March 21, 2026
Moon Rocket, Lost Spacecraft, and a Comet That Fell Apart on Camera
Today on Astronomy Daily: NASA's Artemis II moon rocket has arrived at Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center, with a launch target of April 1st — the first crewed mission beyond Earth orbit in over 53 years. Plus: astronomers have discovered the first-ever mass-transferring brown dwarf binary; Hubble accidentally caught a comet disintegrating in real time; 15 new moons have been confirmed around Jupiter and Saturn; our Moon is accumulating over 100 metric tons of human-made debris; and a dramatic spacecraft double-header — ESA's Proba-3 has been recovered from a month-long blackout, while NASA's MAVEN Mars orbiter remains missing after more than three months of silence. Story 1: Artemis II Arrives at Launch Pad 39B NASA's Artemis II SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft completed an 11-hour overnight journey to Launch Pad 39B on March 20, 2026. Launch is targeted for no earlier than April 1. The crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — will fly a 10-day free-return trajectory around the Moon, making this the first crewed deep-space mission since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Source: https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/03/20/nasas-artemis-ii-rocket-arrives-at-launch-pad-39b/ Story 2: First Mass-Transferring Brown Dwarf Binary Researchers at Caltech have identified ZTF J1239+8347, a brown dwarf binary system with an orbital period of just 57.41 minutes in which one brown dwarf is actively pulling material from its companion — a first for this class of objects. The system, only ~1,000 light-years away, is a prime candidate for JWST follow-up observations. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Source: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/this-pair-of-brown-dwarfs-cant-get-enough-of-each-other Story 3: Hubble Catches Comet C/2025 K1 Breaking Apart In a remarkable stroke of luck, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) fragmenting into at least four pieces over three consecutive days in November 2025. The comet was not the original target of the observation. The findings, published in Icarus, reveal the comet is unusually carbon-depleted and raise new questions about the delay between fragmentation and visible brightening. Source: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-unexpectedly-catches-comet-breaking-up/ Story 4: 15 New Moons Confirmed for Jupiter and Saturn The Minor Planet Center announced on March 16, 2026 that four new moons have been confirmed around Jupiter (bringing its total to 101) and 11 new moons around Saturn (bringing its total to 285). All are small irregular moons, discovered by combining archival telescope data with new observations. With the Vera C. Rubin Observatory now operational, further discoveries are expected. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/more-moons-for-jupiter-and-saturn-total-satellite-discoveries/ Story 5: Human Debris on the Moon — Over 100 Metric Tons and Counting More than 100 metric tons of human-made objects now litter the lunar surface — spacecraft hardware, scientific instruments, and even waste from Apollo missions. With a wave of crewed and commercial lunar missions approaching under Artemis and beyond, space policy researchers are urging the development of international agreements to protect scientifically sensitive lunar sites before they are damaged or contaminated by human activity. Source: https://www.universetoday.com — lunar debris policy Story 6: MAVEN Still Missing / Proba-3 Recovered NASA's MAVEN Mars orbiter, lost since December 6, 2025, remains uncontacted despite three months of recovery efforts using the Deep Space Network, Green Bank Observatory, and the Curiosity rover. An anomaly review board is assessing options. Meanwhile, ESA's Proba-3 coronagraph spacecraft — silent since February 14 after a power failure — has been successfully recovered after engineers exploited a brief window when the tumbling spacecraft's solar panels briefly faced the Sun. MAVEN source: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/nasa-wont-give-up-hope-on-silent-maven-mars-probe-were-still-looking-for-it Proba-3 source: https://dailygalaxy.com/2026/03/europe-restores-contact-lost-spacecraft/
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WEBVTT
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Hey, they're stargazers, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily
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dose of what's happening out there in the cosmos.
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I'm Anna, and I'm Avery. Today is Saturday, March twenty first,
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twenty twenty six, and honestly, Anna, we've got another busy show.
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Today, We really do. A moon rocket has arrived at
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the launch pad for the first time in over fifty years,
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carrying astronauts. We've got a pair of weird, dying stars
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behaving in ways nobody's ever seen before. And a comment
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that basically fell apart while Hubble happened to be watching accidentally.
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Plus fifteen brand new moons in our Solar system, a
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growing garbage problem on our own moon, and the genuinely
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dramatic spacecraft story one lost, one found.
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It's a big one. Let's get into it.
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We're going to start with NASA's Artemis two, and this
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one feels different. After months of delays, repairs, and anxious waiting,
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the rocket is finally on the pad.
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At eleven twenty one am Eastern Time on Friday, March twentieth,
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NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Oryan spacecraft arrived at
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launch pad thirty nine b at Kennedy's Space Center in Florida,
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after an eleven hour overnight journey from the vehicle assembly
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building hauled by the Giant Crawler transporter at less than
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one mile per hour.
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A three hundred and twenty two foot tall moon rocket
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creeping through the night at jogging pace. And honestly, that's
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exactly how it should be.
