An evening pause: If you haven’t done crossed the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana, than this video will allow you to experience it.
And a drive like this is a great way to start the weekend.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
The galaxy MoM z14, as seen in the infrared
by Webb. Click for original image.
The uncertainty of science: Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have now identified a galaxy that formed only 280 million years after the Big Bang, far earlier than their theories of the origins of the universe had predicted.
“The broader story here is that JWST was not expected to find any galaxies this early in the history of the universe, at least not at this stage of the mission,” van Dokkum said. “There are, very roughly, over 100 more relatively bright galaxies in the very early universe than were expected based on pre-JWST observations.”
The data suggests MoM z14 is 50 times smaller than the Milky Way, contains nitrogen and carbon, and appears to be forming stars. The data also found little neutral hydrogen surrounding the galaxy, which also contradicts those same cosmological theories. According to those theories, the early universe should be filled with neutral hydrogen.
The nitrogen and oxygen are also there earlier than expected, and suggest there will be more such galaxies, including some even closer to the Big Bang.
Hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay.
In a ruling that will have wide-ranging impacts across multiple industries, including rocketry, the Supreme Court yesterday ruled 8-0 that the mission creep expansion of federal government’s regulatory use of environmental impact statements (EIS) to hinder all new construction projects is incorrect and must stop.
The case involved a planned railroad in Utah, that had gotten all its permits for construction, including approval of its environmental impact statement, but was then stymied by lawsuits by political activist groups that claimed the impact statement, issued under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), had not considered the impact of the industries the railroads would serve, including impacts far from the railroad’s location itself.
This is a perfect example of the broad expansion of NEPA that has been imposed in the last two decades by federal bureaucracy working hand-in-glove with these leftist political groups.
The Supreme Court, including all of the Democratic Party appointees, said enough!
In its majority opinion, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Court clarified that under NEPA the STB “did not need to evaluate potential environmental impacts of the separate upstream and downstream projects.” The Court concluded that the “proper judicial approach for NEPA cases is straightforward: Courts should review an agency’s EIS to check that it addresses the environmental effects of the project at hand. The EIS need not address the effects of separate projects.”
This statement “is particularly significant for infrastructure projects, such as pipelines or transmission lines, and should help reduce NEPA’s burdens (at least at the margins),” wrote Jonathan Adler, a law professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in The Volokh Conspiracy. “The opinion will also likely hamper any future efforts, perhaps by Democratic administrations, to expand or restore more fulsome (and burdensome) NEPA requirements.”
The article notes (and confirms) what I have been writing now for the past five years in connection with the FAA’s demand that rocket companies require new impact statements every time they revise their operations, even when those changes are relatively minor.
This point could reduce one of the largest delays caused by NEPA: litigation. Since its passage in 1969, NEPA has been weaponized by environmental groups to stunt disfavored projects—which has disproportionately impacted clean energy projects. On average, these challenges delay a permitted project’s start time by 4.2 years, according to The Breakthrough Institute.
The increased threat of litigation has forced federal agencies to better cover their bases, leading to longer and more expensive environmental reviews. With courts deferring more to agency decisions, litigation could be settled more quickly.
This ruling is an excellent move in the right direction, but no one should assume it will be followed honestly by the next Democrat who sits in the White House. Just as Biden expanded red tape by simple forcing the FAA to slow-walk its launch licensing process, future presidents could do the same.
Nor should be expect the lawsuits by these luddite leftists to cease. They will find other legal challenges and will push those instead.
The real solution is to reduce the bureaucracy’s size entirely, so there won’t be paper-pushers for these petty dictators to utilize for their authoritarian purposes. Eliminating or simplifying these environmental regulations would help as well, giving the activists fewer handles on which to hang their lawsuits.
The long-established Luxembour satellite company SES has now gotten regulatory approval from the United Kingdom to buy another long-established satellite company, Intelsat, with the purchase price €2.8 billion.
SES’s €2.8 billion acquisition of Intelsat was cleared by the UK’s competition regulator, in a move that will create a satellite giant to better compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink. The Competition and Markets Authority decided on the basis of “the information currently available to it,” to not subject the deal to an in-depth probe, it said in a statement on Friday.
The deal still needs to be approved by the European Union, which has set June 10th as the deadline for a decision.
This merger is because these older satellite companies are presently losing in competition with the many new low-orbit satellite constellations by new companies, led mostly by Starlink. By merging they hope to compete better.
