July 30, 2025 Quick space links
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.
- Blue Origin touts its progress in reducing propellant boil-off while stored in tanks in space
This capability is essential for creating viable orbiting fuel depots.
- Astronomers claim to have detected a rogue exoplanet floating unattached to any star, using microlensing
Need I say it?
- A video overview of what we now know about Interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas
Not much new information, though it does describe briefly the unlikely (and very unrealistic) proposal of sending one of the Mars orbiters to rendezvous with it.
- Chinese pseudo-company AZSpace shows off its fully assembled Dear-5 cargo freighter
Its launch is now scheduled for August. It is not clear if it will dock with Tiangong-3, resupplying it, or is instead a free-flyer that will return to Earth for recovery.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.
- Blue Origin touts its progress in reducing propellant boil-off while stored in tanks in space
This capability is essential for creating viable orbiting fuel depots.
- Astronomers claim to have detected a rogue exoplanet floating unattached to any star, using microlensing
Need I say it?
- A video overview of what we now know about Interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas
Not much new information, though it does describe briefly the unlikely (and very unrealistic) proposal of sending one of the Mars orbiters to rendezvous with it.
- Chinese pseudo-company AZSpace shows off its fully assembled Dear-5 cargo freighter
Its launch is now scheduled for August. It is not clear if it will dock with Tiangong-3, resupplying it, or is instead a free-flyer that will return to Earth for recovery.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
“Need I say it?”
Yes I laughed..
And I laughed again when I read the article.
“”Based on the microlensing event’s properties, Mroz and colleagues were able to estimate that the lensing body object could be either a Neptune-mass planet located in the Milky Way’s galactic disk, around 15,000 light-years away. Alternatively, the rogue world could be a larger but more distant Saturn-mass object in the Milky Way’s galactic bulge, roughly 23,000 light-years away.””
“Both scenarios are consistent with the microlensing signal we observed,” Mroz said
You all know how I feel about incoherent light being seen as coherent light without a correcting lens. (light distorted into individual wave lengths and spread out like a rainbow through a gravitational prism, without another correcting prism to bring the light back together into the original coherent form)
Uranus recently passed in front of a star for 400 ly away, we learned about a lot about that planet but nothing about microlensing.
https://scitechdaily.com/nasa-just-got-a-rare-look-inside-uranus-heres-what-they-found/
Again, A star passed behind Neptune in 2022. (occultations)
But no mention of microlensing of the star.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/a-deep-dive-into-the-neptune-system-with-jwst
If microlensing was going to happen, the best telescopes and instruments we have would have documented the occurrence having happened in our own system.
There are three phenomenon that can cause the bending of light, a magnetstar’s strong magnetic field can, just like in super colliders. Black holes and Stars nearing black hole status can do it with time distortion…. which changes the amplitude and frequency of the light.(dimming and changing its color/red shift) And of course with “gravity” which distorts the “space” that the light travels in. (when the light exits the distortion field, it will no longer be coherent but broken down into its frequency waveform and scattered across the spectrum)
Re: Rogue Exoplanet.
When large enough and good enough observational tools are developed, we will find that the space-time continuum has been warped by gravity waves, and the “Rogue Planet” is actually a future Earth.
The Wandering Earth
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7605074/
On heat shield materials
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-dome-aerogel-architecture-superior-toughness.html
“To push the limitations of aerogel performance, the researchers developed aerogels that exhibit remarkable superelasticity—enduring 99% strain over 20,000 cycles—and exceptional thermal shock resistance at 2273 K across more than 100 cycles.”
Looking beneath
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-4d-images-shield-spacecraft-surface.html
“Rather than completely burning up when a spacecraft reenters Earth’s atmosphere, its heat shield’s outer surface is sacrificed to protect the rest of the vehicle. The carbon fibers decompose, dissipating the heat.”
“It was assumed that this only happens on the surface, but in a recent study, researchers from the Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and four other institutions gained new information about how the protective carbon fiber material evolves, not just at the surface, but beneath, where structural failure could occur and threaten the life of the vehicle.”