Three of a Kind

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Anna: Picture an asteroid. You're probably

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imagining a potato, one lump of

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rock tumbling through the dark. Now

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imagine three lumps joined at the neck

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like a cosmic string of pearls and

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a tiny moon keeping pace alongside.

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Avery: That's a real object out in the main belt.

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And until this week, nobody knew it looked

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like that. We'll take you there first, and

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then

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Anna: we'll chase a wind. One that lights up

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our own sky and the same kind of

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wind that's slowly stripping a planet

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bare.

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Avery: G' day and welcome to Astronomy Daily. It's

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Friday 31st July, 2026.

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I'm Avery.

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Anna: And I'm Anna. Four stories today,

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a skywatch that spans both

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hemispheres and a thread running right

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through the back half of the show. Avery,

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where do we start?

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Avery: Where else? With the three faced asteroid.

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Anna: So, asteroid 44

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NISA. The number tells you it was one of

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the early finds. Discovered back in

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1857. One of the

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brightest asteroids in the whole main

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belt. That broad river of rubble between

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Mars and Jupiter. It's about

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75 kilometers across at its widest.

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So a serious chunk of rock, one of the

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largest of its particular type.

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Its type matters here. NISA is

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what astronomers call an E type. Its

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surface is rich in a pale mineral called

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instatite, which makes it unusually

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bright and reflective. There aren't many

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big E types, so NYSSA has always

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been a bit of a favorite. But its shape

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has been a nagging mystery for years.

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Earlier observations hinted it might be

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what's called a contact binary. Two

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lobes stuck together, a bit like a

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peanut or a snowman. We've seen

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plenty of those. Comet 67P

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that Rosetta visited, the little asteroid

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Dimorphos that the NASA Dart mission crashed

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into last year. Donald Johansen that

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the Lucy spacecraft flew past last year.

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Two lobes is almost normal.

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BISA isn't normal. A team

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led by Kate Minker at, uh, Lowell Observatory

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has just announced in a study with the

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wonderful title Unmasking 44

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Nysa, that Nyssa appears to have

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three lobes. Three joined by

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two narrow necks, like, uh, a figure carved

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with two deep waists around it.

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If it holds up, it's the first tri

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lobed asteroid ever seen.

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Avery: Three lobes? How do you even see that? These

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things are tiny dots, even in big telescopes.

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Anna: That's the clever part. They used two of

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the sharpest eyes on Earth. The Large

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Binocular Telescope in Arizona. Its

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main mirror is about eight meters, roughly

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three times the size of Hubble's, running an

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instrument called sharkvis, plus

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the Very Large Telescope down in Chile.

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And they used adaptive optics, a mirror

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that flexes hundreds of times a second,

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nearly 600 tiny actuators

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pushing on it to cancel out the blurring of

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our atmosphere in real time. The

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result is sharper than Hubble. They imaged

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NISA on two nights, 15

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February and 21 March this year.

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And both times the same strange

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three part silhouette turned up.

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Which brings us to the second surprise.

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NISA has a moon, a little one,

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about a kilometer across, orbiting at

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least 170 kilometers out.

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It's been given the placeholder name

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S202644

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1, and it

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was hiding in plain sight, drowned out by

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the glare of the much brighter asteroid next

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to it. To dig it out, the team borrowed a

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trick from a completely different corner of

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high contrast imaging, the same family

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of techniques we used to pull a faint

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planet out of the glare of its star.

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As one of the sharkvis scientists,

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Gianluca Lee Cauce, put it, they used

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that technique to catch a faint companion

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whose light was being swamped by the primary.

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And because they caught it moving across two

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separate observing runs, they know it's

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genuinely in orbit, not a background star.

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Avery: Photobombing the shot and a, uh, moon is

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useful, right?

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Anna: Not just a bonus, it's enormously

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useful. This is the thing I love about it.

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Watch how fast the moon goes round and how

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far out it sits and you can weigh the

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asteroid. You get nice's mass.

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Combine the mass with the size and you get

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its density. And density is the whole

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ball game here, because there are two

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competing stories for what NYSA actually

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is. Story one, it's a

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genuine three part body, maybe a

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contact trinary. Three chunks that

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drifted together and gently stuck.

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It's one solid, deeply dented lump

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that only looks three lobed from our angle.

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Density can help tell those apart. A loose

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rubble pile reads light and fluffy. A

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solid coherent rock reads dense.

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So that little moon is going to help settle

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what kind of world this is and how it got

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so weird.

