Category: Behind The Black

Mars and its two moons seen in the infrared by Europa Clipper

10:37 am

Mars and its two moons
Click for original.

Cool image time! The infrared image to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken by Europa Clipper on February 28, 2025 just before it flew past Mars on its way to Jupiter.

Deimos is in the upper left corner, while Phobos is close to Mars.

When the image was taken by the mission’s Europa Thermal Emission Imaging System (E-THEMIS), the spacecraft was about 560,000 miles (900,000 kilometers) from the Red Planet. The image is composed of 200 individual frames, part of a continuous scan of 1,100 frames taken roughly a second apart over a period of 20 minutes. Scientists are using the tiny, point-like images of the moons to check the camera’s focus.

As this is an infrared image (measuring heat), it shows Mars’ northern polar cap as the dark oval at the top of the planet. The bright (and thus warmer) oval to the lower left is the shield volcano Elysium Mons.

This data suggests Europa Clipper’s thermal instrument is working as intended, which is essential for observing the ice content (if any) on Europa once it enters Jupiter orbit in 2030.

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The journal Science retracts 15-year-old paper that proposed arsenic as basic element of life

10:15 am

The death of science: Though numerous later research had rejected the conclusions of a 2010 research paper that had suggested a bacteria found at Mono Lake in Californa was using arsenic instead of phosphorus in its DNA, the journal Science that published that paper has now retracted it.

In a blog post accompanying this week’s retraction notice, Science’s current Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp and Valda Vinson, executive editor of the Science family of journals, emphasize there is no suggestion of foul play in the GFAJ-1 paper. Instead, pointing to subsequent commentary and research that suggest some of the paper’s findings stem from contamination, not arsenic use by bacteria, they write: “Science believes that the key conclusion of the paper is based on flawed data.”

Speaking with Science’s News team, which operates independently from its research arm, study co-author and Arizona State University geochemist Ariel Anbar says the team disputes that assessment and has already addressed the referenced criticisms. “We stand by the data,” he adds.

Anbar added this in this report at Nature:

By contrast, one of the paper’s authors, Ariel Anbar, a geochemist at Arizona State University in Tempe, says that there are no mistakes in the paper’s data. He says that the data could be interpreted in a number of ways, but “you don’t retract because of a dispute about data interpretation”. If that’s the standard you were to apply, he says, “you’d have to retract half the literature”.

This action underlines the decline in open-mindedness in the academic field. It did not suffice to simply demonstrate in later papers that the paper’s conclusions were questionable. It was necessary to cancel it entirely, to airbrush it from history.

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Dassault lobbies ESA to fund its Vortex reusable mini-shuttle

9:51 am

Dassault's proposed Vortex mini-shuttle
Dassault’s proposed Vortex mini-shuttle. Click for original.

The French aerospace company Dassault is now lobbying the European Space Agency to help finance its proposed Vortex reusable mini-shuttle, comparable in concept to Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spacecraft.

The company had first announced this project in June.

While the June announcement included few details, a 25 June hearing of the French National Assembly’s Committee on National Defence and the Armed Forces revealed that the mission is expected to be launched in 2027 aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. The hearing also disclosed that the demonstration mission has a total budget of €70 million, with Dassault providing more than half of the funding and the remainder coming from the French government.

Dassault is now attempting to get more funding from ESA. In June it had signed an agreement with ESA to partner on building a demonstrator, but it was not clear that agreement included funding. It certainly did not include funding for the full scale operational mini-shuttle.

Overall, the structure of funding and the design of the project is good, and demonstrates again Europe’s sharp shift to the capitalism model in the past two years. Dassault will design, build, and (most importantly) own the shuttle, allowing it to market it to many customers. It is also committing a significant amount of its own funds to the project. The funding from France and possibly ESA appears mostly that of a customer buying the services of this product from the company.

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Starlink went down for almost 3 hours yesterday

9:31 am

In what is a rare event, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation was out of service yesterday for about 2.5 hours “due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”

Starlink experienced an outage Thursday afternoon that went on for 2.5 hours and took down at least tens of thousands of people’s satellite internet service. “Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution. We appreciate your patience, we’ll share an update once this issue is resolved,” Starlink posted on X at 1:05 p.m. PT/4:05 p.m. ET.

