Countdown to the Moon: Artemis II Launch Week Begins | Plus Comet Reversal & ISS Medical Mystery Update

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Four astronauts, one rocket, four days until launch.

History is about to be made.

And if you think that's the only jaw dropping story in space today,

wait until you hear about a comment that literally stops spinning

and started going the other way.

I'm Anna.

I'm Avery.

And this is Astronomy Daily, your daily guide to everything happening in space and beyond.

Welcome to season five, episode 75.

Let's get started then.

Alright, let's start with what is, without a doubt, the biggest human spaceflight story

in more than 50 years.

The crew of NASA's Artemis II mission has arrived at Kennedy Space Center in Florida,

and the countdown is well and truly on.

That's right.

Yesterday, Friday the 27th, NASA astronauts Reed Weissmann, Victor Glover, and Christina

Coach, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hanson, touched down at Kennedy's

Shuttle Landing Facility in their T-38 jets arriving from Johnson Space Center in Houston.

They were greeted by NASA administrator Jared Isaacman and a crowd of reporters at was,

by all accounts, the largest anyone had seen for an astronaut arrival in a very long time.

And the energy was electric Avery.

Commander Reed Weissmann stepped out onto the runway, pumped his fists, and said,

and I'm quoting here, hey, let's go to the moon.

That says it all, really.

It really does.

So the plan launches schedules for no earlier than 6.24 in the evening, eastern time, on Wednesday,

April 1st.

I know, April Fool's Day, but this is no joke.

The window stays open until April 6th, giving the team a six-day buffer.

But mission managers are pushing hard for that first opportunity.

And the mission itself, Artemis II will send all four crew members on a ten-day journey

around the moon and back to Earth aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft,

launched on top of the space launch system, the most powerful operational rocket in the world.

They won't land on the moon, that's Artemis III's job,

but they will fly farther from Earth than any human has ever been.

The Apollo 13 record set back in 1970 will be broken.

The crew are now in quarantine at Kennedy,

spending their final days reviewing mission procedures,

completing medical checkups, and spending precious time with family.

The countdown clock is set to begin ticking at 4.44 pm on Monday,

and from that point, it's all systems go.

For anyone who watched the Apollo missions as a child,

or who has simply dreamed of humanity returning to the moon,

this is the week we've been waiting for.

We will absolutely be following this one closely over the coming days on astronomy daily.

And for our listeners down under in Australia and across New Zealand,

April the 2nd is your morning to set those alarms.

Now, from the moon to a tiny snowball tumbling through our inner solar system,

and when I say tiny, I mean it.

Comet 41p, formerly known as Tuddle Jekobini Krizak,

measures just one kilometer across about three times the height of the Eiffel Tower.

And yet, this little cosmic wanderer has just done something that scientists have never

in all of recorded astronomical history observed before.

It reversed its spin.

That's right.

A new study published this week in the Astronomical Journal,

based on observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope,

reveals that Comet 41p first dramatically slowed its spin,

nearly came to a complete stop and then started going the other way.

Researchers describe it as a kind of merry-go-round effect.

The Comet's own outgassing jets, dreams of gas blasted off its surface

as it heats up near the sun, were pushing against its spin so hard that they eventually flipped it.

To give you a timeline, back in March 2017,

the Comet was spinning at a regular pace.

By May 2017, Swift Observatory data showed it had slowed to three times that rate.

And then, when Hubble took a look in December 2017,

the Comet was spinning fast again, but in the opposite direction,

the whole reversal had happened within months.

Now, here's the twist, and it's a sobering one.

Study author David Jewett of UCLA says that because the Comet is now spinning so rapidly in its new direction,

centrifugal forces could overcome the Comet's own weak gravity.

And his conclusion, quote,

I expect this nucleus will very quickly self-destruct.

We may be witnessing the final chapter of Comet 41P's long life.

Which makes these observations all the more remarkable.

The Comet is thought to have been in its current orbit for around 1500 years.

And in one close pass of the sun,

we got to watch it undergo a transformation that would normally take centuries

in just a matter of months.

Hubble really never stops delivering the goods.

Story 3 takes us to one of the deepest mysteries in modern cosmology,

and potentially one of the most significant detections in the history of gravitational wave astronomy.

