Category: Behind The Black

Corroding glacial debris inside Martian crater

11:30 am

Corroding glacial debris inside Martian crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 5, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “irregular cellular structures on crater floor.” Located at 46 degrees south latitude in the Martian southern cratered highlands, we are likely looking at glacial debris that has been significantly corroded, the near surface ice sublimating away in patches because the dirt and dust that protects it has for some reason done a poor job.

In this case however the sublimation has produced these very strange features, very different than corroding subsurface ice features seen elsewhere on Mars. Reminds me of peeling paint, but even that analogy falls short.
» Read more

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ESA finalizes contract for privately built cubesat lander as part of its Ramses mission to Apophis

9:36 am

Apophis' path past the Earth in 2029
A cartoon (not to scale) showing Apophis’s
path in 2029.

The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday announced it has issued the full contract with private startup EMXYS to build its Don Quijote cubesat lander for ESA’s Ramses mission to go to the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it flies by the Earth in April 2029.

EMXYS, a Spanish company, previously built a gravity-measuring instrument for the cubesat Juventas, which is flying on ESA’S Hera mission presently on its way to the binary asteroid Didymos/Dimorphos.

Francesca Ingiosi, overseeing Ramses’ CubeSats, notes: “There won’t be time for sustained human oversight: Don Quijote is going to take itself down on a completely autonomous basis, relying on feature tracking to find a safe place to land. It will be running its gravimeter and magnetometer when it flies, but we have high expectations for its scientific work on the surface.

“It will come down quite slowly, but in the ultra-low gravity of Apophis some bouncing along the surface is possible. The CubeSat is therefore designed to operate from any orientation, although the precise nature of the surface remains a question mark: there is even a small possibility that Don Quijote sinks into the ground, which would not be good!

The launch window for Ramses is in the spring 2028, so the schedule to get this cubesat built is very tight.

Below is a list of the missions going to Apophis in 2029:
» Read more

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German rocket startup Isar wins another launch contract

9:03 am

Isar's first launch attempt fails
Spectrum falling seconds after its launch
in March 2025

Even though it has now spent six months repeatedly scrubbing the second launch attempt of its Spectrum rocket (the first was a failure), the German rocket startup Isar yesterday announced it has won another launch contract, this time from the German subsidiary of satellite imaging company Planet.

Under the agreement, Isar Aerospace will launch one of Planet’s next-generation high-resolution Pelican satellites, with additional satellites planned for future launches. The Pelican is scheduled to fly on Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum launch vehicle, currently scheduled as early as late 2026 from Isar Aerospace’s dedicated launch complex at Andøya Space. The Pelican will be assembled in Planet’s upcoming Berlin manufacturing facility. With both satellite and rocket being built in Germany, this launch will be a national first for the country, demonstrating rapid advancements in the nation’s sovereign space capabilities.

Isar already has contracts with the satellite repair companies Astroscale and D-Orbit, the satellite aggregators Exolaunch and SEOPS, the European Space Agency, and Norway.

As for the rocket itself, the launch is now tentatively scheduled for sometime in July. The company first attempted a launch in January, then in March, then in June. All were scrubbed due to technical issues.

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Katalyst’s Link rescue spacecraft launched successfully

8:41 am

Katalyst's proposed Swift rescue mission
Katalyst’s proposed Swift rescue mission.
Click for original image.

Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus rocket this morning successfully launched the Link rescue spacecraft built by the startup Katalyst, aimed at rendezvousing and grabbing the Gehrels-Swift telescope and raising its orbit.

A mission to raise the altitude of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is underway after launching at 8:36 p.m. Marshall Islands Time (4:36 a.m. EDT), Friday, July 3, from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean.

LINK, a robotic servicing spacecraft built by Katalyst Space, launched into orbit on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, which was deployed by the company’s Stargazer, a modified L-1011 aircraft, at an altitude of about 40,000 feet.

The actual rescue won’t occur for several weeks, as the Katalyst team will spend several weeks checking out the spacecraft’s systems to make sure all is working as intended. Once this is assured, they will begin to slowly move towards Swift:

As it approaches, LINK will collect and send images of Swift to the ground, where teams at Katalyst and NASA will assess the planned grab points. This rendezvous and capture will be a slow and careful process that could take about a month.

