August 29, 2025 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Category: Behind The Black
Idealized Science Institute – Which ramp reaches highest final speed?
An evening pause: A science quiz I suspect most of my readers will get right. Regardless, this experiment illustrates some basic fundamentals of the scientific method: Don’t guess, make no assumptions, test by experimentation, and repeat those tests multiple times to confirm your results.
The Institute that made this video appears to be a great resource for homeschoolers.
Hat tip Cotour, who tells me he “got it correct!”
To everyone: Enjoy the Labor Day weekend!
August 29, 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.
- ULA CEO interviews Amanda Bacchetti, one of ULA’s directors for Vulcan development
Lots of blather, but the key take-away is that they are now focused on iterative development of Vulcan as it launches, similar to SpaceX’s approach, and vastly different than ULA’s past culture. They also hinted a something radical that might involve reuse of the rocket’s upper stage.
- Scientists claim they can date Jupiter’s age from meteorites
Need I say it how completely and utterly uncertain this is?
A baby star and its protoplanetary disk
Click for originial.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, rotated, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is the Webb picture of the month from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), released today. It shows a baby star about 525 light years away.
IRAS 04302+2247, or IRAS 04302 for short, is a beautiful example of a protostar – a young star that is still gathering mass from its environment – surrounded by a protoplanetary disc in which baby planets might be forming. Webb is able to measure the disc at 65 billion km across – several times the diameter of our Solar System. From Webb’s vantage point, IRAS 04302’s disc is oriented edge-on, so we see it as a narrow, dark line of dusty gas that blocks the light from the budding protostar at its centre. This dusty gas is fuel for planet formation, providing an environment within which young planets can bulk up and pack on mass.
When seen face-on, protoplanetary discs can have a variety of structures like rings, gaps and spirals. These structures can be signs of baby planets that are burrowing through the dusty disc, or they can point to phenomena unrelated to planets, like gravitational instabilities or regions where dust grains are trapped. The edge-on view of IRAS 04302’s disc shows instead the vertical structure, including how thick the dusty disk is. Dust grains migrate to the midplane of the disc, settle there and form a thin, dense layer that is conducive to planet formation; the thickness of the disc is a measure of how efficient this process has been.
The dense streak of dusty gas that runs vertically across this image cocoons IRAS 04302, blotting out its bright light such that Webb can more easily image the delicate structures around it. As a result, we’re treated to the sight of two gauzy nebulas on either side of the disc. These are reflection nebulas, illuminated by light from the central protostar reflecting off of the nebular material.
As this is a baby star, the cones above and below the disk indicate the original spherical cloud, with the upper and lower halves now being pulled downward into a spinning disk, where the solar system is forming.
This image is not simply an infrared Webb image. The Hubble Space Telescope provided the optical view, which the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile provided data in those wavelengths. Note also the many background galaxies. The universe is not only infinite, it is infinitely populated.
Perseverance looks west
Click for full resolution. For original images go here and here.
Click for interactive map.
Cool image time! The panorama above, reduced and sharpened to post here, was created using two pictures taken on August 28, 2025 by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance (here and here).
The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks Perseverance’s location when it took these pictures. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line indicates the rover’s planned route, with the white dotted line its actual travels.
The recent geological research focused on the lighter-colored ridge on the right center, dubbed Soroya. From the August 27, 2025 update by the science team:
Soroya was first picked out from orbital images as a target of interest because, as can be seen in the above image, it appears as a much lighter color compared to the surroundings. In previous landscape images from the surface, Mars 2020 scientists have been able to pick out the light-toned Soryoa outcrop, and they noted it forms a ridge-like structure, protruding above the surface. Soroya was easily identifiable from rover images as Perseverance approached since it indeed rises above the surrounding low-lying terrain.
The view is looking downhill away from Jezero Crater. The curve of the horizon is an artifact of the navigation camera’s wide view, accentuated by the slope that the rover sits on. The low resolution of this western region on the overview map is because the science team has not yet had Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) get highest resolution pictures there yet.
