## Starcast: March 15th, 2026

**Jay Shaffer:** Welcome back to the Starcast for the week of March 15th, 2026. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, and with me is my co-host, Mike Lewinski. Howdy, Mike! 

**Mike Lewinski:** Howdy, Jay. 

**Jay Shaffer:** And, uh, happy belated Pi Day! Uh, so, uh, Mike, what's happening with our space weather right now? 

**Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, happy bi day. Jay, the Earth is currently in a solar windstorm that is generated by an equatorial coronal hole that has been causing geomagnetic storms for the last 2 days. I even caught a couple ripples of it on Friday night in Crestone, and I understand you caught a little bit of it down there in Tres Piedras. As the solar wind continues here at mid-latitudes, we have a 45% chance of active conditions for the next 24 hours, and high latitudes have a 45% chance of a severe storm. Those odds drop a bit tomorrow, down to 35% for active conditions at mid-latitudes, and 35% chance for severe conditions or severe storm at high latitudes. So there are about a half dozen sunspots facing the Earth right now, but they all have stable magnetic fields. There's just a 10 to 15% chance of M class flares over the next 2 days, and only a 1% chance of X class flares. So what's happening in the night sky this week, Jay? 

**Jay Shaffer:** Well, Mike, this time of year is a great time to look east in the early morning hours. Or west just after dusk, as we approach the vernal equinox this week, you might be able to catch the zodiacal light.  Just after dusk. The March equinox, aka the vernal equinox, marks the suns crossing over the Earth's equator, moving from south to north. Earth's tilt on its axis is, of course, what causes this northwestern shift of the sun's path across our sky this time of year. And now, Earth's tilt is now bringing spring and summer to the Northern Hemisphere, and at the same time, uh, the March equinox marks the beginning of autumn and a shift toward winter in the Southern Hemisphere. So, um, the sun actually crosses the celestial equator, a line directly above Earth's equator. At 1446 UTC on March 20th, 2026. So that would be at 9:46 a.m. Central Daylight Time. If you're in that time zone. 

It's also a great time to see the expanse of the Milky Way as it lays out almost parallel to the eastern horizon from about 3 a.m. Till dawn. And so I've been catching this in my time lapses in the last week, and it's pretty spectacular. And then with the new moon on March 19th, we should have a perfect dark sky opportunity to see that splendor of the pre-dawn Milky Way.  And the constellation Sagittarius, of course. And if you're out with your telescope in the evening, uh, look for Leo rising in the east, and catch the Leo triplet of galaxies. It's a great target to see multiple galaxies in one field of view. And so that's one of the treats for this time of year. Uh, so Mike, what's happening in space news? 

**Mike Lewinski:** Jay, in the news this week, it's been a busy week for the Planetary Defense Desk. We actually had two bus-sized asteroids zip past us in the last few days.  First was 2026 CC3 on March 11th. But the real near miss was 2026 EG1 late Thursday night, March 12th. That one was discovered only four days after it flew by, passing closer to us than the moon. It's currently heading back out on its 655-day orbit and zipped safely beneath Antarctica. In a related story, we finally have some closure on the riskiest asteroid in decades, 2024 Yr.  4. For a while there it had about a 4.3% chance of hitting the moon on December 22nd, 2032. 

But we just got word that NASA and the ESA used the James Webb Space Telescope for a high stakes check-in while the asteroid was racing away. After months of tracking a potential lunar impact for 2032, new data from the James Webb Space Telescope has officially ruled out a collision. The 60 meter rock is now projected to miss the moon by more than 20,000 kilometers.  And the concern wasn't just the moon itself, but the debris cloud. It could have kicked up toward our satellites. So knowing that it will miss is great news for our satellite infrastructure. In other planetary defense news, studies from the DART mission continue to impress. Researchers confirmed this week that our impact on Dimorphos was so significant, it actually shifted the entire binary system's trajectory around the Sun. A new study in Science Advances shows that the hit was even more effective than we realized.  It didn't just change how Dimorphos orbits its partner. It actually shifted the entire binary system's path around the sun. For the first time in history, it shifted their 770 day orbit by a fraction of a second. It sounds tiny, but it proves that with enough lead time we can absolutely nudge a threat out of the earth's way. And that leads into our main discussion on potentially hazardous objects today. While NASA is handling the heavy hitting. 

A nonprofit called the B612 Foundation is working on the data challenge of finding these things before they find us. And you might remember B612 as being the home planet or home asteroid in the story, The Little Prince. 

**Jay Shaffer:** It's a fascinating approach, you know, when we talk about potentially hazardous objects or PHOs, there's a specific definition that often gets lost in the headlines. To be labeled potentially hazardous, an asteroid has to come within 4.6 million miles of Earth, and it has to be at least 140 meters in diameter. 