Once its robotic arms are attached to Swift, LINK can begin to slowly push Swift upward. Over the course of a few months, LINK will attempt to return Swift close to its original launch altitude. Then, LINK will detach, leaving Swift in its new orbit.

The Gehrels-Swift team will then return the telescope to its operational status, following the same commissioning procedures used when the telescope was first placed in orbit in 2004.

As for the launch, this was Northrop Grumman’s second launch in 2026, and the last Pegasus launch ever. The air-launched rocket is now retired. It was created in the 1980s by the rocket startup Orbital Sciences with the intent to provide a low cost launch option. It launched a total of 46 times (with three failures in the early years), but in the past two decades it could not compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

79 SpaceX
42 China
10 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
8 Russia

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 79 to 74.

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Sunspot update: The ramp down to solar minimum continued to stall in June

8:25 am

As I have tried to do every month since I started Behind the Black sixteen years ago, it is time for another sunspot update tracking the Sun’s sunspot activity as it evolves across its eleven year cycle. As always, I use as my basis the monthly update by NOAA of its graph showing the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere but annotated by me with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

As you can see by that graph below, June activity (the green dot) was only slightly less that in May, indicating a continuing stall in the ramp down to solar minimum, a ramp down that NOAA’s panel of solar scientists had predicted had begun in April 2025.

» Read more

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Skyroot announces launch window for 1st launch of Vikram-1 rocket

8:01 am

Vikram-1 stacked on the launchpad
Vikram-1 stacked on the launchpad

India’s rocket startup Skyroot yesterday announced that its first Vikram-1 rocket is stacked on the launchpad and the company now has a launch window from July 12 through August 4, 2026.

It will attempt to reach a 450 kilometer orbit at a 60 degree inclination. The launch is mostly to test the rocket’s systems, including its guidance and navigation as well as its ability to complete a stage separation and ignition of its second stage. The company says it will also carry several small commercial payloads from both Indian and international customers, but it did not name them.

Few new rockets succeed on their first launch attempt, but it does happen. For India this launch and company are the equivalent of SpaceX in the U.S. in 2006. At that time NASA ran everything. The big space rocket companies (Boeing and Lockheed Martin) had no interest in innovation or competition, and in fact had formed a partnership holding a monopoly on all military launches, while acting almost like the rocket division for those government agencies.

In India now, its space agency ISRO runs everything, including building and flying the nation’s rockets. The Modi government has been trying to get the agency to transfer ownership and management of those rockets to private companies, but the results have been inconclusive. ISRO has transferred some operations and management to private companies for two of its rockets, but done so in a way that ownership and control still remains with the agency.

A success by Skyroot would for the first time create a real alternative to the government agency. But like SpaceX in 2006, the full transition to a private space industry will likely take an additional decade or more. But a success now would be a start.

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1776 – The 250th anniversary of the egg hatching

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Two hundred and fifty years ago today a small group of men gathered in Philadelphia to ratify a very radical document. They called it the Declaration of Independence, with its main purpose to declare to the world the reasons the thirteen North American British colonies wanted to break free from the rule of Great Britain. The job to write it had been given to a committee comprised of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman, but in the end the committee dumped the job on Thomas Jefferson.

He produced a document that will be read for many generations into the future, long after the United States falls into dust, because it outlines the basic fundamentals of freedom, government, and human existence. The full text and some background information can be found here, but all you really need to know is this line:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Americans were declaring to the world that their nation would be built on the idea that its people would be free, and its government’s sole function would be to let them pursue happiness. Think about how simple and almost silly that idea is. And yet, 250 years later, it still rings true, and produces a nation more prosperous and joyous than any nation on Earth.

The song below, called “Hatching an Egg,” is from the 1976 musical 1776. I have posted it many times before, because it is not only a great song, but it is remarkably accurate. It captures the personalities of these Founding Fathers perfectly. We are a nation of freedom-loving eccentrics, founded by individuals as eccentric and as freedom-loving.

Enjoy! And celebrate our anniversary this weekend, as John Adams proclaimed, with “pomp and parade, with shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.”

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July 2, 2026 Quick space links

2:52 pm

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.

