Artemis 2 is going really well. Webb looks at two protoplanetary systems. The White House proposes to cut back NASA's budget. There's an entirely new class of stars. And in Space Bites Plus, Japan is planning a comet return mission. All this and more in this week's Space Bites. Like all of you, I have an absolutely riveted to the updates to the Artemis 2 mission. And so we should continue on our story from what happened last week in our reporting. So just to catch you up, we saw the launch of the Artemis 2 mission, which was going to take the Space Launch System into orbit, carrying four astronauts around the Earth in their Orion capsule. And then after a series of orbital adjustments, they fired their trans-lunar ejection bird. Lasted over five minutes, which carried them on a free return trajectory around the moon. And so that's where we got to last week. And so now plenty has happened. And we've just got to share a chunk of video, one of the most incredible parts of this entire mission. And this is a stabilized version of the launch of the Space Launch System that was captured in infrared, which is kind of similar to how James Webb works. So you're not seeing in visual, you're seeing in terms of heat, but just the resolution and just all of the details that you can see of the rockets firing. It's just incredible. What an incredible sort of sequence. And we only have time to show you just a couple of seconds here. So we'll put a link down in the show notes so you can go and just watch the entire thing, which is minutes long. And so after several days, they continue to coast up the gravitational well from the Earth to the moon. In fact, that burn was so precise that they didn't have to do another correction burn that had been planned. So they just got to watch out the window as the Earth receded. And so like within a couple of days, we got this incredible picture of the Earth taken by the Artemis II crew. And it's funny because my wife caught the picture before I saw it and she showed it to me and it was on Reddit and I was like, that's probably fake. And and then I did a little bit of digging like, nope, that's real. What an amazing picture. And this is actually a night view of the Earth, essentially the dark side of the Earth illuminated by the full moon. And it's funny, like I was going outside every night looking at that full moon, knowing that there were astronauts in that field of view. Like I was looking at the moon and I was also looking at astronauts. I couldn't see them, but they were there. And we've seen a lot of pictures of the Earth from different perspectives. You've got satellites that are capturing weather images. You've got the occasional flyby of various spacecraft that are heading off out into the solar system. We've got the Discover satellite that is taking regular pictures of the Earth. But to see this blue marble image of the Earth seen by human eyes is something that has just not happened in over 50 years. And it is just hard to explain how exciting it is that this happened again. And hopefully this is not the beginning of the end that we are going to see more and more examples of humans looking, gazing at our home planet as they begin their exploration of the solar system. Now, you're probably familiar with the classic Earthrise picture, which was taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts. Well, we got the other version of that, which is Earth set. And so they took these pictures of the Earth going behind the limb of the moon as they were beginning this period behind the far side of the moon. And one thing that kind of surprised me was they didn't get as close to the surface of the moon as I was hoping. They only came within 6,545 kilometers of the lunar surface, which is close enough to see incredible detail of all of the craters across even the far side of the moon. And again, there's so many of these like first time ever is that they saw regions of the far side of the moon that have never been seen with human eyes just because of the way the illumination worked. And speaking of illumination, they saw a total solar eclipse where the sun passed behind the moon from their perspective. And this was a bit of a lucky chance. If Artemis had launched several months ago as originally planned, then the way the trajectories would have worked out, they wouldn't have got this solar eclipse. But because it happened in early April, the position of the sun, the position of the moon, they saw the moon completely block the sun. And this gave them a chance to observe the corona of the sun as well as watch the surface of the moon for meteorite impacts. And you notice these stars in the background, you're seeing Saturn, Mars and Neptune in this picture. Like I thought they were originally lens flare or something, but in fact, those are planets. So then they reached their farthest distance from the Earth, which actually broke the record for the Apollo 13 mission, which originally made the record back in 1970. So that number was 400,171 kilometers away from the planet. And now the Artemis two crew beat that record. They got to 406,772 kilometers. And if you sort of think about it, one of the astronauts in the Orion capsule was the farthest away from the Earth. And then somebody on the earth, it was the farthest away from the Orion capsule. And then they made a sandwich with the earth inside. And then they emerged from the other side of the moon and now began the free return, the fall back to the earth. They completed a short 15 second burn with their engine to get their trajectory perfect. And now they are on their way back home to earth. And the way the timing is going to work, we're going to release this episode of spacebites. And later on Friday afternoon, they're expected to reenter the Earth's atmosphere at approximately 8.07 p.m. on Friday afternoon, Eastern daylight time. This is the scary part. This is one of the times where you're definitely going to want to be watching on Tangerhooks, watching how this comes together, because they have to decelerate from this incredible speed, falling back down to the earth, passing into the Earth's atmosphere, protected only by the heat shield. And one of the big concerns that NASA has had about the readiness of the Orion capsule is how the heat shield worked on previous tests. There was sort of funny ablation that happened on that heat shield. Now we've got four