SpaceX this morning successfully placed a military GPS satellite into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. As of posting the satellite has not yet been deployed.
This was the second military GPS launch that the Space Force has taken from ULA and its Vulcan rocket and given to SpaceX instead. Even though Vulcan was certified in late March by the military for these kinds of military launches, delays in getting Vulcan operational forced the Space Force to find another more reliable launch provider. Even now, two months after that certification, ULA has still not announced a launch schedule for this rocket. The company in December 2024 had predicted it would launch 20 times in 2025, with 16 of those launches being by Vulcan. The year is almost half over now and ULA has only launched once, using an Atlas 5 rocket.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
66 SpaceX
32 China
6 Rocket Lab
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 66 to 51.
According to a statement by a SpaceX official during a telephone press conference on May 28, 2025, the company is now hoping to complete 170 total launches in 2025.
“We’re targeting 170 launches by the end of the year,” Anne Mason, director of national security space launch at SpaceX, said during a call with reporters on Wednesday (May 28).
…”I always find it amazing that this cadence has become somewhat normal,” Mason added during Wednesday’s call, which served to preview SpaceX’s planned Friday (May 30) launch of the GPS III SV08 satellite for the U.S. Space Force. “But if we look back just five years ago, in 2020 when we launched roughly 25 times, which is still a healthy rate at twice a month, and now launching on average every two to three days — I think this demonstrates how Falcon’s reusability and reliability, plus the hard work and dedication of the SpaceX team, has been critical to supporting assured access to space,” she said.
Last year SpaceX set a record of 137 successful orbital launches, a number that also exceeded what the entire world had accomplished yearly for most of the space age since Sputnik in 1957. This new goal however appears to be a reduction from its earlier hopes. Near the start of the year SpaceX officials had predicted it would complete 180 launches.
There is also the possibility that Mason above was only referring to Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, and not counting the test flights of Starship and Superheavy.
Either way, SpaceX continues to prove that freedom and private enterprise can do far more than government, and do it faster and cheaper as well.
Click for original image.
In what appeared to be a totally inexplicable press release today, NASA posted the two pictures of Uranus to the right. The accompanying text was truly puzzling, describing in a somewhat brainless and inaccurate manner what is in the pictures;
Two views of the planet Uranus appear side-by-side for comparison. At the top, left corner of the left image is a two-line label. The top line reads Uranus November 9, 2014. The bottoms line reads HST WFC3/UVIS. At the top, left corner of the right image is the label November 9, 2022. At the left, bottom corner of each image is a small, horizontal, white line. In both panels, over this line is the value 25,400 miles. Below the line is the value 40,800 kilometers. At the top, right corner of the right image are three, colored labels representing the color filters used to make these pictures. Located on three separate lines, these are F467M in blue, F547M in green, and F485M in red. On the bottom, right corner of the right image are compass arrows showing north toward the top and east toward the left. [emphasis mine]
First, the description doesn’t match the pictures precisely, as if whoever wrote it wasn’t looking at these pictures. Second, the description is ridiculously literal, and really provides no information at all. (Consider for example the highlighted sentence. All it is doing is describing a standard scale bar, in the strangest most stupid manner possible.)
I immediately surmised that someone at NASA has decided to use AI to do this work, and AI (in its typical stupid brilliance) provided this worthless text. The unnamed NASA employee — equally as stupid — then posted it without reading it, assuming AI had done his or her job perfectly.
What makes this display of stupidity even worse is that these pictures, and a real press release, were issued back in 2023, when I posted these pictures initially. Does no one at NASA ever bother to read their own press releases?
Apparently not. The advent of AI has now produced human employees at the space agency who read nothing, know nothing, and do nothing. They instead plug stuff into AI and pump it out to the public mindlessly.
No wonder Trump wants to slash NASA’s budget. We certainly ain’t getting our money’s worth from the people that are there.
I also fully expect NASA management to soon deep-six this press release, or to fix it quickly once they read this post.
Northrop Grumman and the rocket startup Firefly announced yesterday that the former has invested $50 million in the latter in order to develop a fully new rocket, dubbed Eclipse, with capabilities allowing it to compete with SpaceX for customers.
