Solar Fireworks, Crew-12 Countdown, and Venus Hides a Secret

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing.

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Four astronauts are sitting in quarantine right now

at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Bags packed, suits ready, waiting for the weather to cooperate.

Basics Crew 12 is almost go.

And the countdown is very much on.

Meanwhile, our son is doing what it does best,

putting on a show.

Plus, a lava tunnel, the size of a city has just been confirmed

under the clouds of Venus.

And the tiny teeth boon of asteroid dust

has just rewritten the story of how life's ingredients

form in space.

Good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world.

And welcome to Astronomy Daily.

I'm Anna.

And I'm Avery.

Let's get into it.

Let's kick things off with our lead story

because the ISS is shorthanded right now.

And NASA wants to fix that as soon as possible.

The SpaceX Crew 12 mission has been pushed back once again,

this time to no earlier than Thursday, February 12th,

at 538 in the morning, Eastern time.

The culprit, weather, along the Crew Dragon's flight path.

Yeah, mission teams did a weather review

and decided to wave off the Wednesday window entirely.

Conditions are expected to improve Thursday,

but Friday the 13th is also being kept as a backup.

So we're in a holding pattern, but a short one, hopefully.

And while we're waiting, let's talk about the crew

because this is a really international team.

Commanding the mission is NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway,

his first space flight command.

Highlight seat goes to the brilliant Jessica Meyer,

who's no stranger to the ISS.

Then you've got Sophie Adonaut, representing the European Space Agency.

This is her first space flight

and Ross Cosmos cosmonaut Andre Fedyev,

completing the quartet.

They'll be riding aboard Crew Dragon Freedom,

which is itself a fascinating spacecraft.

This will be Freedom's fifth flight,

returning after a whopping 501 day turnaround since Crew 9.

And here's something to watch for at launch.

This mission will mark the very first use

of landing zone 40, a brand new landing pad

built right inside the SLC 40 complex itself.

So the booster is going to launch

and then come back and land right next door.

That's wild.

It is wild.

Now, one thing that makes this particular rotation

different from the usual six months is the expected duration.

Because of Crew 11's early medical evacuation back in January,

Crew 12 is expected to stay for eight to nine months,

longer than a typical stay.

The ISS needs the staffing, and this crew is ready.

And it's a big week for launches beyond just Crew 12.

The launch manifest is absolutely stacked right now.

We have ULA's Vulcan rocket going up with USS F-87

a pair of satellite surveillance for the US Space Force.

Then there's the first Ariane 64 launch,

which will carry 32 Amazon Kuiper internet satellites.

That's Starling's main competitor, by the way.

Plus a Russian proton M and surprise, surprise,

multiple Starling missions.

It is genuinely one of the busiest launch weeks

we've seen in a while.

So if you're a launch watcher, clear your Thursday calendar.

Live streams will be available online for most,

if not all of these launches.

OK, story two, and we keep an eye on our star

because right now, as we reported a few days ago,

it is being very talkative.

Sunspot Region AR-4366 has been one of the most active regions

of Solar Cycle 25.

And overnight, it fired off four M-class flares.

The biggest was an M2.8.

That's a moderate flare for context at around 214 UTC this morning,

which triggered a minor R1 class radio blackout

over the seas between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

Just to give people a quick refresher on the scale here,

solar flares are classified by their peak X-ray intensity.

C-class are minor, M-class are moderates,

and can cause brief radio blackouts at high latitudes,

and X-class are the big ones, the kind that can knock out

power grids and satellite communications.

So four M-class flares in a day

is definitely worth paying attention to.

AR-4366 has actually been the source of some spectacular

X-class activity over the past couple of weeks, too.

It's been a busy region.

Now it's rotating out of the Earth facing part of the Sun,

so today the forecast is quiet to unsettled

as the corona whole stream influence gradually weakens.

But forecasters will be watching it closely.

If we get any significant CMEs thrown our way,

that could mean Aurora's pushing further

from the poles than usual,

which is always exciting news for Skywatchers.

Where's still in an active phase of solar cycle 25,

which is tracking hotter than predicted?

So don't put the Aurora alert apps away just yet.

We'll keep monitoring.

We certainly will.

This is exciting stuff.

Okay, moving on, story three takes us

to one of the most exciting ongoing areas of science.

The Bennu samples from NASA's Osiris Rex mission.

We've talked about Bennu a lot,

and each new study seems to shift our thinking a little more.

This week's paper published in the proceedings

of the National Academy of Sciences

might be the biggest shift yet.

So what's the finding?

For decades, scientists thought amino acids and asteroids

formed through what's called strecher synthesis,

a process that requires warm liquid water.

The classic picture was something like

a wet, warm asteroid interior, chemistry bubbling along.

But the Penn State team, led by Allison Bazinski,

looked at the isotopic signatures of amino acids

in the Bennu samples, specifically glycine,

which is a simplest amino acid,

and found that the story is much more complicated.

The data suggests these amino acids

formed under harsh, cold, icy radiation rich environments.

The kind of environment we dissociate more

with the outer solar system than a warm, watery asteroid.

Bazinski described it as their results flipping the script

on how amino acids form.

It's not just one pathway anymore.

It looks like there are many conditions

under which life's building blocks can emerge.

And why does that matter?

Because if amino acids can form an extreme icy environments,

not just warm, watery ones,

the range of places in the cosmos

where life's precursors might exist

just got dramatically wider.