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It really is, And the current target launch date is
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no earlier than Wednesday, April first, which means we could
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be watching the first humans leave Earth's orbit in over
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fifty years in less than two weeks.
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So who's on board the Artemis two crew is Commander
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Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Coach,
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all from NASA, along with Canadian Space Agency mission specialists
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Jeremy Hansen.
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And this mission is full of historic firsts. Victor Glover
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will become the first person of color to travel be
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yond Earth orbit, Christina Coach will be the first woman
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to do so, and Jeremy Hansen will be the first
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non American citizen to leave Earth orbit.
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They'll fly a free return trajectory around the Moon and
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back to Earth in approximately ten days, no landing. This
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is a test flight, but it's a crucial one now.
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The road to the pad was not smooth. Earlier this year,
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a helium flow problem in the rocket's upper stage forced
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the team to roll the whole stack back to the
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vehicle assembly building. That pushed the launch from February, then March,
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and now April.
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But the team fixed when needed fixing, including replacing batteries
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on the flight termination system, and now PAD teams are
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moving into final countdown preparations.
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The last time humans flew beyond Earth orbit was Apollo
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seventeen in December nineteen seventy two. That was over fifty
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three years ago. April first cannot come come soon enough.
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We will absolutely be following this one. Let's move on,
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all right.
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Story two is pure stellar science, and it's one of
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those discoveries that makes you realize how much of the
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universe we still haven't seen yet.
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Astronomers have found something that until now nobody was sure
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could even exist. A pair of brown dwarf stars orbiting
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each other so closely that one is actively pulling material
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from the other.
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Let's back up slightly, so, what is a brown dwarf?
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So Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars, They're bigger
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than giant planets, but not massive enough to ignite and
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sustain hydrogen fusion the way our Sun does. They sort
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of sit in a strange no man's land between planet
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and star.
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And we know many of them exist in binary pairs,
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but this system, designated ztf J one two three nine
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plus eight three four seven, is something else entirely. These
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two brown dwarfs are in an incredibly tight orbit, completing
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a full loop around each other in fifty seven minutes.
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Fifty seven minutes, for context, our moon takes about twenty
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seven days to orbit Earth. These two are practically on
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top of each other.
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And because they're so close, the gravity of one is
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pulling material from the surface of the other, a process
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called mass transfer. This kind of behavior has been seen
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before in binary white dwarfs, the dense remnants of dead stars,
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but never in brown dwarfs. This is a first.
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The research team, led by Caltech graduate student Samuel Whitebook,
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actually had colleagues who didn't believe the finding at first.
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One co author said, and I love this. We've told
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some of our colleagues about them, and they didn't believe
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such a thing exists.
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Which is the best kind of science discovery. The system
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is only about a thousand light years away, which is
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close enough that follow up observations with the James Webbs
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telescope are being planned.
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And what's the eventual fate of these two Either they
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merge into a single brighter star or the one that's
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gaining mass eventually becomes massive and enough to trigger nuclear
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fusion and become a proper star. Either way, a fascinating, ending.
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Incredible stuff story. Three on a and this one involves
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Hubble being very, very lucky.
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So this story starts with a mishap and ends up
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as one of the most extraordinary observational luck stories in
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recent astronomy.
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Tell us all about it.
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Okay, So, researchers at Auburn University had won telescope time
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on the Hubble Space Telescope to study a specific comment,
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but then new technical constraints meant their original target wasn't viewable,
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so they quickly found a replacement, a different comment designated
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C slash twenty twenty five K one slash at lisk
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or just comment K one for short.
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Routine. Enough, so far.
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Routine until one of the team, co investigator John Nonan,
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sat down to look at the data the next morning,
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and he found not one comment in the images. He
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found four because Comment K one was falling apart right
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in front of Hubble's cameras.
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The commet had fragmented into at least four distinct pieces,
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each with its own coma that fuzzy envelope of gas
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and dust around the commentary nucleus, and Hubble's sharp eyes
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could clearly resolve each fragment separately, something ground based telescopes
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could barely make out as blurry blobs.
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The timing was extraordinary. The comet had passed closest to
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the Sun its perihelion just about a month before. That's
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the most intense heat and gravitational stress a comet experiences,
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and for long period comets like Cone, it's when they're
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most vulnerable to breaking up, and.
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Hubble just happened to be watching. The team was able
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to trace the history of each fragment back in time,
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essentially reconstructing exactly how and when the breakup happened. This
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is the first time Hubble has captured a comment this
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early in the fragmentation process.
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There's also an intriguing mystery buried in the data. There
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was a delay between when the comet broke up and
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when bright foutbursts were seen from the ground. Normally, when
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a comet fragments and exposes fresh ice to sunlight, you'd
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expect it to brighten almost immediately, but this one didn't. Why.
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Nobody knows yet, and.
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The initial analysis shows that comet K one is unusually
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depleted in carbon, which gives us new clues about the
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primorial chemistry of our early Solar system, all from a
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comet that wasn't even the intended target.
