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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,