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Long term monitoring of the dry-ice cap at the Martian south pole

12:23 pm

Long term monitoring of the dry-ice cap at the Martian south pole
For original images go here and here.

Cool image time! The two pictures to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, were taken more than two decades apart by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The show a specific spot on the Martian south pole ice cap, at a location where there is also a perennial cap of dry ice that is also slowly shrinking in size.

The top picture was taken on May 14, 2007, the first close-up of this location. At the time the science team titled it “Fast Evolution of Landforms on the Southern Residual Caps,” which suggests that even then they had a sense from one earlier MRO picture that these strange forms were changing. As a result, scientist have used MRO to monitor this site repeatedly over the years, taking dozens of images of this location on a regular basis to track changes, both seasonally and over years.

The bottom picture is the most recent, taken on May 3, 2026. If you compare the two pictures closely, you can see that all these depressions have grown in some manner over the past two decades. (The blobs you see are all depressions. Optically your mind might make them appear as humps, but they are actually places where the cap’s top layer of dry ice has sublimated away.)
» Read more

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Academic publisher Springer Nature to divest itself of woke Scientific American

10:14 am

Scientific American logo
About to go the way of the dodo.

As the saying goes, “Go woke, go broke.” The academic publisher Springer Nature has now announced it is selling off its two consumer magazines, Scientific American and the German Spektrum der Wissenschaft, stating that it wishes “to focus on its core global publishing activities across research, health and education.”

I don’t know about the German magazine, but I do know that Scientific American has become a junk and very woke publication in recent years, unreliable for good reporting as its editorial policy has been instead to push a variety of leftists tropes, from queer sex theories to Covid falsehoods. As the article at the link notes,

The low-lights from the magazine’s stack of articles include:

  • Scientific American colluding with other media to normalize “climate emergency” terminology, despite vast swaths of scientific evidence showing the Earth’s climate has continuously changed over 4 billion years.
  • The magazine pushing “birth parent” terminology, which is utter nonsense in the face of real biology.
  • The magazine offering a ridiculous take on football injuries…tying them to racism.
  • Endorsing Kamala Harris for President.

Other examples of the magazine pushing junk science can be seen here and here.

The article above also notes the interesting timing of this announcement, just before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was to approve the union its writer staff has recently overwhelming voted for. The unionization was supposedly about “compensation, workload, job security,” but it also included the demand for “editorial independence”, the typical code words used by the leftist journalists to demand the ability to write whatever they want, even if the magazine’s owners protest.

Well, rather than protest, this magazine’s owners decided to fire the magazine entirely.

Hat tip to reader Gary.

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Military contractor Anduril experiences engine explosion during static fire test

9:49 am

The military contractor Anduril, which builds a variety of space-based technologies mostly for the Pentagon, had a solid rocket motor explode during static fire test last week at its facility in Mississippi.

According to a statement by the company’s CEO, no one was hurt, and the company was assessing the damage and pinpointing the cause of the explosion.

A solid rocket motor exploded during a test fire at our factory in Mississippi. Most importantly, no one was hurt. The safety systems worked exactly as designed. The team responded exactly the way they’ve trained to, and damages to our test stand were minimal. By the end of the day everyone was already focused on understanding what went wrong and getting ready for the next test.

In 2023 Anduril had acquired the solid-fueled rocket motor company Adranos, and has since been developing these motors for missile use. The company has also partnered with Rocket Lab as part of that company’s 20-launch Pentagon deal for testing hypersonic technology with its HASTE suborbital version of its Election rocket.

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FAA eases supersonic flight restrictions over U.S., as per Trump order from 2025

9:36 am

In accordance with an executive order issued by President Trump in 2025, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on June 30, 2026 announced new regulations on supersonic flights over the United States, easing the half-century-old restrictions that prevented such flights.

You can read the proposed regulations here [pdf]. It states the following:

As directed by [Trump’s Executive Order] 14304, FAA proposes to repeal the prohibition on civil supersonic flight in the U.S. contained in 14 CFR § 91.817 by revising the current regulatory text in § 91.817 to provide an interim noise-based operating certification standard. Further, the proposed revision would provide the conditions under which operators may engage in civil supersonic flight without the need for a special flight authorization (SFA) to exceed Mach 1, an operation-specific authorization that does not allow for civil supersonic flight outside of research and testing purposes in isolated test areas.