Back in November last year,

LIGO, the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory,

picked up a signal that stopped researchers cold.

The gravitational wave appeared to come from a merger event,

involving at least one object that weighed less than a single solar mass.

And here's why that matters.

Through all known processes of stellar evolution,

that simply shouldn't be possible.

Regular black holes form from dying stars,

and the minimum mass for that is a few times our sun.

So what was it?

Well, this week astrophysicist Nico Capeluti,

an Alberto Magaragia from the University of Miami,

published the compelling answer in the astrophysical journal.

Their conclusion, it may be a primordial black hole,

an object formed not from a collapsing star,

but from the unimaginable density of the universe itself,

in the first fraction of a second after the big bang.

Primordial black holes are one of the most tantalizing concepts in theoretical physics.

They could range from microscopic to enormous,

and crucially, they are one of the most compelling candidates for dark matter,

the invisible substance that makes up roughly 85% of all matter in the universe.

We can see dark matter's gravitational effects everywhere we look,

but we have never directly detected it.

A confirmed primordial black hole detection would transform our understanding

of the cosmos overnight.

The Miami team modeled how many primordial black holes should exist,

how often they should merge, and how frequently LIGO should detect them,

and remarkably, the numbers lined up.

One rare detection event exactly as our theory predicts.

It's not confirmation, one signal is suggestive, not conclusive,

but it is a genuinely thrilling lead to follow.

As Capeluti himself put it,

the most plausible explanation for the LIGO signal,

which lacks any conventional astrophysical explanation,

is the detection of a primordial black hole.

Next generation detectors, including the space-based Lisa mission

planned for the 2030s,

and the ground-based cosmic explorer 10 times more sensitive than LIGO,

will hopefully shed more light on this.

For now, we may have just received our first signal from the dawn of time itself.

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Here's the story that bridges ancient human history and cutting edge astronomy.

In the year 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded a strange new star appearing in the sky,

one that would remain visible for up to eight months.

They called it a guest star.

What they had actually witnessed was one of the earliest supernova explosions

ever recorded by humanity.

Fast forward 1800 years, and that same ancient explosion,

now known as supernova remnant RCW 86, or SN185,

has just been given its most detailed examination yet.

NASA's IXPE mission, the Imaging X-Ray Polar Imetry Explorer,

has delivered a breathtaking new image of the remnant's outer edge,

combining its unique X-Ray Polar Imetry data

with observations from NASA's Chandra Observatory

and the European Space Agency's XMM Newton Telescope.

So what did they find?

IXPE targeted the outer rim of the remnant,

highlighted in a vivid purple ring in the new image,

and discovered something fascinating.

The expanding shell of superheated gas,

which had been blasting outward at tremendous speed for 2000 years,

appears to have stopped at the edge of a large low-density cavity

that surrounded the original star.

In other words, the explosion ran into a wall,

and the new data helps explain why the remnant expanded so much faster

than astronomers initially expected.

IXPE achieved this by studying the polarization of X-rays,

essentially how those high energy light waves are oriented

as they travel through space.

It's a technique that opens a completely new window

on the behavior of exploding stars, black holes, and pulsars.

The resulting composite image with yellow for low-energy X-rays,

blue for high-energy, and the purple IXPE data overlaid

is genuinely one of the most beautiful things

you'll see in Space Science this week.

We'll have a link in the show notes.

There's something deeply moving about this story,

a star that humans watched die with the naked eye two millennia ago,

recorded by diligent observers in ancient China,

is still revealing its secrets today.

Science is a very long conversation.

Dory 5 brings us a story that's both deeply human

and profoundly relevant to the future of space exploration,

and it connects directly to our lead story today about Artemis 2.

Earlier this year, you may recall, NASA made headlines

when it announced that the crew 11 mission aboard the International Space Station

was being cut short due to a medical concern.

The agency initially declined to name the astronaut involved,

but in late February, veteran astronaut Mike Think,

a four-time space flyer and retired U.S. Air Force colonel,

came forward at his own request to confirm that he was the person affected.

And this week, for the first time,

Think spoke in detail about what actually happened.

In an exclusive interview with the Associated Press,

conducted from Houston's Johnson Space Center,

the account is extraordinary.

Think says he was eating dinner on January 7,

the evening before a planned spacewalk when it suddenly hit.