Though Starlink has yet to confirm that services are fully up and running again, Downdetector showed reports of issues had dropped to just 1,600 as of 4:30 p.m PT after they’d spiked to around 60,000 at about 1 p.m. PT

CNBC incorrectly tried to pin this internet outage to the start yesterday of T-Mobile’s new cellphone-to-Starlink text and emergency subscription, but that makes no sense, since the two use different Starlink satellites.

Since the constellation began offering customers its service several years ago the number of such global outages has been very rare. If anything, Starlink has been far more reliable than almost all comparable land line internet services.

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Like the Senate the House appropriation committee rejects Trump’s NASA cuts, but differently

9:20 am

The NASA 2026 budget approved this week by the House appropriation committee has rejected the 24% cut proposed by the Trump administration, in a similar manner as the parallel Senate committee.

However, the two congressional committees are not in agreement on any of their spending proposals.

The totals recommended by the two committees are similar — $24.8 billion in the House, $24.9 billion in the Senate — but the specifics are different in many cases.

For example, the House wants to spend $300 million for NASA’s very messed-up Mars Sample Return project, while the Senate eliminated it entirely. The House also increases NASA’s manned exploration budget over Trump’s proposal, while the Senate cuts it. In science spending the House is less generous than the Senate, though both houses reject Trump’s cuts. In education the House agrees with Trump, zeroing out that funding, while the Senate wants to increase the ’25 budget slightly.

Before the 2026 budget is approved the two houses will have to negotiate an agreement to make their numbers match. What has usually happened in past negotiations is that the houses agree to approve the highest spending numbers in any budget item so that nothing gets cut and the budget continues to go up uncontrollably. We should not be surprised if our corrupt Congress does exactly that.

Even so, we should expect Trump to force significant changes at NASA, including budget reductions. Recent Supreme Court rulings have confirmed the president’s right to reorganize and even eliminate bureaucracies, as long as Congress doesn’t specify a particular spending item.

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Spain offers $470 million to move Thirty Meter Telescope to Canary Islands

8:52 am

The Spanish government this week announced it is willing to commit $470 million to fund the long delayed and no longer funded Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and move it from Hawaii to the Canary Islands.

Last month, the administration of US president Donald Trump announced plans to abandon further support for the telescope, as part of its proposals to slash by half funding for the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which has until now supported the telescope’s design.

Now the Spanish government has pitched to bring the giant facility to La Palma, in Spain’s Canary Islands — and backed up the effort with a pledge to contribute €400 million (US$470 million). “Spain reinforces its commitment as a refuge for science, betting on excellent research and technological innovation,” wrote the Spanish minister for science and innovation, Diana Morant, on X, as she announced the funding on 23 July. According to a statement from her ministry, Morant has already submitted a formal proposal to host the telescope to the TMT board, which would have to back such a move for it to go ahead.

The quote incorrectly spins the Trump cuts. The NSF never had the funds to build both the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile and TMT. For years it has been lobbying to get that additional money, and failed. Even now, Congress is not interested in funding both even as it restores much of the funding cuts proposed by Trump.

The idea of moving TMT to the Canary Islands was first put forth in 2016, but in 2021 a Spanish judge blocked the tentative deal. The move also caused Japan to cut its funding to the project, leaving it without the cash to continue.

This new financing commitment by Spain might actually revive the telescope.

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Russia launches two weather satellites

8:36 am

Russia today successfully placed two weather satellites into orbit, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Vostochny spaceport in eastern Russia.

Video of the launch here. This was the second launch for this new constellation of satellites. The rocket flew north from Vostochny, crossing Russia with its lower stages and four strap-on boosters falling in designated drop zones inside Russia. No word if anything landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

91 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 91 to 65.

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July 24, 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.

  • On this day in 1950 the first rocket launch took place at Cape Canaveral
    As the tweet notes, in the subsequent 75 years thousands of rockets have lifted off from there. And as I have noted repeatedly, these launches have done no measurable harm to environment, thus illustrating the utter absurdity of the heavy environmental red tape that the FAA and the federal government have imposed on new launch companies seeking to build launchpads.
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The glaciers on Mars are almost pure ice with only a thin cover of dust and debris

9:55 am

A map of glaciers on Mars
A map of glaciers on Mars.

According to new research, scientists now think that the glaciers on Mars are almost pure ice, protected from sublimation by a thin cover of dust and debris.