“Firefly is incredibly grateful for Northrop Grumman’s investment that further solidifies our first-of-its-kind partnership to build the first stage of Antares 330 and jointly develop Eclipse,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. “…With a 16 metric ton to orbit capability, Eclipse is a sweet spot for programs like NSSL Lane 1 and a natural fit to launch proliferated constellations in LEO, MEO, GEO, and TLI.”
Built upon Northrop Grumman’s Antares and Firefly’s Alpha rocket, Eclipse offers a significant leap in power, performance, production cadence, and payload capacity. The launch vehicle retains the flight-proven avionics from the Antares program with additional upgrades, including a larger 5.4 meter payload fairing. Eclipse also utilizes the same first stage Firefly is developing for Antares 330 and retains scaled-up versions of Alpha’s propulsion systems and carbon composite structures, allowing the team to rapidly build and test Eclipse with significant production efficiencies and economies of scale.
The companies say that because of its reliance on already proven launch rockets, they hope Eclipse’s first launch will take place in 2026 from Wallops Island.
As I noted yesterday, the demand for launch services — especially for heavier payloads — presently exceeds the supply, as already established rocket companies ULA and Blue Origin have so far failed to deliver as promised. Rocket Lab is developing its medium-lift Neutron expressly to grab this market. It now appears Northrop Grumman wants a share as well, and is partnering with Firefly to get it.
If all goes as planned this partnership will soon have two rockets to offer customers, the Antares 330 and Eclipse.
An evening pause: Some history that should never be forgotten, but sadly few now remember.
Hat tip Cotour.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
The Musk game plan for Mars exploration over the next few years.
It appears Elon Musk finally gave his public presentation to SpaceX employees today, entitled “The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary”, and had it posted on X.
I have embedded that presentation below.
After reviewing the present development program for Starship/Superheavy (without mentioning anything about this week’s flight), Musk then outlined the game plan for the the next few years, as shown in the graphic above. If all goes as planned (not to be expected), the first Starships will head to Mars in about eighteen months, at the next launch window near the end of 2026. These flights will be unmanned, and will require that by then SpaceX will have also developed orbital refueling capability.
Musk hopes the first manned missions will take place at the next launch window in 2028-29, with the number of ships increased from 5 to 20. Later windows will see 300 and then 500 ships launched. For those flights a lot of work will need to be done to make Starships function as interplanetary spaceships, something it appears SpaceX and Musk have not yet devoted much energy to.
As always, Musk’s target goals are ambitious and not likely to be met. But as always, his targets are not unreasonable, which means SpaceX will likely eventually get all this done but late by only one or several launch windows.
Musk also noted that this entire program is presently being funded by Starlink revenues. The government for SpaceX and Musk’s space exploration plans is largely now irrelevant. This fact is possibly the most historically significant revelation in his presentation.
I strongly recommend you watch his whole speech, if only to enjoy the “Wow!” factor.
The future is going to be exciting for sure.
Hat tip to reader Gary.
» Read more
A British map from 1700, with the Gulf of Mexico
labeled at “The Great Bay of Mexico”
The recent effort by Donald Trump to get the name of the Gulf of Mexico changed to the “Gulf of America” appears at first glance to have many laudable aspects, the most important of which his desire to energize the American people to have pride in their country. For too long young Americans have been indoctrinated with the anti-American Marxist poison pushed by our modern bankrupt academic community, and have thus been trained to think timidly and with hate about their own country.
Advocating this name change is Trump’s way of quickly countering that negativity. The United States is founded on noble principles — “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — and it has lived up to those ideals with remarkable success during its entire 250 year history. Thus, Americans have plenty to be proud of, and to Trump’s mind something needed to be done to underline that fact.
Hence, his push to change the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America.”
And yet, as much as I support his general effort to invigorate Americans to their glorious past, to my mind this particular effort by Trump is as false and as shallow as the left’s never-ending demands that we use new language for everything. American Indians should be “native Americans”, even though everyone born in the U.S. is native. “Chairman” must become “Chair” or “Chairperson,” even though such usage is ugly and unnecessary. Spaceflight can never be “manned,” football teams can’t be “Redskins,” and “communists” must now be called “progressives.”
And worst of all we must all use the pronouns demanded by perverts, even if when by doing so we are denying reality.
Such abuse of language offends me, as a writer. » Read more
YXZ-1 completing soft splashdown vertically.
Click for movie.