We're talking about icy moons, comet nuclei,

the outer reaches of the solar system.

Places we might not have been prioritizing

in the search for life's ingredients.

What's remarkable is that all of this came

from a sample smaller than a teaspoon.

That spec of 4.6 billion year old asteroid dust

is genuinely changing our understanding

of how life may have gotten started.

The Osiris Rex mission just keeps on giving.

Dory for today, and I genuinely love this one.

We found lava tubes on the moon, we found them on Mars,

and now for the first time,

scientists have confirmed one on Venus.

A team from the University of Trento in Italy

has published a paper in Nature Communications this week

revealing the existence of a massive underground lava tunnel

on our closest planetary neighbor.

And the really clever part of the story is how they found it.

Venus is famously difficult to observe.

It's permanently wrapped in thick sulfuric acid clouds

that block direct photography of the surface.

So the team went back to radar data

collected by NASA's Magellan spacecraft

between 1990 and 1992.

Beta that's over 30 years old.

They developed a new imaging technique

specifically designed to detect underground conduits

near surface collapse features called skylights.

And when they applied it to the Nick's Mons region,

named for the Greek goddess of the night, they found it.

Now, let's talk size for a moment

because this thing is enormous.

The lava tube is estimated to be around 1 kilometer wide.

That's wider than any lava tube found on Earth,

the moon, or Mars.

The roof is at least 150 meters thick.

The empty void below is at least 375 meters deep.

And based on the surrounding terrain analysis,

the whole conduit could extend for at least 45 kilometers

underground.

45 kilometers.

That's a subterranean highway.

And there's an interesting reason it's so big.

Venus has lower gravity than Earth and a denser atmosphere,

which actually favors the rapid formation

of a thick insulating crust on top of lava flows.

So the tubes can grow larger and last longer on Venus than elsewhere.

The planet with the worst surface conditions in the solar system

might have some remarkably stable real estate underground.

This also has really important implications

for future Venus missions.

Esa's envision spacecraft and NASA's Veritas

are both being developed for Venus.

And both will carry advanced radar systems capable

of doing this kind of subsurface analysis in far greater detail.

The team describes this discovery as only the beginning

of what could be a long and fascinating research program

into Venus' hidden geology.

And our final story today takes a delightfully unexpected angle

on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

A new paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology

by Plant Biologist Lincoln Ties at UC Santa Cruz

argues that if we want to find advanced alien civilizations,

we should be looking for exoplanets

with large, accessible deposits of coal.

Coal, not radio signals, not Dyson spheres, coal.

I genuinely love this.

So what's the argument?

Ties traces the chain of development

that led to us being able to communicate

across interstellar distances.

On Earth, none of our advanced technology,

no steel, no deep fossil fuel extraction, no electricity,

no radio telescopes, would have been possible

without first being able to forge steel

and steel required coal.

Specifically, huge amounts of shallow energy dense coal

like the deposits laid down during the carboniferous

and Permian periods, roughly 330 to 260 million years ago.

The paper argues that the same logic should apply

to any technological civilization anywhere in the universe.

Intelligence isn't enough.

Biology isn't enough.

You need the geology to match a planet

that happened to grow the right kinds of forests

at the right time in its history

under the right conditions to bury them

and compress them into energy dense coal seams

that a curious civilization could then dig up

and use to bootstrap an industrial revolution.

And the implications for SETI are fascinating.

The paper suggests planets in the so-called

photosynthetic habitable zone

where both liquid water and oxygen-producing photosynthesis

are possible might be relatively rare.

Even rarer are the planets where all the conditions align.

The right star, the right orbit, the right biology,

the right geology, and the right timing.

Coal doesn't just appear.

It requires a very specific sequence of events

across hundreds of millions of years.

There is also a potential detection angle.

An alien industrial revolution would produce

atmospheric signatures, elevated carbon dioxide,

sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides.

So these are theoretically detectable

with sufficiently powerful telescopes.

The catch, as the paper acknowledges,

is that the coal-burning phase of any civilization

would be relatively brief.

We certainly hope it is.

So the detection window would be narrow,

but it adds a whole new layer to what we're looking for

when we study exoplanet atmospheres.

It's also a slightly humbling thought.

The reason we can have this conversation,

the reason we built the telescopes and the rockets

and the radio transmitters might ultimately come down

to a lucky geological accident 300 million years ago.

We happen to live on a planet with a lot of coal

in the right places at the right time.

Not every world will be so fortunate.

And that is your astronomy daily for Tuesday,

the 10th of February, 2026.

From solar fireworks and a countdown to launch

to lava tunnels on Venus, rewritten science from Bennu

and a genuinely thought-provoking new take

on the search for extraterrestrial life.

It's been quite the episode.

If you enjoyed today's show,

please take a moment to leave us a review wherever you listen.

It genuinely helps more people find us.

And if you want to go deeper on any of today's stories,

we have links to all the source articles waiting

for you in the show notes at astronomydaily.io.

Find us on social media at AstroDailyPod.

And if you've got a question, a story tip,

or just want to tell us what you think,

we'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again tomorrow.

I'm Anna.

And I'm Avery.

Keep looking up.

The star is the toe.

The star is the toe.

The star is the toe.

The star is the toe.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing,

another checkered flag for the books.

Time to celebrate with Jamba.

Jump in at JambaCasino.com.

Let's Jamba.

No purchase necessary.

BGW Group, voidware prohibited by law.

CCNC, 21 plus sponsored by JambaCasino.