Category: Behind The Black

The beauty of Mars’ many-layered northern icecap

12:45 pm

The beauty of Mars' ice cap
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 1, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels it clumsily as “North Polar layered deposits structural geology in icy layers”. What we see are the many layers that make up the north polar cap, produced by the red planet’s many climate cycles that scientists think Mars has undergone over the eons as the red planet’s rotational tilt, or obliquity, rocked back and forth from 11 degrees inclination to as much as 60 degrees. At the extremes, the ice cap was either growing or shrinking, while today (at 25 degrees inclination) it appears to be in a steady state.

These layers are a mixture of ice and dust. The variations from dark to light likely indicate changes in the amount of dust in the atmosphere. Dark layers suggest the atmosphere was more dusty due to volcanic eruptions. Light layers suggest the planet’s volcanic activity was more subdued.

At least that’s one hypothesis.
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On the road today

7:36 am

Diane and I are on the road today, leaving the Grand Canyon, which remains as grand as ever, and heading to Colorado to visit friends we haven’t seen since before the COVID panic.

Thus, I will likely not be able to watch today’s third attempt by SpaceX to complete the tenth launch of its Starship/Superheavy rocket, as it happens.. (Live stream can be found here.)

Once settled in Colorado I will catch up. Like you all, I have my fingers crossed that the launch will go off as hoped with a largely successful test flight.

One fortunate thing that has occurred during the previous two launch attempts in the past two days is that it appears the protest of boats proposed by a Mexico radical activist group to block the launch has so appeared to be a bust. There has been no indication of any boats entering the launch range in the Gulf of Mexico, and if any have tried, it appears they have been removed quickly.

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China launches 10 more satellites in its Guowang constellation

7:06 am

China today successfully launched another ten satellites for its Guowang internet constellation, its Long March 8A rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.

This was the tenth launch for the Guowang constellation, which eventually intends to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink with a constellation of 13,000 satellites. Today’s launch brings the number of satellites presently in orbit to 82.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

104 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 104 to 84.

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Webb and SPHEREx space telescopes observe interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas

10:59 pm

Both the Webb Space Telescope and the newer SPHEREx space telescopes have now been aimed by scientists at the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas.

According to the paper describing the Webb results, the comet’s coma is dominated by carbon dioxide gas.

The SPHEREx results [pdf] also show a strong signal of carbon dioxice in the coma, as well as a strong signal of water ice in its nucleus.

These results, along with all the observations by multiple other telescopes in space and on the ground, are in line with what is expected from a comet, with the kind of unique differences expected from each object. There is nothing seen so far from the data to suggest anything alien about it, despite the claims of some pubicity-seeking scientists who don’t even specialize in comet research.

The big scientific discovery here is that this interstellar comet is so much like comets that come from our own solar system. The implication is that other solar systems have great similarities to our own. .

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Cargo Dragon docks with ISS

10:43 pm

The unmanned cargo Dragon that SpaceX launched on August 24, 2025 successfully docked with ISS earlier today.

At 7:05 a.m. EDT, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked to the forward port of the International Space Station’s Harmony module. The spacecraft carried over 5,000 pounds of scientific investigations and cargo to the orbiting laboratory on SpaceX’s 33rd commercial resupply services mission for NASA.

It will remained docked for the next several months.

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August 25, 2025 Quick space links

3:25 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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Wind-eroded terrain on the edge of Mars’ largest volcanic ash field

12:36 pm

Wind-eroded terrain in Mars' largest volcanic ash field

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 2, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Labeled simply as “wavy terrain” by the MRO science team, it shows a relatively flat plain of hollows and terraced ridges that suggest the prevailing winds come from the west-southwest. As they blow, they slowly cause the layers of material to peel away, exposing those terraces.

This wavy landscape extends for many miles to the west, covering a region 135 by 160 miles in area. The layering and wavy nature of the terrain suggests the material here is fragile and easily peeled away by the winds of Mars’ very thin atmosphere. Think of the sandstone that forms Monument Valley and Canyonlands in the southwest United States, shaped almost entirely by wind.

And in fact, the overview map below confirms this.
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Contact re-established with Jupiter probe Juice after a month

6:48 am

After losing all communications with Europe’s probe Juice on July 16th, on its way to Jupiter, engineers have finally re-established communications and found the spacecraft to be in sound condition.

Six attempts to steer the medium-gain antenna back towards Earth were unsuccessful. Recovery efforts continued overnight, lasting almost 20 hours and focusing on manually powering up Juice’s onboard communication systems.

