March 3, 2026

What the Heck Is This Planet?

What the Heck Is This Planet?
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In today’s episode, Anna and Avery cover six stories from across the space and astronomy world — including a seismic shift in NASA’s Artemis program, a jaw-dropping Webb telescope discovery, fresh imagery of an interstellar comet, and the debut of a powerful new reusable rocket from China.   🚀 IN THIS EPISODE •       NASA officially redesigns Artemis 3 — no Moon landing, and SpaceX’s Starship may not even fly on the mission •       The James Webb Space Telescope discovers PSR J2322-2650b: a lemon-shaped exoplanet orbiting a pulsar every 7.8 hours, with a carbon-rich atmosphere that defies all known planetary science •       A new ‘stochastic siren’ method using gravitational waves from merging black holes could finally resolve the Hubble tension — one of physics’ deepest mysteries •       ESA’s JUICE spacecraft captures its first detailed image of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, revealing a glowing coma and sweeping tail •       This week’s global launch roundup: Japan’s Kairos rocket makes its third attempt, and SpaceX eyes its 600th Falcon booster recovery •       China’s CAS Space prepares to debut Kinetica-2, a reusable heavy-lift rocket targeting late March   🔗 LEARN MORE •       Full episode details and blog post: astronomydaily.io •       NASA Artemis updates: nasa.gov/artemis •       Webb telescope news: science.nasa.gov/mission/webb   ⭐ SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review — it helps other space enthusiasts find the show. New episodes every weekday.   Find us: astronomydaily.io • @AstroDailyPod • Bitesz.com Podcast Network

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WEBVTT

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Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily guide to

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the universe. I'm Anna and I'm Avery. It is Tuesday,

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the third of March twenty twenty six, and we are

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Season five, episode fifty three. Anna, quite a lineup today.

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We really do have something for everyone. We've got an

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update to that major shakeup at NASA, the kind that

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has the whole space community talking.

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We've got a planet shaped like a lemon. That's not

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a metaphor, it is literally shaped like lemon.

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There is a new approach to one of the biggest

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unsolved mysteries in all of physics.

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A space probe has snapped its first close up of

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an interstellar comet. And we've got your global launch roundup,

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including a big one from Japan making its third attempt.

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And China is about to debut a new reusable rocket

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that could shake up the commercial launch industry. Avery, where

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do we start.

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Let's start at the top with NASA and a decision

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that's rewriting the Artemis playbook.

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So Avery. When NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood up at

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Kennedy Space Center just days ago and said Artemis three

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will not be landing on the Moon, it was a

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significant moment.

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It really was to understand why a quick bit of context,

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Artemis three was meant to be humanity's first crude lunar

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landing since Apollo seventeen back in nineteen seventy two. That's

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over fifty years, a very long time to.

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Wait, and now it's not happening. Instead, the mission, now

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targeting a launch sometime in mid twenty twenty seven, has

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been completely redesigned. It will stay in low Earth orbit

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and focus on testing docking procedures between NASA's Orion capsule

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and the commercial lunar landers.

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And that's where it gets really interesting, because those landers

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are SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origins Blue Moon, and NASA

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is now openly keeping both of them in the running

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rather than committing exclusively to Starship.

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Isaacman was quite candid about why he compared the current

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Artemis cado to Apollo and found it wanting. Apollo was

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launching missions every four to five months, Artemis has been

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going every couple of years, which means the agency loses

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what he called muscle memory between flights, engineers leave procedures

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get rusty.

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And Starship, despite eleven test flights, has yet to reach

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Earth orbit. It's still technically a suborbital vehicle, and the

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list of milestones it needs to hit before it could

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put astronauts on the Moon orbital refueling, rendezvous and docking

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an uncrude lunar landing is still very long.

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So the plan now is Artemis three in low Earth

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orbit to test systems, then Artemis four as the first

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real moonlanding, targeting twenty twenty eight, and NASA is even

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talking about two moon landing missions in twenty twenty eight

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if they can get the launch cadence up ambitious.

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Very and in the meantime, Artemis two, the crewe fly

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by around the Moon with no landing, is still on

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track for an April launch after being rolled back to

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the vehicle assembly building for repairs to a helium flow issue.

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A lot happening on the Artemis front. We will absolutely

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keep you updated. Now, let's go somewhere much much further away,

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seven hundred and fifty light years.

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In fact, this one genuinely made me do a double

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take when I read it. Scientists using the James Web

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Space telescope have found an exoplanet unlike anything ever studied,

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and they are baffled.

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So let's set the scene. The planet is called PSR

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J two three two two DASH two six five zero B.

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It's about the mass of Jupiter, and it orbits its

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star at a distance of just one million miles. For comparison,

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Earth orbits the Sun at about one hundred million miles.

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This planet is one hundredth of that distance away.