astronauts on board who want to make sure they survive so that this capsule can splash down in the Pacific. And so if you want a stressful time, watch that reentry procedure. It'll happen live on NASA, and it's going to take 13 minutes from when they enter the atmosphere to when they have slowed down and land in the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of San Diego. Obviously, we will bring you up to date on what happens next week. But so far, what an incredible mission. I am so excited. I am renewed in my enthusiasm for Artemis space exploration, exploring the moon, bring it on. And in the midst of the Artemis two missions, we've got the new budget request from the White House, which is known as the skinny budget. So this is sort of like a slimmed down initial version of what they want for the budget for NASA. And guess what? They want to cut the budget of NASA. Here we go again. And this is the thing that happened back with the 2026 budget request. So once again, they want to cut the budget of NASA by 23 percent. And specifically, they want to cut the science funding by 47 percent. Last year, they wanted to cancel 45 missions. This year, they want to cancel 40 missions for the 2026 budget. They put together that initial budget. There was a very serious cut to NASA and then Congress overruled it and fully funded NASA. And so now we've got another significant cut to the NASA budget. The question is, will Congress go along with the budget the White House is requesting or will they fully fund it again? And it's a funny time because you've got the new NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, who gave an announcement about NASA's very ambitious plans to return to the moon. This is the ignition program where they are planning to build a human base on the moon to send dozens of landers to the surface of the moon just in 2027. And so we are seeing on the one hand, the White House trying to decrease NASA's budget. And then on the other hand, looking for a lot of ambitious new plans, a nuclear mission to Mars. So someone's going to have to square this circle. And so what's going to happen? Well, on the one hand, we can see Congress overrule the White House's budget or we can see them go along with it and see this significant cut to NASA. But a lot of the damage was done last year. There was really thousands of workers at NASA that took early retirement, that were let off of various projects. And so already there is this sort of decline in the overall experience, the sort of brain trust of NASA to be able to carry on these really ambitious programs. And so, you know, will they be able to staff up, bring on new contractors? You know, how this all plays out is still very much up in the air. But now you've got the first piece of news, the sort of first shot across the bow that once again, the White House is looking to cut NASA's budget. All right, now let's look at some cool new pictures from James Webb. So you're looking at two images of protoplanetary disks taken by James Webb. One of these is at 450 light years away. The other is 470 light years away. And the orientation is you're seeing these edge on. You're looking down through the protoplanetary disk and you're seeing the sort of central stellar region. You've got polar jets coming off of these newly forming planetary systems. And this is what you get when the planetary systems are really just within the first few hundred thousand years old. You've got gas and dust that is swirling in, starting to accumulate around the central protostar that is still accumulating material. The fusion hasn't begun yet. Once there's enough material at the central star, then the fusion will ignite. Then the radiation pressure will start to blow away the rest of this material. Of course, James Webb is an infrared telescope, which allows it to look through the gas and the dust to be able to see these features in this protoplanetary disk before you be able to see it with any other kind of telescope. You're seeing a lot of different colors in this image. And so really these colors match different kinds of molecules, different sizes of dust grains in these protoplanetary disks. But it's great to just see two of these side by side. You can see the similarities and the differences. We've got a story about this from Matt Williams on Universe Today. No matter when astronomers think they've got the universe figured out, the universe comes up with new, strange, exotic objects that then require classification. And the key to when you have a new class of objects, you need to see two examples of a thing. And so if you just see one example of a thing, that's a mystery. You see two examples of a thing that are behaving in the same way. Now you've got a new class. And so astronomers reached that new class requirement for an unusual new object. So what they saw was something that gave off all of the characteristics of a white dwarf star. This is, of course, a dead star. This is something that the sun is going to turn into after it runs out of fuel in its core. You can get these white dwarfs if the original star is up to about eight times the mass of the sun. It pops out its outer layers and then you're just left with the cooling core of the star that remains. And these stars can often be in binary systems. So they are orbiting around some other star and will siphon material away from that star and build this accretion disk around the white dwarf star. That then also gives off X-ray radiation because it's compressed so tightly and so hot. Astronomers found two examples of white dwarfs that seem to have like a half ring of material around them, but they don't have a binary object. And so they are alone. And yet they have this strange semi-ring of hot material around the white dwarf. So what's causing it? One possibility is that this is material that was actually lifted off of the surface of the white dwarf star. Somehow its intense magnetic fields are so strong that it's able to start collecting material in a half ring around the white dwarf. Another possibility is that this is through some interaction with some other object or some collision that is now, you can't see the other object that hit. But the possibility is that it has torn up. And this is what remains of the planetary system that was orbiting around it. Now it's been kind of mashed into this half ring, like maybe a destroyed gas giant is around