Eventually, a command succeeded in reaching Juice and triggering a response. The command activated the signal amplifier that boosts the strength of the signal that Juice sends towards Earth. Contact was re-established, and Juice was found to be in excellent condition. No systems had failed, and all telemetry was nominal.

The root cause was traced to a software timing bug. The software function that switches the signal amplifier on and off relies on an internal timer. This timer is constantly counting up and restarts from zero once every 16 months. If the function happens to be using the timer at the exact moment it restarts, the amplifier remains switched off, and Juice’s signal is too weak to detect from Earth.

The spacecraft has a scheduled fly-by of Venus on August 31st, so regaining contact was critical. It has already done one Earth fly-by, with two more scheduled, before it arrives in Jupiter orbiter in July 2031.

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SpaceX launches a cargo Dragon to ISS

7:16 am

SpaceX last night successfully launched an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its third flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The Dragon, carrying 5,000 pounds of cargo, will dock at ISS on August 25, 2025 in the early morning. During its mission at ISS it will also do a test engine burn to see if it can raise ISS’s orbit, the kind of orbital adjustments that have been routinely done by the Russian Progress freighters.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

104 SpaceX
47 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 104 to 83.

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Misconduct alleged in management of Square Kilometer Array in Australia

5:53 pm

According to a whistle-blower, there has been financial misconduct in international management of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) being built in remote western Australia.

In response to the disclosure, a copy of which has been seen by the Guardian, Zerbi has initiated an investigation into claims that public funds from member states have been lost through trading accounts – and then covered up by the organisation through the shuffling of funds internally.

At the centre of the misconduct allegations is a claim that at least £12m (A$25.1m) was lost through investment in three money market funds, with one fund allegedly losing 45% of its value. The Guardian has seen balance sheet extracts and statements that appear to confirm the investments by the SKAO, which is headquartered at the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Manchester.

The report also calls for an investigation into claims funds are being shifted within the organisation, and currency fluctuations being fabricated to conceal these losses from the governing council overseeing the project.

The project is significantly overbudget.

SKA management denies the alliegations, though it has at the same time begun its own investigation.

This corruption likely stems from the project’s international setup, which apparantly makes it “immune from normal legal processes and exempt from paying tax.” In addition, “international staff employed on the project in Australia are hired on diplomatic visas.” Under these conditions we should not be surprised if some hanky-panky with large sums of money took place.

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Off to the Grand Canyon and Colorado

8:20 am

Diane and I are taking a short six-day vacation up north, beginning today. This is actually our first trip together since the COVID panic, and we are both looking forward to it.

Our original plan had been to do a hike to the bottom, stay overnight at Phantom Ranch, and then hike out the next day. For a variety of reasons, including the fire on the north rim that has closed Phantom Ranch till the late fall, we shifted our plans to spending a few days at the south rim. We will hike the rim trail one day (something Diane hasn’t yet done), and do other stuff the next. We will then head to Colorado to visit friends.

I will be posting while I am on the road, but don’t expect long essays.

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August 22, 2025 Quick space links

7:56 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who apologizes for the lateness due to a hectic day at work. 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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SpaceX gets major tax credit for the jobs its new Starship factory will create.

1:29 pm

Because SpaceX’s new Starship factory, dubbed Gigabay, will create more than 500 new jobs in the Boca Chica region, the Starbase city commission this week awarded the company a sales tax refund valued as much as $3.75 million.

Gigabay will create about 630 new jobs, according to information Barrera showed the City Commission. That number included 315 entry-level jobs, which pay nearly $50,000 a year; 277 staff jobs, which pay nearly $90,000 a year; and 26 manager positions, which pay about $164,000 a year. … At least 25% of the jobs must be filled by veterans, residents of the enterprise zone or people who are considered economically disadvantaged.

SpaceX may receive a sales tax refund of $7,500 per job if the company invests $250 million. The program is capped at 500 jobs, allowing SpaceX to receive a maximum of $3,750,000.

Once again, the opposition to SpaceX does not come from the general public, which overwhelming supports what the company is doing in south Texas because of the wealth it is bringing to the region. The only opposition comes from fringe and very tiny leftist activist groups who oppose anything new, and specifically hate Elon Musk because he backed Donald Trump in last year’s election.

Sadly, those fringe groups are also backed by the propaganda press, which gives them a loud bullhorn they don’t deserve. It is imperative that Texas politicians recognize these facts, and not let that bullhorn bully them into actions detrimental to their constituents.