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Best accidents in science, honestly, onwards. Story four is a
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numbers came So.
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How many moons to Saturn have.
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As of this week two hundred and eighty five.
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Two hundred and eighty five and Jupiter.
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One hundred and one. The Minor Planet Center of the
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International Astronomical Union announced on March sixteenth that four new
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moons have been confirmed around Jupiter and eleven new moons
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around Saturn.
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Fifteen new moons just like that. I love this recurring story.
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It feels like somebody keeps going around the back of
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these planets and finding more hiding.
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There, sort of exactly what's happening. Actually, the Saturn moons
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were found by a team led by Edward Ashton from
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the University of British Columbia who combed through data from
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the Canada, France Hawaii telescope going back to twenty nineteen,
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and the Jupiter moons were spotted by a team led
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by Scott Shephard at the Carnegie Institution.
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All of these newly confirmed moons are tiny, barely a
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couple of miles across, with magnitudes around twenty five to
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twenty seven, meaning they're far too faint to see without
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some of the world's most powerful telescopes.
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Far what astronomers call irregular moons, captured objects orbiting far
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from the planet, often going the wrong way in retrograde.
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Most of the new Saturnian moons are doing just that,
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moving in the opposite direction to the planet's rotation, which
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is a strong sign they were probably captured from somewhere else,
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either asteroids snagged by Saturn's gravity or fragments from a
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collision that broke up a larger moon in the distant past.
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And this count is only going to keep climbing. The
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Veric Reuben Observatory went fully online last year, and it's
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going to be detecting these tiny, faint moons at a
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rate we haven't seen before.
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Poor Jupiter, though, still two hundred moons behind Saturn. It's
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like Jupiter just can't catch up.
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Jupiter just needs a try harder. Okay, story five, and
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this one's a little closer to home.
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So here's a question. What's on the Moon right now?
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Other than dust and rock, I mean.
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The flags, some rovers, U golf ball, I.
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Think more than one hundred metric tons of human made material,
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spacecraft parts, scientific instruments, cameras, landers, crash sites, and yes,
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actually bags of human waste left behind by Apollo astronauts.
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We left star rubbish on the Moon.
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We absolutely did. And that's just what's there now. We're
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on the verge of a completely new era of lunar activity,
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crude missions, commercial landers, scientific rovers, resource prospectors, and nobody
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has a comprehensive framework for what happens to all the
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stuff we're about to bring up there.
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There's no Lunar Environment Protection Agency, there's no international treaty
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specifically addressing lunar surface contamination. The Outer Space Treaty of
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nineteen sixty seven says countries are responsible for their national
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activities in space, but it doesn't get into the specifics
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of say a crash lander leaking propellant near a scientifically
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important site.
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And there are real concerns beyond aesthetics. Some of the
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most scientifically valuable areas of the Moon, like the permanently
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shadowed craters near the Poles, which may hold ancient ice deposits,
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could be contaminated by human activity before we've even finished
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studying them in their pristine style.
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Space policy researchers and planetary scientists are increasingly pushing for
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binding international agreements about lunar preservation zones, impacts, site protections,
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and responsible disposal of mission hardware.
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It's a conversation the space community needs to have urgently,
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because the missions are coming, whether the policy frameworks are
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ready or not. The Moon has been waiting four and
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a half billion years. The least we can do is
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think carefully before we trash it.
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All Right, We're ending today's show with a story that
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has two very different outcomes, one spacecraft recently lost and
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one spacecraft recently found.
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Let's start with the one that was found. ESA's Proba
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three mission, which we mentioned yesterday, has now been officially
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confirmed as recovered, and the details of how it happened
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are genuinely dramatic.
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So PROBA three is a fascinating mission. It uses two
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separate spacecraft flying in precise formation at an altitude of
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over sixty thousand kilometers to create an artificial solar eclipse.
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One satellite carries a disc that blocks the Sun, and
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the other carries a cornograph to study the faint outer
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atmosphere of the Sun, which is normally washed out by
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the Sun's blinding light.
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On February fourteenth, the Corona spacecraft, one of the two,
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suffered a chain of failures that caused it to lose
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its orientation. Its solar panels turned away from the Sun,
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its batteries drained, and it entered survival mode, tumbling silently
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through space for nearly a month.
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Engineers tracked it and waited for an opportunity. That opportunity
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came when the tumbling spacecraft briefly turned its solar panels
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toward the Sun just enough to generate a small amount
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of power. Teams in Spain acted immediately and contact was
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re established.
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LISA Director General Joseph Ashbacker said they saw that some
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sunlight was actually hitting the solar panels, and that was
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their moment. The spacecraft has now regained stable orientation and
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is charging its batteries. Engineers are carefully running checks before
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resuming science operations.
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Relief all around now. Contrast that with the story of
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NASA's Maven spacecraft, currently orbiting Mars, or at least it
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should be.
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NASA lost contact with Maven on December sixth last year,
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after the spacecraft was expected to emerge from behind Mars
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