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Avery: Any theories on the how?

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Anna: Nothing locked in. And that honesty is

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the fun of it. It could be a record of

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gentle slow motion collisions in the belt,

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bodies bumping and merging over billions of

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years. It could be the aftermath of a

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bigger smash that left a battered

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survivor. Or observations of that

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moon will narrow it down. For now, we've got

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a brand new kind of object, a triple

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lobed asteroid with its own satellite

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sitting in a part of the sky we thought we

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understood. And that's the quiet lesson of

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NISA. It was found in

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1857. It's one of the best

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studied bright asteroids we have. And in

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2026, it still had two secrets

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left. A shape nobody expected and a

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moon nobody had seen. The solar system

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is not done surprising

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Avery: us from a world we can nearly

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touch to one we may never reach,

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but might one day actually see.

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NASA has just backed a genuinely audacious

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idea. A plan to photograph the surface of a

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planet around another star. Not detect

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it, not measure it, see it.

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Continents, oceans, weather.

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Anna: Hang on, we can't do that. I feel

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like we have pictures of exoplanets.

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Avery: We have dots. Every exoplanet we've

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ever found is, in a sense, invisible. We

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infer it from a star's tiny wobble or a faint

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dip dip in brightness as the planet crosses

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in front. In the very best cases, we've

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captured a single pixel of light. Nobody

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has ever resolved a surface. The problem is

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brutal. A star can be around 10 billion times

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brighter than the little Earth sized planet

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beside it. And the two sit almost on top of

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each other in the sky. The new concept comes

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from physicist Paul Stankis at Brookhaven,

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and it's one of 18 early stage ideas NASA

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just funded through its innovative Advanced

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Concepts Program. Nyack. These are

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seed grants, small money, nine months,

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permission to chase something wild. His is

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called Mapping Alien Continents. It works in

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two moves. First, a new kind of light

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canceling instrument, another that blots out

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the star's glare while keeping the planet's

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light at a contrast of 10 billion to one or

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better. Then the really bold bit. You fly

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two of these on separate spacecraft about a

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hundred kilometers apart and combine their

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beams till they act as one enormous

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telescope, big enough in principle to resolve

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features on the planet's face.

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Anna: A telescope a hundred kilometers wide

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made of two spacecraft flying in formation.

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Avery: That's a dream. And I want to be honest about

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where this sits. It's a concept study, not a

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mission on a launch pad. It may never fly in

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this form, but this is exactly how the big

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leaps begin. Someone asks what if we could

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actually look? And NASA hands him a little

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funding to find out whether the physics

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holds. If it ever came together, it would

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turn exoplanets from statistics into

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places.

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Now, Anna, speaking of things, we can

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Anna: see from right here, we've got weather coming

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in space. Weather forecasters at

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noaa, uh, are tracking a couple of clouds of

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solar material heading our way. Coronal

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mass ejections, big blobs of charged

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gas flung off the sun. These two

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are faint and they're only likely to give

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Earth a glancing blow over the next day or

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so.

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Avery: Glancing, but not nothing.

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Anna: Not Nothing. Layer those CMEs

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on top of a fast stream already flowing from

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a coronal hole, a gap in the Sun's

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outer atmosphere, and the models suggest we

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could tip into a G1 storm. That's

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the mildest rung on the scale. No drama for

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the power grid, but enough to nudge the

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aurora to slightly lower latitudes than

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usual. The so over the coming nights. It's

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worth a look if you're up high, and I'll give

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you the where and when in the skywatch.

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Here's the thread, though. That same solar

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wind, the constant outflow from the sun

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is gentle at Earth because we've got a strong

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magnetic field and a thick atmosphere

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shrugging it off. Auroras are the pretty

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side of that shrug. But not every world

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is so lucky. Some planets have been

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standing in that wind for billions of years

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with no shield at all.

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Avery: Which is the perfect cue for my next 1mi

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escapade, a pair of NASA's craft

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nicknamed Blue and Gold after the University

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of California, Berkeley colors, built by

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Rocket Lab and launched last November on a

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blue origin. New Glenn. They're Mars bound.

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And right now they're loitering out near a

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spot called L2, about a million miles

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beyond Earth, waiting for the road to Mars to

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open. While they wait, one of them turned its

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cameras back toward home and snapped a family

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portrait. Earth and the Moon together as

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two slim crescents. In ordinary

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visible light, they look exactly as you'd

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hope, two bright sunlit sickles against the

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black. But these cameras also see in thermal

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infrared heat, and that view is stranger

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and honestly, a bit beautiful. The night

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side of Earth glows softly with its own

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warmth, while the Moon's dark half sits

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far, far colder. A portrait in

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light and a portrait in heat of the same two

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worlds.