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Texas brewery tries brewing beer and growing barley on ISS

1:19 pm

A Texas brewery dubbed Starbase Brewing (no connection to SpaceX) has just completed an experiment on ISS where it tried to brew beer in weightlessness as well as grow barley in simulated Martian soil.

Starbase Brewing — unrelated to Elon Musk’s space company or its South Texas city of Starbase — sent its MicroBrew-1 and OASIS experiments to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX mission Aug. 1. They came back aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that splashed down eight days later off the coast of California.

…OASIS, short for “Optimizing Agriculture in Simulated Interplanetary Soils,” is the result of a partnership between the beer maker, Texas A&M AgriLife and Jaguar Space, a Colorado bioastronautics firm. According to Argroves, who launched the company in 2020, the goal was to grow barley in a mixture of Martian soil simulant with a byproduct of beermaking called Brewer’s Spent Grain and microbes.

The MicroBrew-1 experiment attempted to ferment beer, mixing “eight containers loaded with half wort — the sugary liquid extracted from malted grains — and half yeast.”

The company is far from manufacturing space-grown beer, but its founder seems focused on being the first brewery selling beer on Mars.

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Junk science now dominates the reporting of the propaganda press

12:32 pm

The Sciences, when science journalism focused on reporting real discoveries
The Sciences, when the goal of science journalism
was to report real discoveries

When I started my career as a science journalist in the early 1990s, Peter Brown, the editor of award-winning magazine The Sciences (now sadly discountinued), assigned me the job of writing short news pieces. He pointed at a three-foot-high pile of press releases, and suggested I go through them to find some scientific discovery worth reporting.

As I went through this pile each month, I found that 90% described results that while interesting certainly did not merit any news coverage. Many described theories that “might” or “could” be true, hardly examples of solid new knowledge. I would find a handful of releases worth a news report, while the remaining 90% would get thrown in the dumpster.

Unfortunately, limited space in the magazine often meant that only one of the stories I thought worthwhile would be reported, but it also meant the story we picked was of real significance. The reader was guaranteed to read about important research results, because the technology then forced us to be discriminating.

That was then. Today, things are very different. The web allows modern news outlets to report about practically every press release they get. Nothing gets thrown away. If anything, new outlets today relish reporting on the least significant science results, merely because the scientists speculate about some amazing final events that “might,” “could,” or “may” happen, if their theories are right. The press eats this junk science up, because it produces great clickbait that, while as vapid as cotton candy, sounds really cool or exciting. That these speculations have no basis in reality is irrelevant.

To give you an idea of what I mean, here are a few examples from our modern propaganda press that I have gathered in just the past week:
» Read more

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Study: Car design has worsened, increasing blindspots which cause accidents

9:21 am

The view out of a modern car
The view out of a modern car

Our present dark age: According to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), in the past two decades the design of cars has drastically decreased the visibility for drivers so that blindspots are larger, resulting in an increase in accidents.

Puzzled by traffic accident data showing that fatalities for cyclists and pedestrians had risen over the past 25 years, while car passenger deaths had come down, IIHS researchers wondered whether drivers might be finding it harder to see those more vulnerable road users.

And they discovered that successive versions of long-running popular cars had obstructed, more and more, a driver’s view of the 10 meters (33 ft) of space they were about to drive into. That near-car view, from the eye point of the average male driver, had shrunk on every one of six long-running models tested, IIHS testing showed, when an early (1997-plus) version was compared with the version on sale in 2023.

In the case of traditional cars, the near-car viewable area had contracted only slightly, the 7-8% reductions from the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry possibly even attributable to measurement error.

When it came to SUVs, however, the shrinkage was dramatic. The driver of a 1997 Honda CR-V could see 68% of a forward half-circle whose perimeter was 10 meters (33 ft) from their eye point – slightly more, in fact, than from the sedans that were tested. The driver of a 2023 CR-V could see just 28% of that semi-circle. In relative terms, the driver of the 2023 CR-V could see only 42% of what they would see from a 1997 model.

You can read the IIHS study here.

Why are designers doing this? One theory is that they are increasingly relying on cameras and software to replace the driver’s sight, and thus feel free to add obstructions to the car body that make it look cool. The problem is that these mechanical non-human solutions simply don’t work as well as the human brain, and thus drivers are hitting things more often.

But don’t worry. Soon AI will soon make it possible for cars will drive themselves! We will even be able to eliminate the windows entirely so that car travel will be an utterly private thing!

