Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - SurveyMonkey, Using AI to surface insights faster and reduce manual analysis time - https://get.surveymonkey.com/tad - Prezi: Create AI presentations fast - https://try.prezi.com/automated_daily - Consensus: AI for Research. Get a free month - https://get.consensus.app/automated_daily Support The Automated Daily directly: Buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/theautomateddaily Today's topics: Artemis II returns from lunar flyby - Artemis II completed a historic 10-day crewed circumlunar mission, validating SLS and Orion performance and paving the way for Artemis III’s planned lunar landing in 2027. We cover key milestones, record-setting distance, and what post-flight inspections reveal for upcoming missions. ISS schedule and SpaceX CRS-34 - International Space Station operations ramp up with updated flight planning and the imminent SpaceX CRS-34 cargo run delivering major science investigations and critical spares. We break down what’s on Dragon, why these experiments matter, and what’s next for crew and cargo rotations in 2026. Robotic missions: Mercury, asteroids, Mars - A wave of robotic exploration is advancing planetary science: China’s Tianwen-2 prepares for asteroid operations and later a comet rendezvous, while ESA-JAXA’s BepiColombo closes in on Mercury. We also preview ESA’s Hera, JAXA’s MMX, and why these missions reshape planetary defense and origin stories. Fresh astronomy breakthroughs across universe - New observations are solving long-standing astrophysical puzzles, from gamma-Cas X-rays to star cluster evolution measured by Webb and Hubble. We also look at a reawakened supermassive black hole launching a million-light-year jet and what these results mean for how galaxies and stars evolve. Space weather, NEOs, and skywatching - Two powerful X-class solar flares highlight ongoing space-weather risk, while near-Earth asteroid flybys and new planetary-defense cooperation keep attention on impact preparedness. We’ll also highlight May 2026 sky events including Eta Aquarids, a Moon–Venus conjunction, and a rare Blue Moon. Episode Transcript Artemis II returns from lunar flyby NASA’s Artemis II mission has wrapped up as the first crewed journey beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo, completing a ten-day circumlunar flight that launched April 1, 2026 and splashed down April 10 in the Pacific off San Diego. Flying aboard Orion, named Integrity, commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen reached a maximum distance of about 252,756 miles from Earth and logged roughly 695,081 miles total. Beyond the headline return to lunar vicinity, the crew executed key propulsion burns and captured standout deep-space observations, including Earth setting behind the lunar horizon, real-time views of the Moon’s far side, and a 54-minute solar eclipse sequence that revealed the Sun’s corona. Post-flight checks indicate Orion’s thermal protection system performed as expected, with reduced heat-shield char loss compared to Artemis I and a notably precise landing about 2.9 miles from target—data that feeds directly into planning for Artemis III and a first crewed lunar surface landing targeted for 2027. ISS schedule and SpaceX CRS-34 The International Space Station remains the centerpiece of orbital science, and its 2026 cadence is accelerating with updated schedules for cargo and crew. The next major delivery is SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services 34, targeted to launch May 12, 2026 at 7:16 p.m. EDT on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40, carrying more than 6,400 pounds of cargo and research. Dragon is expected to dock autonomously around May 14 at the forward Harmony port. Key investigations include ODYSSEY, testing whether ground-based microgravity simulators truly match real microgravity by comparing bacterial behavior; STORIE, monitoring charged particles tied to space weather impacts on satellites and power grids; Green Bone, exploring bone cell growth on a wood-based scaffold; SPARK, studying red blood cells and spleen changes during long-duration flight; and Laplace, examining dust-particle behavior in microgravity to inform how planetary systems form. Along with science, CRS-34 brings station-critical spares like life-support components and power hardware, and it’s slated to stay until mid-June before returning time-sensitive samples and gear—including an ocular imaging device and the Advanced Plant Habitat, which is slated for eventual museum display. Robotic missions: Mercury, asteroids, Mars On the station itself, Expedition 74 continues a wide-ranging research and maintenance push: from quantum-physics hardware configuration and ultrasound vein scans to studies of heart, eye, and psychological health in long-duration spaceflight. NASA is also testing hyperdistributed RFID inventory tracking that