Artemis II: Homeward Bound and The Lost Mars Mission

About this episode

The episode covers the latest space news including Artemis II's return, a lost Mars mission, and new scientific discoveries about Earth and comets.

Today's Space News — Astronomy Daily S05E84 | April 8, 2026 In today's episode, Anna and Avery cover six incredible stories spanning the final days of humanity's return to deep space, a lost spacecraft mystery, and fresh science rewriting how we understand our own planet. TODAY'S STORIES: (00:00) Intro (01:30) Story 1 — Artemis II Day 7/8: science debrief done, trajectory burns fired, and the crew heads home for a historic splashdown Friday (08:00) Story 2 — Cygnus CRS-24 launch delayed to April 10 due to weather — now launching the same day Artemis II lands (13:00) Story 3 — Earth formed entirely from inner Solar System material: Jupiter blocked everything else, and water was already here (19:00) Story 4 — ESA Juice delivers stunning new data on interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS: 70 Olympic pools of water per second (24:00) Story 5 — Comet C/2025 R3 PanSTARRS is the new comet to watch this April — and it's looking good (29:00) Story 6 — FEATURE: Mars 96, the lost Mars mission that crashed back to Earth 30 years ago — and was never found Subscribe for daily space and astronomy news | astronomydaily.io | @AstroDailyPod Become a supporter of this podcast…

People in this episode

Hosts: Anna, Avery

Topics covered

• Artemis II
• Mars mission
• spacecraft mystery
• Earth formation
• comet observations
• interstellar data

Keywords

• Artemis II
• Mars 96
• Cygnus CRS-24
• Earth formation
• interstellar comet
• comet C/2025 R3
• space news
• NASA
• ESA

Sponsors

NordVPN

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NASA, ESA

Places: Earth, Solar System, interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, comet C/2025 R3 PanSTARRS

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