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One complete orbit one full year for this planet takes

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just seven point eight hours.

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And its star is not a normal star. It's a pulsar,

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a raw, rapidly spinning neutron star, the collapsed core of

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a long dead massive star containing the mass of our

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entire Sun packed into something the size of a city.

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And the gravity from that pulsar is so extreme that

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it's literally stretching the planet. Instead of being roughly spherical

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like Earth or Jupiter, the gravitational tidal forces are pulling

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it into an elongated shape, like a lemon or an

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American football, if you prefer.

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The lead researcher, Michael Zang from the University of Chicago

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described it as the stretchiest planet we've confirmed, the stretchiness

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of which is a sentence I never expected to hear

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in astronomy.

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But the shape is almost the least weird thing about it.

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When WEB turned its infrared instruments on this world, the

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atmosphere came back completely wrong. Instead of water, methane, carbon dioxide,

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the things you'd normally expect on a gas giant, it's

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almost entirely helium and carbon.

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Carbon compounds called C two and C three, specifically molecular carbon,

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and because the pressure inside the planet is enormous, scientists

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think that carbon could actually be crystallizing in the deep

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interior forming diamonds.

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The surface temperature is around thirty seven hundred degrees fahrenheit,

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by the way, which is four times hotter than venus.

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So it's a lemon shaped diamond cord thirty seven hundred

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degree mystery world, orbiting a zombie star every eight hours.

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And nobody can explain how it formed, Zang said. The

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carbon composition rules out every known formation mechanism. It's part

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of what's called a black widow system, where the pulsar

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is slowly evaporating its companion, but even that doesn't fully

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explain what WEB is seeing.

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The team is seriously entertaining the idea that this might

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be an entirely new class of cosmic object, not quite

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a planet, not quite a stellar remnant, something in between

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with no name.

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Yet only Web could have found this. The pulsar amidst

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mostly gamma rays, which are invisible to infrared instruments, so

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Web could study the planet without the star drowning it

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out a pristine spectrum. The researchers called it a perfect

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observational setup. Remarkable stuff from the inexplicable to the cosmological.

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What's next, So the Hubble tension. If you've been listening

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to astronomy daily for any length of time, you've heard

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us mention this. But let's quickly recap why it matters

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so much.

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The Hubble constant is a measure of how fast the

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universe is expanding. Different methods of measuring it produce different answers,

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not wildly different. We're talking about a ten percent gap,

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but in cosmology that gap is enormous. If the universe's

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expansion rate isn't consistent, something in our fundamental model of

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physics is wrong.

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And now a team from the University of Illinois and

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the University of Chicago thinks they may have found the

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new tool that could finally help resolve it. They call

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let the stochastic Siren method.

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And it works like this. Every time two black holes

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spiral together and collide somewhere in the universe, which is

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happening constantly across billions of galaxies, they release gravitational waves

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ripples in the fabric of space time itself. Most of

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these events are too distant and too faint for us

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to detect individually.

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But together all those undetected collisions create a background hum,

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a constant, low level gravitational wave signal washing through everything

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all the time, and the team realized that by looking

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for or in this case, not finding that background signal

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in existing data from the Ligo, Virgo and Cogra detectors,

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they could actually constrain the hubble constant.

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Even the non detection is informative. If certain expansion rates

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were correct, you'd expect to see a background signal by

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now you don't, so those slower expansion scenarios can be

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ruled out.

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Combined with exact existing measurements from individual black hole mergers,

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the team produced a new, more precise estimate of the

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expansion rate, one that sets right in the contested zone

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where the hubble tension actually bites.

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The research is published in Physical Review Letters. Daniel Holtz

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from You Chicago put it well, saying it's not every

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day you come up with an entirely new tool for cosmology.

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And as gravitational wave detectors become more sensitive over the

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next decade, this method will only get sharper.

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The gravitational weight background itself is expected to be directly

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detected within about six years. When that happens, this technique

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becomes even more powerful. We might actually be within reach

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of solving one of the deepest puzzles in physics. Exciting times, from.

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The vast and theoretical to the relatively local. We had

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a visitor in our solar system and we've got a

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new photo.

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So three I slash Atlass has been quite the recurring

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care on the show, and with good reason. This is

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only the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected passing through

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our Solar system, and it's by far the most studied

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because we had more warning than with the previous.

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Two and now ESA's Juice spacecraft, the Jupiter icy Moons

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Explore currently in Root to Jupiter, has captured its first

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detailed image of the comet, and what it's showing is

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a bright, glowing coma surrounding the nucleus with a sweeping

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tail already developing.

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Juice was actually well positioned to get an early look

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at this object, which makes it a brilliant opportunistic observation.

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The spacecraft was designed to study Jupiter's moons, but its

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cameras are perfectly capable of turning onto a bright comet.