Work over the last 20 years has demonstrated that at least some of these glaciers are mostly pure ice with only a thin cover of rock and dust, but according to a new paper published in Icarus, glaciers all over the planet actually contain more than 80% water ice, a significant finding. Ultimately, this means that Mars’s glacial ice deposits are nearly pure across the globe, providing a clearer understanding of Mars’ climate history and a possible resource for future utilization.

The researchers analyzed mid-latitude glaciers at five different locations in both the north and south hemispheres, and found that at every location the data suggested almost pure ice.

The map to the right, from earlier research, shows the prevalence of near-surface ice once you get above 30 degrees latitude. From the poles to the mid-latitudes it appears there is an ice sheet or “ice table” just below the surface. In the mid-latitudes glaciers dominate, as this appears to be the region where that ice is beginning to dissipate. In the equatorial regions little or no near-surface ice has been detected, though there has been some evidence in some places of ice at deeper depths.

This data once again demonstrates that Mars is not a desert like the Sahara, as we once believed. Instead, it more resembles Antarctica, where there is ice everywhere that simply needs to be processed for use.

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T-Mobile makes its Starlink capability available to everyone

9:34 am

T-Mobile officials yesterday announced that it is now offering its Starlink text and location cellphone capabilities available by subscription to all users, whether or not they are a T-Mobile customer.

On Wednesday, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert announced that the Starlink-powered service is officially out of beta, though it only supports text messaging and location-sharing for now. The new satellite coverage option is called “T-Satellite,” and it’s currently available as a standalone subscription. It’s being offered at $10 per month for a “limited time,” before increasing to $15 per month. It also comes included for customers on the carrier’s $100 per month Experience Beyond or older Go5G plans.

Your device will automatically connect to T-Satellite if you’re in an area with no cellular coverage. As long as there isn’t a heavy amount of cloud coverage or trees blocking your view of the sky, you should be able to send and receive text messages, including to 911, as well as share a link that temporarily tracks your location.

At present, the service is only available in the United States, though it will expand as SpaceX launches more cellphone-to-satellite Starlink satellites. T-Mobile also expects to add voice capability as well.

Nor is this the only option. AT&T is partnering with the satellite company AST SpaceMobile to offer similar services.

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Mexico’s president says it will investigate SpaceX for doing salvage operations off its coast

9:26 am

Mexico to SpaceX:
Mexico to SpaceX: “Nice business you got here. Shame
if something happened to it.”

You can’t win with these people: First Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum complained loudly about the debris that landed or washed up on its beaches after several of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy test launches, demanding an investigation followed by sanctions against the company.

Now Sheinbaum is complaining and demanding a new investigation about SpaceX’s effort the last two weeks to salvage and remove that debris from the ocean off its coast.

During a passage of her daily press conference, Sheinbaum said the agencies are analyzing whether the company has to be sanctioned after its unit tasked with clearing debris from the Starship launch, located in the Gulf of Mexico, worked without proper authorization. “We are investigating but the Environment, Navy, Digital Transformation, Government and Foreign Relations secretariats are conducting their research. The study is practically done,” Sheinbaum said.

Navy Secretary Raymundo Pedro Morales Angeles said the company hired by SpaceX to retrieve debris from its Starship rocket was allowed to enter the country but didn’t fulfill the requirements to work and ended up leaving the country.

If this behavior doesn’t prove Sheinbaum’s lust for power and control, nothing will. She doesn’t really care about Mexico’s beaches or environment. If she did, she would celebrate SpaceX’s salvage operations. What she really doesn’t like is that someone is doing something without her permission. She is the boss, and SpaceX better remember that!

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Rocket startup IRocket mergers with investment company

9:10 am

The rocket startup IRocket has now gone public by merging with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) BPGC, with the latter committing $400 million in investment capital in the merged company.

Innovative Rocket Technologies Inc. (iRocket), a next-generation reusable space rocket developer, and BPGC Acquisition Corp. (BPGC), a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by The Hon. Wilbur Ross, the 39th U.S. Secretary of Commerce with more than 55 years of private equity and investment banking experience, and BPGC Management LP, an independent private equity firm dedicated to opportunistic buyouts and special situations transactions in the global industrials, materials and chemicals sectors, jointly announced today that they have entered into a definitive Merger Agreement and Plan of Merger dated July 22, 2025, in connection with the previously-announced letter of intent.

Upon closing, the combined company will operate under the name iRocket Technologies Inc. and the parties will plan to list the combined company on Nasdaq.