the star. And so I love this example because, you know, we're still in the early stages of Vera Rubin where we are getting these hundreds of thousands of new alerts every single night. And so whenever you have a newer, deeper understanding into the universe, then you're going to pick up more and more of these rare objects. So just to be clear, these were not discovered by Rubin, but this is the kind of weird anomalies that we should expect to see more and more as we get more and more Rubin data. We've got a story about this from Evangoth. Mercury is one of the least explored places in the solar system. And that is because Mercury is actually the hardest planet to reach in the solar system. I know it sounds strange. You just fall towards the sun. The problem is you have to cancel out a ton of your orbital velocity. We are going around the sun at 30 kilometers per second. We need to be able to get down to Mercury. And the way to do that is to get rid of that speed. There's only one orbiter that's made it to Mercury and another one is on its way right now, which is Bepi Colombo from the European Space Agency. But there have been no landers and there have been no rovers. Wouldn't it be amazing if you could have a rover or lander on the surface of Mercury? There's a challenge though, of course. And that is that on the day side of Mercury, the temperatures hit 427 Celsius. And then on the night side, temperatures can go down to negative 173 Celsius. So on the day side, you are being bathed in radiation too much to keep yourself cool on the night side. It is kind of like this problem that we see with being in the dark on the moon, which is that your batteries freeze and you cannot survive through the night. The night on Mercury is way longer. Than it is on the moon. A solar day on Mercury lasts 176 Earth days. So you've got to be able to handle half of that in either full radiation or in full darkness, but there is a really clever trick. And that is that if you keep moving on the surface of Mercury, you could out walk the sunset. So if you're at the equator on Mercury, then you would only have to be able to move six kilometers per hour to stay ahead of either the sunset or the sunrise, whichever one you prefer. And if you get closer to the poles and then like say at 45 degrees, that speed goes down to just a little over four kilometers per hour. And so researchers have proposed a rover that would explore the surface of Mercury by keeping itself perfectly in the sweet spot between day and night. And we only have to average that speed, you know, four and a half kilometers per hour if they want to be off the equator or six kilometers per hour at the equator. And then this rover could continuously rove around the surface of Mercury, always staying in this perfect terminator position so that it doesn't get too hot or too cold and is able to continue doing science. And it's such a cool idea. You've got this rover on Mercury that is constantly staying in motion to avoid getting too hot or too cold. We've got a story about this from Matt Williams. Every week we do a vote on our channel where he tells what you thought was the best space news story of the week and the winner by the landslide. This is the biggest record that we've ever seen is Artemis 2. So thank you everyone who voted last week. We're going to put up the vote this week. I think I know where the answer is going to go, but we'll do it anyway. We put it on the post tab at the same time that we released this video. And so go ahead, go there, vote or just watch in your feed. It should show up. But of course, the best chance, subscribe to the channel, click on the notifications bell and then just obey the algorithm in all ways. There is a dark matter experiment deep underground in Canada. It's called the super cryogenic dark matter search or super CDMS. And this is a four by four meter tank that is surrounded by lead two kilometers underground in an active nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario. And by being two kilometers underground, by being shielded by lead, it prevents any contamination from cosmic rays reaching this chamber. But all of the molecules and atoms inside the chamber are moving. And so they have to cool it down to one one thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. And the experiment hit a milestone that they have reached that cool temperature. And now the search is on for some kind of dark matter particle to interact with the interior of the chamber. It's kind of the same thing as a neutrino observatory that you have this square kilometer of ice, say with the ice cube experiment where you're waiting for a neutrino to pass through the water and interact with some particle. Happens very rarely. But when you do, you get this cascade of other particles. And so by having this place that is completely shielded and there is no motion from any of the molecules, then theoretically, if some light particle of dark matter enters this chamber, then they could be able to detect it. And so now they've reached that coolest temperature and the hunt is on for dark matter particles in Canada. And we've got a story about this from Matt Williams. And now it's time for another picture from James Webb. And this time you're looking at the Westerhout 51 star forming region. This is a picture taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This is a star forming region that is about 13,000 light years away from us. And so once again, it's one of these regions where you've got tons of gas and dust that is making it impossible for us to be able to see what's going on inside with our visible light telescope. But James Webb to the rescue is able to look through that and pick out all of the knots of star forming regions. And sort of this is one big picture, but they also have tons of smaller pictures of different parts inside the nebula. And they've identified interesting features such as pro-planetary stars and weird comet like objects in the area. And in fact, some of the clouds in this region are so thick that even James Webb can't be able to see through them. And so astronomers used Alma, the Otacama Large Millimeter Array, which is a radio telescope that is able to also look through the gas and dust. They could sort of overlay the images from James Webb to what they're seeing with Alma to try and get a better sense of what these various features are. But