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New Horizons placed in hibernation, possibly forever

9:05 am

The science team running the New Horizons probe, now more then 5.7 billion miles from Earth, has placed the spacecraft into what will be its longest hibernation period so far, with the possibility that it could even last forever.

New Horizons, which had been in active data-collection mode since April, will now remain in hibernation. Pending a final Fiscal Year 2026 budget, the spacecraft may be awoken in late June 2026. This will be the longest hibernation period of the mission so far, surpassing the previous mark of 273 days from June 2022 to March 2023.

But the spacecraft won’t be completely at rest; New Horizons will continue to take round-the-clock measurements of the charged-particle environment in the Sun’s outer heliosphere and the dust environment of the Kuiper Belt using three different onboard scientific instruments. These data will be transmitted back to Earth when New Horizons wakes up. [emphasis mine]

Though the NASA press release puts up an optimistic front, it is very likely that this hibernation period will last significantly longer than planned, due to those budget negotiations. Trump’s budget proposes eliminating all funding for New Horizons, which will mean this hibernation period will be permanent. There will be no money to hire anyone to reactivate it.

Even if the budget is cut, it is probable that NASA management in the future will provide some cash. At the moment there is little for it to observe on a daily basis. All that needs to be done is to turn it on for short periods to download the heliosphere data. Management could simply decide to turn it on once every five years or so.

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SpaceX launches X-37B for Space Force

9:11 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched the Space Force’s X-37B mini-shuttle, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

This is the eighth mission for the Space Force’s two X-37Bs. It appears this flight is fourth for this particular X-37B, but this is not confirmed. Nor do we know how long this particular will last in orbit.

SpaceX’s first stage completed its sixth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The fairing halves completed their first and second flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

102 SpaceX
47 China
11 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 102 to 82.

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August 21, 2025 Quick space links

3:08 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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Using Webb astronomers have for the first time identified the source of a fast radio burst

12:02 pm

Fast Radio Burst source

Astronomers using the Webb Space Telescope have now successfully pinpointed a specific object that appears to be the source for a fast radio burst (FRB), extra-galactic short bursts of radio energy whose cause and origin have up-to-now been unexplained.

Blanchard and his team used a discovery of an FRB in a nearby galaxy made with the CHIME Outriggers array, a radio telescope in Canada, which was recently upgraded to enable FRB detections with precise positions. The researchers then turned to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to look for an infrared signal from the same location.

…The infrared data revealed an object, dubbed NIR-1, that is likely a red giant star or possibly a middle-aged massive star. A red giant is a Sun-like star near the end of its life that has expanded and brightened, while the other possibility is a star much more massive than the Sun.

Although these stars are unlikely to directly produce FRBs, the scientists say, they may have an unseen companion, such as a neutron star, pulling material away from the red giant or massive star. This process of transferring mass

The burst itself occurred on March 16, 2025 about 130 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 4141. You can read the discovery paper here [pdf].

There remain of course great uncertainties. For one, NIR-1 is itself not likely the cause of the FRB, but related to its source in some manner. The scientists posit a number of explanations, from either an unseen magnetar (a pulsar with a powerful magnetic field), or a flare from this massive star reflecting off that unseen magnetar.

Regardless, this discovery helps narrow the theories considerably.

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Slumping landslide in Mars’ glacier country

11:40 am

Overview map

Slumping landslide in Mars' glacier country
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was downloaded on July 1, 2025 from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Labeled by the science team as a “flow,” it shows what appears to be a major collapse of the canyon’s south wall. The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, near the center of the 2,000-mile-long strip in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars that I label “glacier country” because almost every single high resolution image of this region shows glacial features.

This picture is no exception. First, the canyon appears filled with a glacial material, though its flow direction is unclear. Orbital elevation data suggests that this collapse is actually at the canyon’s high point, with the drainage going downhill to the east and west.

Second, the collapse itself doesn’t look like an avalanche of rocks and bedrock, but resembles more a mudslide. Since liquid water cannot exist in Mars’ thin atmosphere and cold climate, the soft nature of the slide suggests it is dirt and dust impregnated with ice. At some point, either because of the impacts that created the craters on its southern edge or because the sun warmed the ice causing it sublimate away thus weakening the ground structurally, the entire cliff wall slumped downward to the north.

The canyon itself is about 800 feet deep. It likely formed initially along a fault line, with ice acting over time to widen and extend it.

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