The press release at the link makes a lot of very ambitious claims about the company’s proposed rocket, claims that so far appear to be nothing more than nice PowerPoint graphics.

iRocket’s Shockwave launch vehicle is uniquely designed for recovery and reuse of all of its stages. Just as airplanes fly multiple flights, iRocket will Recondition, Reload, and Relaunch™ its rockets in under 24 hours. iRocket’s patented liquid rocket engines will maintain high efficiency through descent as well as ascent. iRocket’s engines will be fueled with sustainable liquid oxygen and methane, which burns cooler, imparts less stress on components, and further supports iRocket’s unique 24-hour turn-around time. Being on a leading edge with its rocket engine expertise, iRocket is also developing solid rocket motors that will transform boosters, missiles, and interceptors.

The company has been around since 2018, yet as far as I can determine has never launched anything. One would hope that something real will begin to finally happen with this infusion of significant new capital.

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Study identifies range of interference produced by Starlink satellites

8:58 am

In analyzing about 76 million radio images produced by the new Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in Australia scientists have found within them signals produced by SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.

PhD candidate and study lead Dylan Grigg said the team detected more than 112,000 radio emissions from 1806 Starlink satellites, making it the most comprehensive catalogue of satellite radio emissions at low frequencies to date. “Starlink is the most immediate and frequent source of potential interference for radio astronomy: it launched 477 satellites during this study’s four-month data collection period alone,” Mr Grigg said. “In some datasets, we found up to 30 per cent of our images showed interference from a Starlink satellite.”

Mr Grigg said the issue wasn’t just the number of satellites, but the strength of the signals and the frequencies they were visible at. “Some satellites were detected emitting in bands where no signals are supposed to be present at all, such as the 703 satellites we identified at 150.8 MHz, which is meant to be protected for radio astronomy,” Mr Grigg said. “Because they may come from components like onboard electronics and they’re not part of an intentional signal, astronomers can’t easily predict them or filter them out.”

The researchers were careful to note that SpaceX has been following all international regulations, and that these signals are not a violation of any law or regulation. Further, they emphasized that “Discussions we have had with SpaceX on the topic have been constructive.”

Because many other such constellations are now being launched — with several from China that normally does not negotiate these issues like SpaceX — the scientists want new international regulations imposed to protect their work.

More and more it seems astronomers should simply move their operations into space or the Moon, where such issues will not exist. Getting above the atmosphere and away from our modern technological society provides so many benefits for research the move should be a no-brainer. That it is now also much cheaper to do it (thanks to SpaceX) makes the move even more practical.

For some reason however the idea seems too difficult for many astronomers to fathom.

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JAXA/Mitsubishi test upgraded engines for H3 rocket

8:42 am

Japan’s space agency JAXA, working with Mitsubishi, successfully completed today a static fire test of new more powerful engines to be used on its new H3 rocket, thus eliminating the need for solid-fueled boosters with the goal of reducing the rocket’s cost.

Thursday’s test involved the sixth H3 rocket, which is a Type 30 test vehicle that has three main engines and no boosters. The three main engines were fired for 25 seconds while the rocket remained attached to the launchpad. JAXA will check acceleration, temperature and other data collected during the test.

This new version of the H3 is expected to do its first launch before the end of 2025. If successful, the launch price compared to JAXA’s now retired H2A rocket will be cut in half, to about $35 million, a number that will almost be competitive with the Falcon 9. SpaceX officially charges about $70 million per launch, but it is believed it could reduce that price significantly — some estimate to as low as $20 million — and still make a profit.

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July 23, 2025 Quick space links

2:36 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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Curiosity amid the boxwork

12:13 pm

Curiosity amid the boxwork, looking uphill
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped to post here, was taken on July 20, 2025 by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. It looks uphill to the south into the canyon that Curiosity will eventually travel, with the white chaotic upper flanks of Mount Sharp on the horizon. The mountain’s peak itself is out of view, about 25 miles away.

The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position, on the northern edge of the large patch of very distinct boxwork ridges visible from orbit. You can see these ridges in the foreground of the panorama above.

The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line roughly indicates the rover’s future travels. At the moment, however, it is going nowhere, as the science team is focused on studying these boxwork ridges in the hope they can determine their origin. Such features are usually associated with cracking later filled with lava, with the polygon-shaped cracking usually associated with a formerly wet environment drying.