could automate item location across the constantly shifting ISS environment—a capability that would be especially valuable for future lunar and Mars habitats where time and attention are scarce resources. Looking ahead, NASA’s CRS-35 is targeted for fall 2026 with more than 7,200 pounds of cargo including roll-out solar arrays, while Northrop Grumman’s CRS-25 is aimed for fall or winter 2026 with about 11,000 pounds. Crew traffic also stays busy: Soyuz MS-29 is scheduled for July 14, 2026 with NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, and SpaceX Crew-13 has been moved up to mid-September 2026 to increase U.S. rotation frequency. Fresh astronomy breakthroughs across universe Robotic exploration across the solar system is equally active. China’s Tianwen-2, launched in May 2025, is en route to near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa for a first Chinese asteroid sample return, with orbital insertion planned for June 7, 2026 and sampling operations expected in July using both anchor-and-attach and touch-and-go methods. The target is about 100 grams of regolith, with Earth return planned for 2027, followed later by a long-haul extension toward main-belt comet 311P/PanSTARRS for sustained observations in the 2030s. Meanwhile, ESA and JAXA’s BepiColombo—one of the most complex planetary missions ever flown—is on final approach to Mercury with arrival set for November 2026. After an eight-year cruise with multiple planetary flybys, it will split into two science orbiters to study Mercury’s surface composition, geology, and thermal environment, while also measuring its magnetosphere and plasma interactions in unprecedented detail. In planetary defense, ESA’s Hera is scheduled to reach the Didymos system in November 2026 to characterize the aftermath of NASA’s DART impact and sharpen models for future asteroid deflection. And JAXA’s MMX mission, planned for launch in November 2026, aims to return a sample from Mars’s moon Phobos—an outcome that could finally settle whether Phobos and Deimos are captured asteroids or remnants of an ancient impact on Mars. Space weather, NEOs, and skywatching Astronomy headlines also delivered major puzzle-solving results. Observations from XRISM, using its high-precision Resolve spectrometer, indicate that the long-mysterious X-rays from the bright star gamma-Cas are driven by a hidden companion—likely a white dwarf—feeding or interacting in a way that produces hot plasma whose motion tracks the companion’s orbit. That ties up a more-than-50-year mystery and clarifies how rare Be star X-ray binaries form. In galaxy-scale star formation, combined James Webb and Hubble work on thousands of young clusters in nearby galaxies shows that massive clusters clear their natal gas faster—emerging and lighting up in ultraviolet within about five million years—while lower-mass clusters stay embedded for roughly seven to eight million years. On even larger scales, radio observations with LOFAR and India’s upgraded GMRT reveal a supermassive black hole in galaxy J1007+3540 apparently reactivating after about 100 million years of dormancy, producing a jet on the order of a million light-years and leaving behind fainter fossil plasma that hints at repeated on-and-off cycles. Story 6 Space weather and planetary defense both stayed in focus in late April. The Sun produced two strong X-class flares—an X2.4 on April 23 and an X2.5 on April 24—events capable of disrupting radio communications, affecting navigation signals, stressing power infrastructure, and raising radiation concerns for spacecraft and astronauts. On the near-Earth object beat, asteroid 2026 HJ1—estimated around 23 feet across—passed safely on April 21 at roughly 400,000 miles, about 1.6 times the Earth–Moon distance, a reminder of why continual tracking matters even when no impact risk exists. International coordination is expanding too: ESA and JAXA signed a Memorandum of Cooperation to deepen planetary defense collaboration, including work tied to the Ramses mission concept to rendezvous with asteroid Apophis ahead of its exceptionally close April 13, 2029 flyby—about 32,000 kilometers above Earth—so scientists can measure how Earth’s gravity alters the asteroid’s shape, spin, and surface. Story 7 For skywatchers, May 2026 offers several easy targets: the Eta Aquarid meteor shower peaks around May 5 and 6 with fast meteors from Halley’s Comet debris, best seen before dawn toward the east, though moonlight may wash out fainter streaks. A Moon–Venus conjunction on May 18 should be visible shortly after sunset in the west, with Jupiter also lingering in the evening sky and closing in on Venus toward a June 9 conjunction. And May ends with a rare Blue Moon on May 31, the second full Moon in a calendar month, also noted as the most distant full micromoon of 2026. Story 8 Commercial spaceflight continues to mature into a repeatable market in 2026, led b