The Chinese pseudo-company Space Epoch (also called SEpoch) announced today a successfully hop test yesterday where its prototype YXZ-1 grasshopper-type test prototype completed a vertical launch to an altitude of about 1.5 miles, shut down its engines, then relit them to achieve a soft splashdown over water.
The test article used thin-walled stainless steel and had a diameter of 4.2 meters, a total height of 26.8 meters and a takeoff mass of about 57 tons, according to Space Epoch. The test lasted 125 seconds and reached around 2.5 kilometers in altitude. The test article used Longyun methane-liquid oxygen engines provided by [pseudo]-commercial firm Jiuzhou Yunjian (JZYJ).
Sepoch says the test has laid a solid foundation for the first full flight of the YXZ-1, also known as Hiker-1 in English, later this year.
Without question China’s pseudo-companies as well as its official state space divisions are aggressively pursuing reusable rockets, far more aggressively than any companies (other than SpaceX) in the west. There are at least nine Chinese pseudo-companies or government agencies testing rockets that can land vertically (Space Epoch, Landspace, Deep Blue, Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Space Pioneer, Ispace, Galactic Energy, Linkspace), with eight having attempted hop tests with mixed results.
In the west, only SpaceX is flying reusable rockets. Blue Origin’s New Glenn is supposed to be reusable, but it has only launched once and on that flight its first stage failed to land successfully. The company has only done hop flights with its small suborbital New Shepard spacecraft. Rocket Lab is building its reusable Neutron rocket, but it also has never done any hop tests with that rocket. Stoke Space plans a completely reusable rocket, with the second stage returning as well, and has done one short hop test of a prototype of that stage. Other rocket companies are designing or developing such rockets, but none have done any hop tests.
In general China’s rocket industry appears far ahead in this race.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.
The uncertainty of science: Scientists using three different instruments on the Mars orbiter MAVEN now believe they have detected evidence of the actual process in which Mars loses its atmosphere, dubbed “sputtering”.
To observe sputtering, the team needed simultaneous measurements in the right place at the right time from three instruments aboard the MAVEN spacecraft: the Solar Wind Ion Analyzer, the Magnetometer, and the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer. Additionally, the team needed measurements across the dayside and the nightside of the planet at low altitudes, which takes years to observe.
The combination of data from these instruments allowed scientists to make a new kind of map of sputtered argon in relation to the solar wind. This map revealed the presence of argon at high altitudes in the exact locations that the energetic particles crashed into the atmosphere and splashed out argon, showing sputtering in real time. The researchers also found that this process is happening at a rate four times higher than previously predicted and that this rate increases during solar storms.
This sputtering is believed to be the process in which Mars lost the thick atmosphere that scientists believe must have existed in the past so that liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. When MAVEN arrived in Mars orbit ten years ago the scientists actually thought the spacecraft would detect it relatively quickly. That it took ten years to finally find some evidence it is occurring suggests something is not quite right with their theories.
China today successfully launched a classified Earth observation satellite to do “national land surveys, environmental management and other fields,” its Long March 4B rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, which use very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
65 SpaceX
32 China
6 Rocket Lab
6 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 65 to 51.
Unastella rocket at launch
A South Korea rocket startup dubbed Unastella on May 28, 2025 successfully launched a small prototype suborbital rocket from its own launch site near the country’s southern coast.
UNA EXPRESS-I is 9.45 meters long and has a total weight of 2 tons. It is a small launch vehicle that uses kerosene (jet fuel) and liquid oxygen as fuel, with a thrust of 5 tons. The vehicle successfully completed its flight to the target distance of 10 kilometers and fell into the maritime safety zone set by Goheung County, the company stated. Park Jae-hong, the CEO of Unastella, noted, “For the first launch, we lowered the altitude for safety and extended the reach.”
This is South Korea’s second rocket startup that has launched a small test prototype, the first being Innospace which launched its test rocket from Brazil in 2023 and hopes to do an orbital launch before the end of the year.
It appears that South Korea is shifting successfully to the capitalism model. Back in 2023 it was trying to develop its government-built Nuri rocket, but that development seems to have stalled. Since then its newly formed space agency has established policies encouraging private space commercialization, which has apparently resulted in these two new rocket companies.
Click for original graphic.
The uncertainty of science: Using data collected by the Webb Space Telescope combined with modeling and lab experiments, scientists now think they have found evidence that Europa’s surface is constantly changing, with materials from its interior being brought to the surface.