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What makes three i atlas so scientifically exciting is what

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it can tell us about chemistry beyond our Solar system.

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Interstellar objects carry the fingerprints of wherever they formed previous

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NASA observations. All Bettie revealed the coma and a flare

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up as it was heading outward, and the composition data

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has been trickling in.

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And now we have Juice's optical imagery to add to

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that picture. Every instrument, every telescope, every spacecraft that can

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contribute data is doing so. This is coordinated Solar System

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science at its best.

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Three I at lists is now heading back out into

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the Solar System. So the window for observations is narrowing,

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but the data already collected, we'll be keeping researchers busy

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for years. Now, let's check in on what's flying this week.

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It is a busy week at launch sites around the globe.

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Five missions on the schedule, and there are some real

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standout moments to watch for.

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The international highlight is japan Space one, a commercial startup

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backed by Canon Electronics and Ihi Aerospace, is attempting its

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third launch of the Cairos rocket from Spaceport Key on

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the Key Peninsula. The window opens Wednesday, the fourth of March.

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Now, the first two Cairos flights did not go well.

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Flight one in March twenty twenty four was terminated by

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the Autonomous Flight Termination System due to first stage underperformance.

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Light two in December twenty twenty four was lost because

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a sensor failure caused loss of control during the first

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stage burn.

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Third time lucky hopefully. This flight is targeting Sun synchronous

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orbit and is carrying five small payloads from a range

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of customers, including satellites from Taiwan and a microsatellite from

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a Japanese high school. Lovely to see that kind of diversity.

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On the SpaceX side, there are four Falcon nine missions

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this week, launching from both Cape Canabrol and Vandenberg. The

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standout is a Vandenberg launch on Wednesday, where booster B

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ten seventy one will be flying for its thirty second mission,

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and that landing will mark SpaceX's six hundredth Falcon booster

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recovery attempt.

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Six hundred the numbers just keep getting bigger and more

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mind boggling. A booster that's flown thirty two times is

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extraordinary by any standard. This week's Falcon nine missions will

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also push SpaceX to its thirtieth launch of twenty twenty six. Overall,

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the cadence is relentless, and we're watching.

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The Chiros launch particularly closely. Japan's commercial launch sector has

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been growing, and the successful Chiros flight would be a

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significant milestone for the country's private space industry. Fingers crossed

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now speaking of new rockets.

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And we close today's episode with a look further ahead

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to the end of March, when China's commercial space sector

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is about to make a significant move.

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CAS Space, a commercial offshoot of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,

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is preparing to debut its new Connecticut two rocket. Launch

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is targeted for late March from the Gooquan Satellite Launch

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Center out in the Gobi Desert.

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The Connecticut two is a fifty three meter tall rocket

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powered by three YF one oh two engines running on

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kerosene and liquid oxygen, a similar propellant combination to SpaceX's

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Falcon nine, and like Falcon nine, it's designed to be reusable.

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It can carry up to twelve thousand kilograms to low

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Earth orbit or around seventy eight hundred kilograms to a

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five hundred kilometers Sun synchronous orbit. That's a meaningful capability.

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It puts it in a similar class to Falcon nine

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in terms of payload.

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For its debut mission, it's carrying the qin Zau one,

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a prototype cargo spacecraft designed to eventually resupply China's Tiongong

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space station. Think of it as China's equivalent of testing

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a dragon capsule, a first step toward a regular, affordable resupply.

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System, and cast Base has ambitious plans. They're aiming for

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at least four Kinetica two launches in twenty twenty six alone,

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including missions to deploy satellites into mega constellations, directly competing

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with Starlink in the global broadband market.

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It's worth noting that CAAs Space's smaller solid fuel rocket,

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the Kineticut one, has already flown eleven successful missions and

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has eight more planned for this year, so this is

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not a first time player, they have operational experience.

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The broader picture is that the global commercial launch industry

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is genuinely becoming competitive in a way it never was before.

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BaseX still leads, but you now have serious players from China, Japan,

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Europe and beyond all developing capable, affordable rockets. It's a

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fascinating time to be watching this space unabsolutely intended.

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And on that note, it's time to wrap up episode

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fifty three.

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Really already?

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Yes, that is a wrap on Astronomy Daily Season five,

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episode fifty three. What a week it's shaping up to be.

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From NASA's lunar reset to lemon planets, to cosmic background

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hums to ar new reusable rocket on the launch pad.

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If you've enjoyed today's episode, we would love it if

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you leave us a review. Wherever you listen, it really

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does make a difference in helping new listeners find the show.

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You can find full show notes, blog posts, and more

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over at Astronomy Daily dot io, and follow us on

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social media at astro Daily Pod for daily space updates.

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Until next time, keep looking up. The universe has no

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shortage of surprises.

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Clear skies everyone, goodbye.

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Say stars, Star