Note the utter barrenness of this terrain. This is Mars, a lifeless world that has only the future potential for life, once we humans start to colonize it. Whether there was ever any past life remains uncertain, but the nature of its terrain as seen by both Perseverance and Curiosity suggests strongly that past life never existed, or if it did it barely survived and was quickly wiped out, a long time ago.
Mars’ interior is more chaotic than Earth’s
The largest quakes detected by InSight, indicated
by the red dots.
Using archival quake data from the Mars lander InSight, scientists now believe that the upper layers in the interior of the red planet are not as coherently layered as the Earth’s, that its mantle is broken up in a much more chaotic manner. From the paper’s abstract:
We report the discovery of kilometer-scale heterogeneities throughout Mars’ mantle, detected seismically through pronounced wavefront distortion of energy arriving from deeply probing marsquakes. These heterogeneities, likely remnants of the planet’s formation, imply a mantle that has undergone limited mixing driven by sluggish convection. Their size and survival constrain Mars’ poorly known mantle rheology, indicating a high viscosity.
These “heterogeneities” are large blocks of material, some as large as two to three miles wide, that are thought left over from the planet’s initial formation. These initial pieces of the mantle were layered like the Earth, but subsequent impacts during the accretion process cracked them and shifted them about.
These results have some uncertainty, as so far only one seismometer, InSight’s, has be placed on Mars. It will require more sensors and years of data to fully map the interior with greater precision and reliability.
Trump ends unions for federal employees at NASA and other agencies
Trump’s war with the swamp continues
Fight! Fight! Fight! Trump this week issued a new executive order ending the union contracts for government employees at NASA and other agencies, continuing a March order aimed at reducing or eliminating union action in the federal government.
The president issued a new directive ending collective bargaining agreements at NASA, the International Trade Administration, the Office of the Commissioner for Patents, the National Weather Service, the US Agency for Global Media, hydropower facilities under the Bureau of Reclamation, and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.
Trump classified the agencies as having national security interests, exempting them from federal union laws.
Though lawsuits are on-going challenging Trump’s action, the public should know the context. » Read more
SpaceX launches 28 more Starlink satellites while setting a new reuse record for a Falcon 9 1st stage
SpaceX earlier today launched another 28 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The first stage completed its 30th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. This is a new reuse record for a Falcon 9 first stage. At this moment only the space shuttles Discovery (39 flights) and Atlantis (33 flights) have flown more often.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
108 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 108 to 84.
Alan Jackson – Summertime Blues
An evening pause: Performed live, but I have no idea when.
Hat tip Sayomara.
August 28, 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.
- NASA seeks volunteers to passively track the first manned Orion mission around the Moon, presently scheduled for April 2026
It appears NASA wishes to find out if commercial communications systems can do the same as its government network of antennas.
- French startup The Exploration Company’s Nyx cargo capsule passes initial ISS safety review
The company is targeting its first cargo flight to ISS in 2028. Its longer range goal is to provide cargo and eventually manned service to the commercial stations that will follow. A successful docking in 2028 will strengthen its competitive position.
- German rocket startup Isar Aerospace secures launch agreements with European Space Agency
The deal is for two smallsat launches beginning in 2026, and will depend on Isar first achieving a successful launch, having failed in its first attempt in March 2025.
Another great hiking location on Mars
Click for original image.
In honor of our just completed visit to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, today’s cool image takes us to another location on Mars that to me appears a perfect place to install some hiking trails. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 30, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The image shows a two-mile wide canyon with a number of scattered narrow mesas within. The north and south rims rise about 550 feet above the canyon floor. The two mesas labeled “A” and “B” rise about 200 and 100 feet respectively.
The hiker in me immediately imagines what a great hike it would be to go up the western nose of either ridge and walk along its crest. The knife-edge nature of ridge “A” would mean that for a large majority of the hike you’d be at the north and south edges at the same time.
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Jools Holland & Doctor John – Boogie Woogie Twins
An evening pause: Performed live c2012.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.