This new study found crystalline ice on the surface as well as at depth in some areas on Europa, especially an area known as Tara Regio. “We think that the surface is fairly porous and warm enough in some areas to allow the ice to recrystallize rapidly,” said Dr. Richard Cartwright, lead author of the paper and a spectroscopist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “Also, in this same region, generally referred to as a chaos region, we see a lot of other unusual things, including the best evidence for sodium chloride, like table salt, probably originating from its interior ocean. We also see some of the strongest evidence for CO2 and hydrogen peroxide on Europa.”
…“Our data showed strong indications that what we are seeing must be sourced from the interior, perhaps from a subsurface ocean nearly 20 miles (30 kilometers) beneath Europa’s thick icy shell,” said [Dr. Ujjwal Raut of the Southwest Research Institute and co-author of the paper]. “This region of fractured surface materials could point to geologic processes pushing subsurface materials up from below. When we see evidence of CO2 at the surface, we think it must have come from an ocean below the surface.”
The graphic to the right shows the detected variations across the surface of Europa, based on the Webb spectroscopic data. It also illustrates nicely the coarseness of this data, its lack of resolution, and the uncertainties involved. The scientists have found evidence that suggests the surface is changing, but the key word here is “suggests”. They have not yet directly seen any actual changes, such as changes between two images taken at different times.
Nonetheless, the data does point in the right direction. Moreover, it would be far more unlikely if nothing on Europa changed. The fundamental question that remains unanswered is how fast things change there. And we won’t have any chance to answer this question until Europa Clipper enters Jupiter orbit in 2030 and begins multiply fly-bys of Europa.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
An evening pause: Performed live 2016. It ain’t some long-haired guy twiddling on a bass guitar, but her fingers as a nimble and as creative.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
To all: I am in need of more evening pause suggestions. If you have suggested before, you know the rules and the way to do it. Please send me stuff. If you haven’t suggested anything previously and have something you think would work, say so in a comment here — but don’t tell us what your suggestion is. I will email you to get it. The guidelines:
1. The subject line should say “evening pause.”
2. Please send only one suggestion per email.
3. Variety! Don’t send me five from the same artist. I can only use one. Pick your favorite and send that.
4. Live performance preferred.
5. Quirky technology, humor, and short entertaining films also work.
6. Suggestions should generally be short, less than 10 minutes, preferable under 5 minutes
7. Search BtB first to make sure your suggestion hasn’t already been posted.
8. I might not respond immediately, as I schedule these in a bunch.
9. Avoid the politics of the day. The pause is a break from such discussion.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
Israel food products, provided directly to Gazans.
Click for video.
Several news stories in the past few weeks suggest to me that we are beginning to see the first signs of the end game that will bring about the defeat of Hamas and the establishment of a sane society within the Gaza strip.
First, it appears that Hamas is short of cash, according to a news report from a Saudi newspaper and then re-reported by an Israeli news outlet.
Sources within the terror group revealed that Hamas is struggling to pay salaries — not only to government employees, but also to members of its military wing and staff in other affiliated bodies at all levels.
The sources added that the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, have not paid salaries to terrorists for approximately three months and are facing serious financial difficulties in acquiring essential equipment for their military operations.
One of the things that has propped Hamas up for decades has been its control of foreign aid. The money comes in and Hamas doles it out while keeping large portions for its own use. The distribution of money gives Hamas leverage, while the money it keeps reinforces its power. Under Trump that foreign aid spigot has been largely shut down, and this story suggests we are now seeing the first results of this policy.
Second, Israel is now taking over the direct distribution of humanitarian aid. In the past Hamas maintained its power over its citizens by acting as the go-between of food and medicine. Nothing would go to anyone unless Hamas got its dirty hands on it first. Often no aid at all would reach Gazans. Hamas would keep it all, shipping it underground to its tunnels for use later during siege. Or it would sell that aid on the black market, raising money to fund its terrorist operations.
Israel, in partnership with the United States, is now ending that vile practice.
» Read more
China today successfully launched Tianwen-2, its first mission attempting to return a sample from a near Earth asteroid, its Long March 3B rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China.
Video of the launch can be found here. The probe will take about a year to reach asteroid Kamo’oalewa, where it will fly in formation studying it for another year, during which time it will attempt to grab samples by two methods. One method is a copy of the touch-and-go technique used by OSIRIS-REx on Bennu. The second method, dubbed “anchor and attach,” is untried, and involves using four robot arms, each with their own drill.