To enable supersonic flight operations in the U.S., this proposal would require (1) the aircraft be operated such that sonic boom overpressure at the surface does not exceed 0.11 pound per square foot (psf), (2) the Administrator finds that the operator has shown, through measurement, modeling, or other methods, that primary and secondary (direct and indirect) sonic boom overpressure at the surface does not exceed 0.11 psf during operations, and (3) the aircraft be operated in compliance with any conditions and limitations issued by the Administrator.

It is very likely this regulation was informed by the supersonic flight tests conducted by Boom Supersonic in 2025, where its plane broke the sound barrier three times during a flight with no significant sonic booms.

The FAA hopes to get this new regulation finalized by mid-2027.

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Three launches from SpaceX, ULA, and China

9:15 am

Since yesterday there have been three confirmed launches by SpaceX, ULA, and China, with a fourth by China not yet confirmed.

First, SpaceX launched 24 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The first stage (B1100) completed its 7th flight (37 days after its previous flight), landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

Next, ULA placed 29 more Amazon Leo satellites into orbit, its Atlas-5 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This was ULA’S last Atlas-5 launch for Amazon, and its fifth launch in 2026. The rocket is being retired, and the remaining six Atlas-5s in stock are all presently reserved by Boeing for launching its Starliner capsule. Since that capsule has no present missions, it is very possible Boeing will sell these launches to Amazon, though this has not yet happened.

As for Amazon, these 29 satellites brings the total in orbit at this time to 396. According to its FCC license, it must place 3032 in orbit by July 30, 2029. Getting those satellite in orbit on time remains a challenge, as two of the rockets the company is relying on (ULA’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn) are grounded, and Arianespace’s Ariane-6 has a somewhat slow launch cadence. It also has a ten-launch contract with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, but that won’t be sufficient to meet its needs.

Finally, China today launched a new ocean observation satellites, its Long March 4B rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China. China’s state-run press provided no information about where the rocket’s lower stages, which use very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed.

China had another launch scheduled today, but as of posting no word of that launch has been released.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

79 SpaceX
42 China
10 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
8 Russia

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 79 to 73.

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Launch of Katalyst’s Swift rescue mission scrubbed

8:46 am

The launch early this morning of Katalyst’s Link rescue mission to raise the orbit of the Gehrels-Swift space telescope was scrubbed due to a “launch vehicle issue” with the Northrop Grumman Pegasus rocket.

After takeoff of the L-1011 aircraft carrying the Pegasus XL, a launch vehicle issue temporarily prevented teams from deploying the rocket. The date of the next launch attempt for this mission to boost NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory will be determined after teams have reviewed data from today’s attempt.

NASA provided no further information. This is the last Pegasus rocket existing, as the company ceased its production several years ago, with its last launch in 2021. Overall it had only been launched five times in the past sixteen years, a cadence so slow it means launch crews now are likely inexperienced or very rusty.

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Texas gives out $1 billion to corporate internet providers as part of federal BEAD program

3:19 pm

The state of Texas today announced the 17 internet providers (all big corporations) that it awarded $1 billion in grants under the federal government’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, ostensibly designed to help companies bring fast internet to remote rural areas, but has instead become a perfect example of crony capitalism, welfare for big corporations that don’t need the money but make the right political donations to the right politicians.

The list of companies that won awards is revealing. Rather than list them all, however, consider these three, the highest, lowest, and most well known:

  • Nexstream: $401,831,807 for fiber and fixed wireless to 32,404 locations
  • VTX Communications: $2,120,407 for fiber and fixed wireless to 261 locations
  • Starlink: $108,787,903 for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite to 63,887 locations

In other words, Nexstream and VTX got grants of $12,400 and $8,124 for each location it provided service, while SpaceX only got $1,703, even though SpaceX by itself provided service to almost 1/4 of all the locations listed across the entire state, 63K out of 209K total. My guess is that the other companies spread the political wealth judiciously to the right people, something that SpaceX almost never does.