**Mike Lewinski:** Right. That 140 meter diameter is the city killer threshold. Let's look at history here to put that in perspective. When people think of impacts, they often think of the Chicxulub event. That one wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and that was a 10 kilometer wide monster. That's the worst case scenario portrayed in movies like Don't Look Up. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Don't look up actually hit on a very real fear amongst astronomers. The comet from the deep. In that movie, they only had six months, and with Chicxulub-sized objects, we're pretty sure we found almost all of them in our solar system. And none of them are hitting us anytime soon. But it's the smaller ones, the ones that don't end civilization, but could end a city that keep the sky watchers up at night. 

**Mike Lewinski:** Exactly. Look at the Tunguska event in 1908. That was a stony asteroid, likely 50 to 100 meters across. It exploded in the atmosphere over Siberia and flattened 80 million trees over 2,000 square kilometers. If that had happened over London or New York, the death toll would have been in the millions, and we had 0 warning. 

**Jay Shaffer:** And even more recently, there was the Chelyabinsk in 2013. I don't know if you remember that, but that was only about 20 meters wide, tiny compared to Chicxulub, but it exploded with the force of about 30 Hiroshima bombs. And it shattered windows across the entire city and injured over 1,500 people. The wild part? We didn't even see it coming because it was coming from the direction of the sun, and it was hidden in the glare. 

**Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, that hidden in the glare problem is exactly why the B612 foundation exists. They argue that we can't just rely on luck. And don't look up the disaster happened because of a mix of late detection and political greed. B612 wants to solve the detection part so that politics don't have to be a last-minute scramble. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, they've been around since, uh, like 2002 and I believe they were founded by former astronauts Ed Liu and Rusty Schweickart. And their Asteroid Institute developed the THOR algorithm, the Track Let Heliospheric Orbit Recovery. And it's essentially a way to use the massive cloud computing to find those hidden asteroids. By linking together snapshots from different telescopes that weren't originally recognized as the same object. So it's basically data mining. 

**Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, it's a complete shift in philosophy. Instead of just building a single giant telescope, they're creating a map using data that already exists. Danica Remy, the foundation's president, says it's a data challenge. If we can map the 140-meter city killers, we can move from a state of fear to a state of engineering and plan a DART-style mission 10 years in advance instead of 6 months. 

**Jay Shaffer:** And yeah, that lead time is vital. Rusty Schweickart often talks about the geopolitical nudge. If you have to move an asteroid, you're essentially sliding its impact point across the Earth until it misses.  The limb of the planet. And if the mission fails halfway through, uh, you've just moved the disaster from one country to another. So you need to, uh, years of international diplomacy and, uh, long lead time and warning to handle that safely. 

**Mike Lewinski:** It really highlights that we're the 1st species with the ability to actually do something about this. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program or a B612 foundation, but we do. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Well, at least what we know of the dinosaurs. I mean, there's some theories that the dinosaurs had a technological civilization, and we just don't have any record of it. But, uh, and maybe they just, uh, failed on that mission. But while we're mapping those leads for safety, we're also mapping the future economy.  These rocks are full of resources, and so if we appeal to greed and commercialism and entrepreneurialism and capitalism. Uh, we're talking water for fuel, rare metals, and mapping the threats is also mapping the gas stations of the future. 

**Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, it turns out that the don't look up fear into a look up and explore mentality by solving the data problem.  We aren't just protecting the planet. We're opening up the solar system. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, I love that it's the B612 Foundation is, you know, getting us to be more proactive than reactive. 

**Mike Lewinski:** Well said, Jay. Well, thanks for joining us for this deep dive into the rocks headed our way. If you want more space-based drama, keep an eye out for the Project Hail Mary movie that's coming to theaters. It's got a much more optimistic take on humanity's scientific ingenuity when the stakes are high. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, it's pretty cryptic in the trailers that I've seen, so I don't know the actual threat in that movie, but I'm looking forward to catching it, and I assume that you are also. 

**Mike Lewinski:** I am. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Well, let's go ahead and wrap it up and thank all of our listeners for checking out the podcast today. And be sure to comment, like and subscribe and let us like know what you'd like to hear more about. You can also check out our websites, WildernessVagabonds.com for Mike and Skylapser.com for Jay. And our YouTube channels, so just look up Mike Lewinski or Skylapser and enjoy our videos rather than our voices. The intro music is Fanfare for Space by Kevin MacLeod from the YouTube Audio Library. And from the Deep Sage 9 Observatory, uh, this is Jay Shaffer and… Mike Lewinski, Wishing you all clear skies.