Some data suggests Kamo’oalewa is possibly a fragment from the Moon, but that is not confirmed.
After a year studying Kamo-oalewa, Tienwen-2 will then return past the Earth where it will release its sample capsule. The spacecraft will then travel to Comet 311P/PANSTARRS, reaching it in 2034. This comet is puzzling because it has an asteroid-like orbit but exhibits activity similar to a comet.
As for the launch, there is no word where the Long March 3B’s lower stages and four strap-on boosters, all using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China. It should be noted that the video I link to above was taken by an ordinary citizen watching from a hill nearby, bringing with him a group of children as well. Considering the nature of the rocket’s fuel (which can dissolve your skin if it touches you), China’s attitude is remarkably sanguine to not only drop these stages on its people, but to allow tourists to get so close to launches.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
65 SpaceX
31 China (with one more launch scheduled later today)
6 Rocket Lab (with one launch scheduled for today SCRUBBED)
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 65 to 50.
Click for full resolution. For original images go here and here.
Click for interactive map.
Cool image time! The panorama above, created from two photographs taken on May 23, 2025 by the left navigation camera (here and here) on the Mars rover Curiosity, looks south uphill into the canyon that Curiosity is eventually going to climb.
The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position, the white dotted line its past travels, the red dotted line its initial planned route, and the green dotted line its future route. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area seen in the panorama above.
If you look on the horizon to the left, you can see very bright terrain higher up the mountain. This is the pure sulfate-bearing unit that is Curiosity’s next major geological goal. It won’t reach that terrain for quite some time however because first the scientists want to spend some time studying the boxwork geology that Curiosity is now approaching. That boxwork suggests two past geological processes, as yet unconfirmed. First it suggests the ground dried like mud, forming a polygon pattern of cracks that then hardened into rock. Second, lava seeped up from below and filled those cracks. The lava, being more resistant to erosion, ended up becoming the boxwork of ridges as the material around eroded away.
This proposed history however is not proven. They hope to find out when Curiosity gets there.
Meanwhile, despite having traveled almost 22 miles, the rover is more than 25 miles from the peak of Mount Sharp, which remains out of sight. That peak is also about 15,000 feet higher.
Click for original image.
Scientists analyzing the Martian geology of the meandering outflow canyon from Jezero Crater, now think it was formed by four different very short-lived events when the theorized lake inside the crater overflowed the crater rim.
The map to the right, figure 1 of the paper (cropped and annotated to post here), provides the context. Two canyons, Sava Vallis and Neretva Vallis feed into Jezero Crater, and one canyon, Pliva Vallis, flows out. From the abstract:
By examining the shape of the valley, we noticed that Pliva Vallis was not like valleys carved by continuous rivers on Earth and propose instead that the valley was carved by at least four episodes of lake overflow. To give a minimum estimate of the duration of these events, we use a numerical model to simulate the overflow of a lake and the incision of a valley. Modeling suggests that the four (or more) episodes identified each incised part of the valley and that each episode lasted a few weeks at maximum.
The researchers also considered whether Pliva Vallis could have been carved by glacial flows, but rejected that possibility partly because “the general morphology of the valley shows a decrease in depth and width downstream, while subglacial channels [on Earth] tend to remain of similar width or become larger, as the flow regime does not decrease downstream.”
These conclusions of course carry a great deal of uncertainty. For one, they are based solely on orbital data. No ground truth exists as yet. Secondly, they assume the geology on Mars behaves in the same manner as on Earth. It could very well be for example that the reason the valley shrinks in size is because its Martian glacier sublimated away as flowed downhill, something that doesn’t happen on Earth.
Regardless, the data strongly suggests that water shaped Jezero in some manner.
ASKAP J1832 circled. Note the red arc denoting
the supernovae remnant. Click for original image.
Using both the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Square Kilometer Array in Australia, astronomers have discovered a star that pulses in both X-rays and and radio frequencies in a manner previously unseen and that fit no known theory.
ASKAP J1832 belongs to a class of objects called “long period radio transients,” discovered in 2022, that vary in radio wave intensity in a regular way over tens of minutes. This is thousands of times longer than the length of the repeated variations seen in pulsars, which are rapidly spinning neutron stars that have repeated variations multiple times a second. ASKAP J1832 cycles in radio wave intensity every 44 minutes, placing it into this category of long period radio transients.