Even so, this distribution is far better than during the Biden administration, when it rescinded its grant to Starlink, claiming it had failed to provide any rural internet service, when in fact it was practically the only internet company successfully doing so. That rescinding occurred at almost the same time Musk revealed he was going to support the Republican Party.

Having noted this improvement, I still think this entire program is the worst sort of Washington corruption, and should be canceled. It is a waste of tax dollars — money we don’t have — going to companies that are already making huge profits from their own customers.

A side note: Five companies applied for grants and were denied, with Amazon’s Leo being the most recognizable. Amazon asked for $1.145 million, but since it hasn’t provided service yet to a single customer, its Leo constellation not yet operational, the Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO) rightly denied the request. Thank god for small blessings!

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Chandra data finds the Milky Way is bigger in size than previously believed

1:11 pm

The Milky Way is bigger than we thought
Click for original movie.

Using X-ray data from both the X-ray space telescopes Chandra and XMM-Newton, scientist now think the Milky Way is bigger in size than previously believed, with its three outer arms winding around the galactic center at a greater distance.

The two artist conceptions to the right show the difference before and after. The top image shows the previously conceived positions of the three outer arms on the right. The bottom image shows the new position as estimated by this data, about 10% farther out from the Milky Way’s center with the arms more widely spaced.

The researchers used three different gamma-ray bursts to determine the distances to three spiral arms in the Milky Way. In order of increasing distances from the Galactic Center, they are the Perseus, the Outer, and the Outer Scutum-Centaurus arms. Along the direction of one of the bursts, they found that both the Outer and Outer Scutum-Centaurus arms are about 10% more distant than astronomers previously thought.

“The differences are small, but any revision of these distances is important because they are so fundamental for understanding our galaxy,” said co-author Ilaria Fornasiero, who was a PhD student in the same program as the leading author. “For example, this could mean that astronomers have to revise estimates of the mass of the galaxy, because that affects how wide the arms stretch.”

There is a lot of uncertainty in this result. Because we are inside the Milky Way, we really cannot see what it looks like. In fact, though they know it is a spiral galaxy, astronomers are not even sure what classification it falls into. Many studies say it is a barred spiral, but the size and magnitude of that bar is unconfirmed. In this study it appears they considered the bar less prominent.

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The rocky surface of Gediz Vallis on Mars came from landslides and water-induced debris flows from above

12:46 pm

Looking south inside Gediz Vallis
Looking uphill into Gediz Vallis, in 2024, when this research was being done.

Overview map
This map from 2024 provides the context for the panorama above.
Click for interactive map.

Using the data the rover Curiosity gathered during its exploration of the canyon dubbed Gediz Vallis on the lower flanks of Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons) inside Gale Crater on Mars, scientists have concluded that the rocky material came from above, flowing downhill in the far past in major boulder landslides and water-induced debris flows.

The panorama above was taken when Curiosity was in Gediz Vallis. The overview map to the right provides the context, with the white dotted line showing Curiosity’s actual travels, and the yellow lines indicating the approximate area covered by the panorama. From the paper’s abstract:

Curiosity investigated Gediz Vallis, a canyon within Aeolis Mons, indicating that it must have formed late in Gale’s history. At the center of Gediz Vallis is a topographic ridge, comprised of sedimentary rocks. In the region where Curiosity crossed the ridge, Arc Pass, the rover investigated the processes that formed the ridge.

Curiosity found that rocks in Arc Pass were formed by water flows rich in debris, and landslides, which originated from higher up Aeolis Mons. These transport processes were separated by episodes of wind erosion and alteration of the rocks by groundwater. These observations indicate that liquid water continued to be available for brief periods late in the history of both Gale crater and Mars. [emphasis mine]

As noted by the highlighted sentence, the geology once again says that water in some form shaped the surface. As the scientists add in the paper, however, “Any surface water was likely only intermittently available, interspersed with significant hiatuses of aeolian erosion and dry granular transport processes.” It remains to be seen exactly what state that water was in, whether liquid or ice, considering that Mars has always been too cold with too thin an atmosphere for liquid water to exist on the surface.

Curiosity spent more than a year in this part of Gediz Vallis, then traversed west into the parallel canyon, dubbed Valle Grande, that it has been climbing for the past two years.

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