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SpaceX launches NASA’s twin Tracers solar wind monitoring satellites

11:32 am

SpaceX today successfully launched NASA’s twin Tracers solar wind monitoring satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in Califorina.

The first stage completed its sixteenth flight, landing back at Vandenberg. The two fairing halves completed their 2nd and 14th flights respectively. As of posting the satellites had not yet deployed.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

91 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
8 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 91 to 64.

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Rocket Lab’s new Neutron rocket faces red tape delays at Wallops

10:00 am

Proposed dredged channel
Proposed dredged channel. Click for original.

We’re here to help you! Rocket Lab appears to be having regulatory problems getting approvals to transport hardware for its new Neutron rocket to its new launchpad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island in Virginia, delays that might prevent it from launching as planned later this year.

It appears the company needs to dredge a deeper channel to ship the heavier Neutron hardware into Wallops, but it has not been able to begin work because of approval delays by the federal government.

The dredging project was approved by VMRC [Virginia Marine Resources Commission] in May, but the company has yet to start digging because it’s still awaiting federal sign-off from the Army Corps of Engineers.

Lacking this approval and unable to get the channel ready for this year’s launch, the company is seeking permission to use a stop-gap different approach to transport the hardware through these shallow waters.

Kedging, a little-known nautical method, is used to ensure the barges can safely navigate the existing shallow channel. Workers would use a series of anchors and lines to steer the barge through the shallow waters. The company is seeking permission to use this method through the end of June 2026 or until the dredging work is complete, whichever comes first.

Lacking an okay to do even this alternative approach, Rocket Lab will be forced to transport the hardware using “ramps and cranes,” an approach that is impractical in the long run for achieving a profitable launch pace. It also would likely result in not meeting its targeted launch date before the end of 2025 for the first Neutron launch.

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One of China’s big satellite constellations appears in trouble

9:35 am

According to a report in China’s state-run press today, one of the giant satellite constellations China is building to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is in trouble, and will likely fail to meet its international licensing requirement to place more than six hundred satellites in orbit by the end of 2025.

Only 90 satellites have been launched into low Earth orbit for the Qianfan broadband network – also known as the Thousand Sails Constellation or G60 Starlink – well short of the project’s goal of 648 by the end of this year.

Under international regulations to prevent spectrum hoarding, satellite operators must deploy a certain proportion of their constellation within set times after securing orbits and radio frequencies.

Shanghai Yuanxin Satellite Technology, the company leading the project, plans to deploy more than 15,000 satellites by 2030 to deliver direct-to-phone internet services worldwide.

To meet its license requirement, it require a launch pace for the rest of ’25 of about 30 satellites per month, something that the article says is unlikely due to “a severe shortage of rockets” in China.

This story might also explain why China’s government yesterday ordered all its rocket pseudo-companies to speed up their test schedules, pushing to launch their new rockets for the first time this year instead of in 2026. The Xi government’s order appears to be trying to address this rocket shortage.

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Senegal to sign Artemis Accords

9:24 am

According to a NASA announcement today, Senegal will become the 56th nation to sign Artemis Accords tomorrow.

The full list of nations now part of this American space alliance: Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

It remains unclear whether the second Trump administration has taken a new interest in using this alliance to renew the accords’ original goals, of encouraging private enterprise and property rights in space. The Biden had shifted the purpose away from those goals towards the more globalist approach represented by the Outer Space Treaty.

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Trump administration moving to reduce rocket launch environmental regulations

9:16 am

FAA logo

According to a draft executive order that has not yet been released, the Trump administration is planning a major revision of the FAA’s environmental and launch regulations that has badly impacted rocket companies, with the goal of streamlining licensing.

The order would give Trump even more direct control over the space industry’s chief regulator by turning the civil servant position leading the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation into a political appointment. The last head of the office and two other top officials recently took voluntary separation offers.

The order would also create a new adviser to the transportation secretary to shepherd in deregulation of the space industry.

…The draft order also seeks to restrict the authority of state coastal officials who have challenged commercial launch companies like SpaceX, documents show. It could lead to federal officials interfering with state efforts to enforce their environmental rules when they conflict with the construction or operation of spaceports.

The order would also have the secretary of transportation ‘reevaluate, amend, or rescind’ sections of Part 450, the FAA licensing regulations that it imposed during the Biden administration that was supposed to streamline licensing but ended up adding considerable new red tape which contributed significantly to squelching the new launch industry that had popped up during the first Trump term.

