Moon Rocket Rolls Out, Dual Spacewalks & CERN’s New Particle | March 19, 2026

A massive day in space as NASA's Artemis II moon rocket heads to the launchpad tonight, NASA and China both conduct spacewalks, CERN announces a brand-new particle, and astronomers reveal a nearby galaxy has been hiding the aftermath of a cosmic collision. Episode Highlights 🚀 Story 1: Artemis II Rollout — The Moon Rocket Heads to the Pad Tonight NASA is rolling the Artemis II Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft to Launch Pad 39B tonight (March 19), targeting an 8 p.m. EDT start for the slow 4-mile crawler journey. The April 1 launch window remains firmly on track. Crew members Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen have entered quarantine — making history as the first crew to venture to the vicinity of the Moon since 1972. Source: NASA Blogs / Space.com 👨‍🚀 Story 2: Dual Spacewalk Day — ISS & Tiangong Both Suit Up NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Chris Williams completed U.S. Spacewalk 94 on March 18, spending 7 hours and 2 minutes preparing the ISS for a new roll-out solar array. Meanwhile on March 16, Shenzhou 21 commander Zhang Lu tied the Chinese EVA record with his sixth career spacewalk alongside crewmate Wu Fei outside China's Tiangong station. Sources: NASA / Space.com ⚛️ Story 3: CERN's LHCb Discovers New Doubly Charmed Particle The LHCb experiment at CERN announced the first discovery made by its upgraded detector: the Xi-cc-plus baryon, a proton-like particle containing two charm quarks and one down quark, making it roughly four times heavier than a proton. Detected at 7-sigma significance, it settles a two-decade-old scientific dispute and is the 80th particle discovered by LHCb. Source: CERN / Universe Today 🌌 Story 4: Small Magellanic Cloud Caught Mid-Transformation University of Arizona astronomers have confirmed that the Small Magellanic Cloud — one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbours — collided directly with the Large Magellanic Cloud a few hundred million years ago and is still reeling from the impact. The finding upends decades of assumptions about the SMC's use as a benchmark for early universe galaxy studies. Source: The Astrophysical Journal / Sky & Telescope 🪐 Story 5: Exotrojans — Hunting Asteroid Companions Around Other Stars A new paper in The Astrophysical Journal by Jackson Taylor (West Virginia University) and colleagues pushes the search for exotrojans — asteroid co-orbital companions to exoplanets — into some of the most extreme environments yet studied, as the hunt continues for the first confirmed detection. Source: The Astrophysical Journal / Universe Today 📡 Story 6: SETI Rethink — Time to Broaden the Search A new paper argues that the decades-long focus on narrow radio and microwave bandwidths in the search for alien signals may be too limiting, and proposes broadening the electromagnetic search to a much wider range of the spectrum. Source: Universe Today Find Us Everywhere • 🌐 Website: astronomydaily.io • 🐦 Twitter/X: @AstroDailyPod • 📸 Instagram: @AstroDailyPod • 🎵 TikTok: @AstroDailyPod • ▶️ YouTube: @AstroDailyPod • 📝 Tumblr: @AstroDailyPod • 🎙️ Part of the Bitesz.com Podcast Network

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