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Anna: Gorgeous. But that's not why they built it,

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is it?

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Avery: It's not. And here's where our, uh, thread

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lands. Escapade exists to study exactly what

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we were just talking about. Its whole job,

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once it reaches Mars in 2027, is to measure

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how the solar wind strips away the Martian

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atmosphere. Mars doesn't have a global

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magnetic shield like ours, so the same wind

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that just gives us auroras has, over billions

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of years, helped peel Mars from a warmer,

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wetter world. The thin, cold desert we see

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today. Two spacecraft taking readings from

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two vantage points at once, watching a planet

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lose its air in real time. That Earth and

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Moon portrait was really a calibration check,

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a chance to point the cameras at uh, familiar

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targets before the main event, but it doubles

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as a quiet reminder. A shielded world

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and an unshielded one are separated by

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not very much at

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Anna: all the wind that paints our sky

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and the wind that scours Mars. The same

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sun. Lovely thread Avery

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right out under the sky.

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First the moon. We've just come off the full

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buck moon on the 29th, so we're in a

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bright waning gibbous stretch. M beautiful

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to look at, but that glare will wash out

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anything faint for the next several nights.

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Worth knowing before you plan meteors.

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The southern Delta Aquariids and the Alpha

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Capricornids have just passed their peak on

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the 30th in into the 31st. From here

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in the southern hemisphere, the Delta

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Aquarids still favor us. But with the moon

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this bright, keep expectations modest

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and watch for the occasional slow bright

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Capricornid fireball which both

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hemispheres can catch. The better news is

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what's coming. The Perseids build to

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their peak on the night of the 12th into the

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13th of August, and this year the Moon is

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nearly new, so it's a genuinely dark

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generous window. For North America,

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that's prime. Find a dark spot, look

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up after midnight and the northern sky can

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deliver a meteor a minute at its best.

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From the southern hemisphere, the Perseids

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sit low in the north so you'll see fewer.

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But a clear northern horizon is worth a try.

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Mark the 12th. Also on the 12th of

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August, a uh, total solar eclipse. The

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path of totality runs across Greenland,

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Iceland and a slice of Spain, with

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partial phases for parts of northern North

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America and Europe. If you're anywhere near

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it, never look at the partial sun without

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certified eclipse glasses that meet the

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ISO

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123122

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standard. Ordinary sunglasses will not

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protect your eyes. Totality only is

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safe to view with the naked eye and only for

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those precious seconds it lasts. Planets

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quickly, both hemispheres. The pre dawn

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sky is the place to be with the brighter

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planets gathering low in the east before

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sunrise. From Sydney, look to the eastern

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horizon in the hour before dawn. From

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North America, the same window an hour or

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so before your local sunrise. One

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quick diary item and this one's for our

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telescope owners. On the 5th of August, a uh,

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dead SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage

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space junk we tracked since it launched

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Firefly's Blue Ghost lander back in January

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of last year is expected to smack

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into the moon near Einstein Crater at

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about half past six Universal Time.

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For North America, that's the small hours of

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the 5th and you're the best placed to try for

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it. Aim for the faint dust plume near the

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Moon's eastern edge. Not a naked eye

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flash. You'll want a decent telescope from

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Sydney. The Moon isn't up at impact, so down

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here we'll be leaning on the afterimages from

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orbiters like NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance

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Orbiter. And to close our thread, the

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aurora. If those solar storms land

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as forecast, watch the high latitudes over

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the coming nights across the northern tier of

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the United States and up into Canada in the

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north and down towards Tasmania,

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southern New Zealand and southern Victoria in

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the south. Same sun, same wind,

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both ends of the Earth. And if you catch a

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glow, you'll know exactly what you're looking

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at.

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Avery: Everything we talked about today, the links,

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the images of NISA and that Earth and moon

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portrait is at

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astronomydaily.IO, along with the

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daily newsfeed and the newsletter signup.

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Anna: And if you spotted an aurora or bagged a

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Perseid, tell us. There's a listener contact

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form on the site. And we love hearing what

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you've seen.

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Avery: That's Astronomy daily for Friday 31st

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July. I'm Avery.

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Anna: And I'm Anna. Until next time. Click. Clear

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Skies.