As is usual for the propaganda press, the article at the link implies that these changes would result in horrible environmental consequences as well as increased safety risks to the public. What it does not note is that these changes appear to simply return the regulatory framework back to what existed prior to the Biden administration, a framework that had existed for more than a half century previously. The environment and public safety did just fine under those more freedom-oriented rules. I am sure both will do just fine again.

This order might also help explain Trump’s decision to withdraw Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator and appoint Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as interim NASA administrator. The order puts much of this work on his head, and having him in charge of NASA will likely aid that work.

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July 22, 2025 Quick space links

5:16 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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First Hubble images of interstellar comet 3I/Atlas released

5:03 pm

Comet 3I/Atlas, taken by Hubble
Click for original.

An undergraduate student has just released the first pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the interstellar object 3I/Atlas, confirming that it is a comet as indicated by the earlier image taken by the Gemini North telescope.

One of those images, taken only hours ago, is the inset on the map showing the comet’s route through the solar system to the right. The streaks on the image are either stars or cosmic rays. Though this image is of significantly lower quality than the Gemini North picture, it once again shows both the comet’s nucleus and developing coma.

A preprint [pdf] of a new research paper based on data from both telescopes further confirms this conclusion:

[T]hese results suggest that 3I/ATLAS hosts a coma containing large water ice grains, and that its dust continuum is stable over at least week-long timescales. The spectral characteristics further distinguish 3I from known ultrared trans-Neptunian objects and align it more closely with active Jupiter-family comets.

The last conclusion is very significant. Though the path and speed of this interstellar object says it must come from beyond the solar system, its cometary make-up more resembles comets that reside in the inner solar system. These facts strongly imply that there is at least one other solar systems not very different from our own.

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SpaceX launches two SES communications satellites

2:41 pm

Despite a launch abort yesterday at T-11 seconds for unstated reasons, SpaceX followed up by successfully completing the launch today, sending two SES communications satellites into orbit with its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

This was SpaceX’s fifth launch for this SES constellation, during which it has placed a total of ten satellites into orbit. The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The fairings completed their ninth and twenty-first flights respectively.

A few hours earlier a different SpaceX rocket had another launch abort at about T-43 seconds, this time because of a local power outage. That launch has been rescheduled for later this evening.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

90 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
8 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 90 to 64.

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Astronomers detect exoplanet shaping the protoplanetary disk surrounding a baby star

9:41 am

Star with disk
Click for original image.

Astronomers using two different instruments on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have now directly detected what they think is an exoplanet as it shapes the spiral arms of a baby star’s protoplanetary disk.

In the case of HD 135344B’s disc, swirling spiral arms had previously been detected by another team of astronomers using SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch), an instrument on ESO’s VLT. However, none of the previous observations of this system found proof of a planet forming within the disc.

Now, with observations from the new VLT’s Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) instrument, the researchers say they may have found their prime suspect. The team spotted the planet candidate right at the base of one of the disc’s spiral arms, exactly where theory had predicted they might find the planet responsible for carving such a pattern.

The newly detected object however might be a brown dwarf and not an exoplanet. More observations are required to reduce the uncertainty.

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Have astronomers observed a black hole twice gobble from the same star?

9:23 am

Astronomers have now observed identical flares 700 days apart and coming from the same supermassive black hole, suggesting that a star was partially disrupted both times as it orbited the black hole.

Both flares produced less energy than predicted, based on calculations that assumed the complete destruction of a star. From the paper’s [pdf] abstract:

Here we present the optical-ultraviolet tidal disruption event AT 2022dbl, which showed a nearly identical repetition 700 days after the first flare. Ruling out gravitational lensing and two chance unrelated disruptions, we conclude that at least the first flare represents the partial disruption of a star.

…Since both flares are typical of the optical-ultraviolet class of tidal disruptions in terms of their radiated energy, temperature, luminosity, and spectral features, it follows that either the entire class are partial rather than full stellar disruptions, contrary to the prevalent assumption, or some members of the class are partial disruptions, having nearly the same observational characteristics as full disruptions. Whichever option is true, these findings could require revised models for the emission mechanisms of optical-ultraviolet tidal disruption flares and a reassessment of their expected rates.

Assuming the star wasn’t completely destroyed during the second flare, a third flare should occur about two years from now, as the star swings around and makes its next close approach. If so it will confirm this theory. If not, we will be left with the simple uncertainty of science.

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