Using Chandra, the team discovered that ASKAP J1832 is also regularly varying in X-rays every 44 minutes. This is the first time that such an X-ray signal has been found in a long period radio transient.
…However, that is not all ASKAP J1832 does. Using Chandra and the SKA Pathfinder, the team found that ASKAP J1832 also dropped off in X-rays and radio waves dramatically over the course of six months. This combination of the 44-minute cycle in X-rays and radio waves in addition to the months-long changes is unlike anything astronomers have seen in the Milky Way galaxy.
The false-color X-ray/radio image to the right shows the star (circled). Based on the data, it is unlikely that the star is a neutron star or a pulsar. Its properties also do not fit with a magnetar (a pulsar with a very strong magnetic field). Though located within a supernova remnant, the astronomers determined this to be a coincidence, the star unrelated to the remnant.
The best explanation so far is that this is a white dwarf with a companion and the strongest magnetic field ever conceived. The astronomers however do not appear enthused by that explanation either.
Psyche’s flight path to the asteroid Psyche.
Click for original image.
In troubleshooting a significant drop in pressure in the xenon gas fuel lines to the ion engines of the Psyche asteroid probe, engineers have now pinpointed the problem to a failed valve and have switched to a back-up fuel line.
Powered by two large solar arrays, Psyche’s thrusters ionize and expel xenon gas to gently propel the spacecraft, which gradually picks up speed during its journey. The team paused the four electric thrusters in early April to investigate an unexpected drop in pressure. They determined that a mechanical issue in one of the valves, which open and close to manage the flow of propellant, caused the decrease. Through extensive testing and diagnostic work, the team concluded that a part inside one of the valves is no longer functioning as expected and is obstructing the flow of xenon to the thrusters.
Now that the swap to the backup fuel line is completed, engineers will command the spacecraft’s thrusters to resume firing by mid-June.
This issue had to be resolved before that scheduled firing in June or else Psyche would have fallen off its course to reach the metal asteroid Psyche by August 2029.
The beat goes on! SpaceX this morning successfully placed another 27 Starlink satellites into orbit (including 13 with cell-to-satellite capabilities), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The first stage completed its nineteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
65 SpaceX
30 China (with two launches scheduled later today)
6 Rocket Lab (with one launch scheduled for today SCRUBBED)
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 65 to 49.
Starship in orbit before losing its attitude control
SpaceX today was able to successfully launch Starship and Superheavy on its ninth test flight, lifting off from SpaceX’s Starbase spaceport at Boca Chica.
The Superheavy booster completed its second flight, with one of its Raptor engines actually flying for the third time. Rather than recapture it with the launchpad chopsticks, engineers instead decided to push its re-entry capabilities to their limit. The booster operated successfully until it was to make its landing burn over the Gulf of Mexico, but when the engines ignited all telemetry was lost. Apparently that hard re-entry path was finally too much for the booster.
Starship reached orbit and functioned successfully for the first twenty minutes or so. When engineers attempted a test deployment of some dummy Starlink satellites, the payload door would not open properly. The engineers then closed the door and canceled the deployment.
Subsequently leaks inside the spacecraft with its attitude thrusters caused the attitude system to shut down and Starship started to spin in orbit. At that point the engineers cancelled the Raptor engine relight burn. The spacecraft then descended over the Indian Ocean as planned, but in an uncontrolled manner. Mission control then vented its fuel to reduce its weight and explosive condition. It essentially broke up over the ocean, with data was gathered on the thermal system until all telemetry was lost.
Though overall this was a much more successful flight than the previous two, both of which failed just before or as Starship reached orbit, the test flight once again was unable to do any of its objectives in orbit. It did no deployment test, no orbital Raptor engine burn test, and no the re-entry tests of Starship’s thermal protection system. Obviously the engineers gathered a great deal of data during the flight, but far less than hoped for.
SpaceX has a lot of Superheavy and Starship prototypes sitting in the wings. I expect it will attempt its next flight test, the tenth, relatively quickly, by July at the very latest. I also do not expect the FAA to stand in the way. It will once again accept SpaceX’s investigative conclusions instantly and issue a launch license, when SpaceX stays it is ready to launch.
As Starship reached orbit as planned, I am counting this as a successfully launch. The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
64 SpaceX
30 China
6 Rocket Lab
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 64 to 49.