He lost the ability to speak.

He felt no pain.

The episode lasted around 20 minutes.

His crewmates, seeing him in distress,

immediately contacted flight surgeons on the ground.

It was completely out of the blue, he told the AP.

It was just amazingly quick.

NASA used the station's ultrasound machine during the event,

which Think credits as genuinely useful

at his condition quickly stabilized,

but NASA's medical team determined

that the safest course of action was an early return to Earth

so that Think could access advanced medical imaging

not available on the ISS.

NASA cancelled the following day's spacewalk,

and on January 15, Think and his three crewmates,

Zena Cardman, Kimia Uey, and Oleg Plotnov,

splashed down in the Pacific Ocean

about a month ahead of schedule.

Here's the part that is both remarkable and sobering.

As of this week, doctors still do not know what caused it.

A heart attack has been ruled out,

but the precise nature of the event,

whether neurological, cardiovascular,

or something else in pyrely, remains undiagnosed.

NASA is now reviewing astronaut medical records

to determine whether anything similar has occurred

in space before, potentially without being recognized.

And here's why this matters so much right now,

with Artemis II five days from launch.

On the ISS, if something goes wrong medically,

astronauts could be home within hours.

On a 10-day lunar mission,

and certainly on any future mission to Mars,

that option doesn't exist.

The Think Incident has become a landmark moment for space medicine,

prompting urgent conversations about

what medical capabilities need to exist

on deep space vehicles.

Think himself framed it with characteristic composure.

Baseflight is an incredible privilege,

and sometimes it reminds us just how human we are.

And Mike Fank says he feels fine now,

and is continuing routine post-flight conditioning

at Johnson Space Center.

We wish him a full and swift recovery,

and we salute the crew and the medical teams

who got everyone home safely.

And finally, eyes on the sun,

because our nearest star has been putting on a show

this week.

That's right, a new Sunspot region,

designated AR-4403,

rotated into view on the eastern solar limb

on March 26th, and it wasted no time

making its presence felt.

Within hours of coming into view,

AR-4403 unleashed the powerful M3.9 solar flare

at 611 UTC, triggering in R1,

that's a minor radio blackout over the Indian Ocean.

Now the good news, as of today, Saturday the 28th,

the Sun is relatively quiet.

AR-4403 has calmed after its initial outburst,

and space weather forecasters are expecting

mostly quiet conditions through today.

But there's a catch,

and it's worth noting for our listeners

who love Aurora watching.

From Sunday the 29th, a co-rotating interaction region,

a dense zone of compressed solar wind,

along with a high-speed stream from a coronal hole

are expected to arrive at Earth,

and a faint coronal mass ejection

from the recent activity could also

graze our planet's magnetic field around that time.

Face weather forecasters are predicting

unsettled geomagnetic conditions,

which could, in favorable circumstances,

push Aurora's to slightly lower latitudes than usual.

So for our listeners in Southern Australia,

Tasmania, and New Zealand,

particularly those of you with dark skies

away from city lights,

Sunday and Monday nights are worth watching.

Check your local Aurora Alert apps,

keep an eye to the south,

and fingers crossed for clear skies.

And if you capture anything spectacular,

we'd love to see it.

Hagguss at Astro Daily Pod.

We'll be keeping an eye on developments,

and may have an update in Monday's episode

of Conditions Escalate.

And that is a wrap on an absolutely packed edition

of Astronomy Daily.

To recap what we covered today,

the Artemis II crew has landed

at Kennedy Space Center,

with April 1st launch in their sites.

Hubble has documented the first ever

spin reversal of a comet,

and that comet may be on borrowed time.

LIGO may have detected a black hole

born at the dawn of the universe itself.

NASA's IXP telescope

gave us the finest portrait yet

of a supernova first seen by human eyes

in 185 AD.

astronaut Mike Finke spoke for the first time

about his still mysterious

medical emergency in orbit.

And the sun is stirring

with possible Aurora opportunities

on the way for southern hemisphere sky watchers.

What an extraordinary time to be alive and looking up!

If you're enjoying Astronomy Daily,

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who loves the cosmos as much as we do.

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at Astro Daily Pod.

Until Monday, keep looking up!

Clear skies, everyone!

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