it's believed in the sort of core area, which is called Westerhout 51A. There's about 10,000 solar masses worth of new stars that are forming. And this is the youngest star forming region in this nebula. And in fact, they are still a creating material and their stars haven't fully formed yet, and they've got pro-planetary discs around them. And it's sort of an even earlier version of those pro-planetary discs that I showed you early on in this episode. We've got a story about this from Carolyn Collins Peterson. And here is your Bota story. Now, if you've watched enough of my material, you know that I am obsessed with the Japanese Space Agency. There is something special going on with JAXA that they have this sort of mixture of really innovative ideas, a willingness to test out and take big risks in exploring the solar system. And that got us a sample return mission with Hayabusa and Hayabusa too. We've got the upcoming mission that's going to be returning a sample from Phobos, the Mars Moon. And now the Japanese are working on plans for a sample return from a comet. So the mission is going to be called the next generation small body return. My guess that's just the working name. They'll come up with something else. And the target is a comet called 282 Blampane. Now, this comet was originally discovered in 1819. And then it was lost for two centuries and finally rediscovered in 2003. Because it doesn't have a lot of activity, it was originally thought to be a near Earth asteroid, but it turns out it is actually a comet. It's only about 160 meters across. And so at the recent lunar and planetary science conference, engineers from the Japanese Space Agency laid out their plans for returning a sample from this comet. So the mission will launch in 2034 and it'll take 14 years to be able to get out to the comet, collect these samples and then return those samples back to Earth. That'll include about a year and a half just in operations at the comet before it finally grabs the sample and begins its trip home. And so who knows, in the late 2040s, we might finally get our hands on samples retrieved from a comet. Thanks to the Japanese. We've got a story about this from Andy Thomas week. We've got some zingers this week, but in fact, this is a fraction of the space news that we're covering over on Universe Today. We've got dozens of additional stories, too many for us to be able to talk about here in the show, but I write a weekly email loser where I give an overview of every single story that we're covering on Universe Today. And then I send it out every Friday afternoon to 70,000 of my closest friends. It's completely free. There's no ads. You can go to university.com. Now this week, I suspect we burned into the memories of many of you going forward. I like to talk about this phenomenon and some of my own in space exploration. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pardretti, Bailey Groovang, Brian Bode, Cairdwen, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Baleck, Darkfinger, David Guilton, and David Mass, Evan Dotbro, James Clark, Janet Smith, Jeremy Madder, and Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Smiths, Michael Purcell, Nord Space, One Step For Animals, Doug, please follow my nephew at VBrick 6994. Ray Kaidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Foundemunny, Team 49, Teleships Canada, Vlad Chippolin, Wolfgang Klotz, and Zell DeBord, galactic defender who support us at the master of the universe level. And all our patrons, all your support means the universe to us. So this was a very big week. And I got a lot more emotional about the Artemis mission that I was expecting. You know, I am a steely-eyed science journalist. I have been reporting on space exploration news for over 27 years now. I have seen all of the missions that have happened and reported on them. And yet I felt like a child. I felt like a kid who is watching the Apollo missions the first time around. Now, I wasn't there for it. My dad was. He explained it to me how exciting it was. And this felt very similar. And it feels different than it did with the Artemis One Mission, that this time there were people, they went farther away from Earth than humanity has ever been. And that felt really important. And it made me think about some of the really kind of foundational experiences that I have in space exploration. And I think about the times where space really kind of blew my mind. In 1981, I watched the launch of the space shuttle, the first space shuttle. And this was something that I shared with my father. You know, he had watched the Apollo landings and was a gigantic space. Or it still is. And he woke me up early in the morning so that we could watch the space shuttle launch for the first time in 1981. I was doing a paper route in 1986 for the Challenger disaster. In 2003, I was a young father and that was when we had the Columbia disaster. I can remember the Magella missions that were happening in the late 80s when I was coming home from high school. We're seeing these first pictures of the surface of Venus. But I think the most influential event was probably the Mars Pathfinder mission and Sojourner, which happened in the late 1990s. And it was sort of one of the inspirations that made me consider becoming a science journalist. I was working at a web design company in Vancouver. We had a live stream from NASA of the various events that were happening around the Pathfinder mission. And the entire my entire team was sort of had this going on in the background while we were building websites. And it was just it was so exciting to see the surface of Mars again, which we hadn't seen in a long since the Viking missions. And yet there was a rover rolling around on the surface of Mars, examining rocks. It was remote controlled by Earth and it just felt incredible. And it has just stuck with me. And, you know, we had the first images of Pluto taken by New Horizons, the images of Jupiter from the Galileo mission, the Voyagers. There's so many of these moments and events. And I would love to hear from you. What were the ones that really stuck with you that either got you more and more enthusiastic about space or you just kind of kind of remember exactly where you were, what you were doing when you heard about it or watched it? Anyway, this is a thing that we share and I'd love to hear your stories. All right, we'll see you next time.
