to the sun
to talk about some remarkable new insights
into how solar flares actually work,
courtesy of Esa's solar orbiter spacecraft.
Solar flares are one of those phenomena
that everyone's heard of and are certainly
in the news this week.
But I think many people don't really understand what's happening.
What did solar orbiter discover?
Well, researchers found that solar flares start
with what they're calling a magnetic avalanche.
Just like a snow avalanche starts
with a small amount of snow movement
and then cascades into something much larger,
solar flares begin with initially weak magnetic disturbances
that rapidly become more violent.
That's a great analogy.
How are they able to observe this?
Solar orbiter captured one of its most detailed views
of a large solar flare during its September 30th, 2024,
close approach to the sun.
What made this observation special was the combination
of four different instruments working together,
the extreme ultraviolet imager along with spice, sticks,
and fire.
What kind of detail are we talking about?
The high-resolution imagery from the EUI instrument
zoomed in to features just a few hundred kilometers
across in the sun's corona, capturing changes
every two seconds.
And the team was able to watch the build up to the flare
for about 40 minutes before it erupted.
That's incredibly fortunate timing.
It really was.
Pradeep Chita from the Max Planck Institute
for Solar System Research, who led the study,
said they were very lucky to witness the precursor events
in such beautiful detail.
These kinds of high cadence observations
take up enormous amounts of memory on spacecraft,
so they can't do them all the time.
So what actually happens during this magnetic avalanche?
About 40 minutes before the main flare,
the instruments observed a dark filament of twisted magnetic
fields connected to a cross-shaped structure
of progressively brightening magnetic field lines.
New magnetic field strands appeared every two seconds or less,
each one magnetically contained and becoming twisted like ropes.
And then everything becomes unstable?
Exactly, just like in a typical avalanche,
the region becomes unstable.
The twisted strands begin to break and reconnect
in what's called magnetic reconnection.
This rapidly triggers a cascade of further destabilizations,
creating progressively stronger reconnection events
and outflows of energy,
visible as increasing brightness in the imagery.
This is different from how scientists previously
thought flares work.
Scientists had proposed a simple avalanche model
for explaining the collective behavior
of thousands of flares on the sun and other stars,
but it wasn't clear whether a single large flare
could be described this way.
This result shows that a flare isn't necessarily
one coherent eruption,
but can be a cascade of many interacting reconnection events.
I read something about reigning plasma blobs in this study.
Yes, that's one of the most fascinating parts.
The team observed ribbon-like features moving
extremely quickly down through the sun's atmosphere,
even before the main episode of the flare.
These streams of what they called reigning plasma blobs
are signatures of energy deposition.
They get stronger as the flare progresses
and continue even after the flare subsides.
And they detected some seriously high energy particles, too, right?
They did.
The STIX instrument measured x-ray emission
that rose dramatically during the flare
as reconnection events increased.
Particles were accelerated to speeds of 40 to 50%
of the speed of light.
That's about 430 to 540 kilometers per hour.
Those high energy particles can be dangerous
for satellites and astronauts, can't they?
Absolutely.
They can escape into interplanetary space
and pose radiation hazards to satellites, astronauts,
and even Earth-based technologies.
That's why understanding this process
is essential for forecasting space weather.
What surprised the researchers most about this discovery?
Chita said they didn't expect the avalanche process
could lead to such high energy particles.
They're excited to explore this further,
but he mentioned they'd meet even higher resolution x-ray
imagery from future missions to really untangle
all the details.
What does this mean for our understanding
of flares on other stars?
That's a great question.
Mijo Janvier, Esa Solar Orbiter Co-Project Scientist,
called this one of the most exciting results
from Solar Orbiter so far.
She said an interesting prospect
is whether this avalanche mechanism happens in all flares
and on other flaring stars as well.
It really highlights how much we still
have to learn about our own sun,
even as we explore the far reaches of the solar system.
Absolutely, and that's the beauty of space science.
There's always new mysteries to unravel.
Well, that wraps up another packed episode of Astronomy Daily.
We've covered everything from cutting-edge satellite technology
to historic medical operations in space,
from birthday celebrations to groundbreaking scientific
discoveries.
What a journey through the cosmos,
from blue origins ambitious TerraWave network
to the first medical evacuation in ISS history,
from Buzz Aldrin's 96th birthday to Enceladus's potentially
habitable ocean from Mercury's plasma waves
to the sun's magnetic avalanches.
There's never a dull moment in space exploration.
If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure to subscribe
to Astronomy Daily wherever you get your podcasts.
We bring you the latest space in Astronomy News every single day.
And don't forget to follow us on social media for updates,
bonus content, and to join our community of space enthusiasts.
You can find all our episodes and more at astronomydaily.io.
Thanks for joining us on this cosmic journey.
Keep looking up.
Clear skies, everyone.
This has been Astronomy Daily.
We'll see you tomorrow.
Astronomy Daily.
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Astronomy Daily: Space News Updates

Astronomy Daily: Space News Updates

Astronomy Daily: Space News Updates
