space

The Next Great Telescope Is Up and Away

The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope successfully launched this week on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Deployment went smoothly, and the craft is operating nominally and talking to NASA.

Roman will travel to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, where it will use two instruments — the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph Instrument — to search for exoplanets, dark energy, and other astrophysical phenomena. The WFI will capture images with the same resolution and clarity as Hubble, but has a * 100x * larger field of view, and the Coronagraph will allow the telescope to detect and see exoplanets better than any telescope in operation.

When it arrives at its L2 orbit, testing and calibration will begin. Expect the first real images in early 2027.

The telescope is amed for Nancy Grace Roman, an astronomer and NASA’s very first Chief of Astronomy in the 60s and 70s. Among many other achievements, she is responsible for getting Hubble off the ground-- not literally off the ground and into space, of course, but championing the project and driving the early planning of it.

Launch image credit: Andrew McCarthy (https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/2094042714580951147). Other images credit: NASA.

Totality

Hauntingly beautiful capture of the solar eclipse last week at totality by astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy. In his words: “My favorite capture of the night: The moment the moon's shadow split the sunset in half, leaving a diamond ring in the sky and a breathtaking view. I call it "Shadows on the Balearic Sea".”

We are blessed with an abundance of extremely talented astrophotographers working today, but Andrew may be the best.

https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/2087659520839270858

The View From Above

Absolutely stunning images captured by ISS astronaut Jessica Meir during last week’s spacewalk to install new equipment on the ISS. The urge to write a story about the first image is quite strong. Her description:

“While I wasn’t gazing at Anil Menon during last week’s spacewalk, my eyes were drawn downward to our majestic Mother Earth. Here’s how she looked from my spacesuit.

Photo 1: Coastal view framed by the ISS solar arrays.

Photo 2: The sun sets behind our newly installed IROSA mod kit, a mounting platform for new arrays to be installed on an upcoming spacewalk (like the shorter array in lower left of photo 1).

Photo 3: Mountain views framed by the solar arrays.”

Revisiting the Pale Blue Dot

Ready for your latest dose of feeling tiny and insignificant - while also an incredibly improbable, and thus special and meaningful, part of a vast universe?

Well, I give you one grainy, smudgy image. Not exactly inspiring at first glance, and yet. This timelapse of images (40 seconds in total) was captured by the Perseverance rover's Mastcam instrument on Mars last month, and it shows Earth briefly occulting behind the Martian moon Phobos.

As Carl Sagan so famously and eloquently said:

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

Starship Test Flight 13 Soars, Splashes and...Floats?

Starship executed a *nearly* flawless test flight 13 yesterday evening. Perfect launch and flight, and Ship deployed 20 of the upcoming Starlink V3 satellites. Then Ship did the totally unexpected - its soft landing in the ocean was SO soft, when it fell over into the water, IT DIDN'T EXPLODE!! It just floated there in the waves (spawning a thousand memes). So now SpaceX has a slightly worn but flight-tested Ship that it wasn't expecting; oh, the tests they're going to run on that machine, lol.

The only flaw in the test was that the booster only lit 5 of its 13 engines during landing burn, so landed harder than expected in the ocean. Not nearly as severe of a failure as in the last test, but they do continue to have some issues with the booster engines they need to work out.

It was an incredibly beautiful flight, full of jaw-dropping visuals.

City Lights, Galactic Lights

Incredible image captured by astronaut Don Pettit on the ISS. The inhabitants of Earth are creating, building, laughing, dancing, and most of all, shining.

From his post: “Milky Way views over the city lights of Earth. Humans shining back at the stars that inspire us! Taken with Nikon Z9, 14mm, f/1.4, ISO 6400 with homemade sidereal tracker on ISS Expedition 72.”

https://x.com/astro_Pettit/status/2075719821623271512

Flashback: Saturn

Incredible view of Saturn few days before “the grand finale” when the probe Cassini finished its trip after 13 years orbiting the planet (2004-2017).

I’m taking a stand: No offense to Juno and Jupiter - they’re delivering wonderful content - but Cassini was the best space probe, and Saturn is the best planet.

Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Space Science Institute, Mindaugas Macijauskas. Via Xavi Bros on X

Starship Version 3 Takes Flight

Starship V3 is alive and kicking! The new, massively upgraded Starship and SuperHeavy rocket made its debut on Friday, and it was simply beautiful.

Starlink provided absolutely gorgeous high-quality video of the entire hour+ flight - far and away the best video of spaceflight I've ever seen. One of the mission objectives was to deploy 20 Starlink satellites (which it did), and one of the satellites switched on to capture a view of Starship after it deployed. It's really incredible video, and you can check it out here: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2057962516282577014

The mission did not hit 100% success - the booster engines shut off early after separation, and one of Ship's engines didn't light. But it flew just fine on 5 engines (redundancy FTW) and executed a perfect soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean (and then exploded when it tipped over, but that was TOTALLY PLANNED and the only way for the splashdown to end). MechaZilla chopstick catches will be attempted in the near future.

Over 1,000 upgrades were made to the ship and rocket since the last flight - which is great, but this meant 1,000+ opportunities for new failures. I was nervous, I admit. But it did fantastic.

Now, let's get our asses to the moon, then Mars.

The Exoplanets of the Milky Way

NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) has released its most complete view of the starry sky to date. The blue dots represent over 700 *confirmed* exoplanets, while the orange dots correspond to over 5,000 candidates awaiting verification. All cast upon the beautiful plane of the Milky Way.

You can learn more about TESS’ mission and this update here: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/tess/nasas-planet-hunting-tess-reveals-dazzling-night-sky/

Artemis II Images

I’m sure you all know that the Artemis II lunar flyby mission was a tremendous success, and the astronauts returned home safely. They captured a ton of incredible images while they were up there. I’ve included a few of the best below, but you can see more at https://images.nasa.gov or just scroll my X feed to check out my many, many posts and shares about the mission: https://x.com/GSJennsen.

To The Moon!

Or around it, anyway…. The Artemis II astronauts are officially on the their way to orbit the moon (and briefly journey farther than any human has ever traveled). First, though, they'll orbit Earth and test out a bunch of systems.

I won't lie; the SLS rocket had me nervous. I am a child of the shuttle disasters, and I was biting my nails during the ascent. But SLS got it done.

Now, onward into our future in space.

Enjoy some spectacular shots of the launch, and a bonus shot of Earth from the Orion spacecraft this morning (a view human eyes haven’t enjoyed in too many decades).

Image credit:

Pictures 1 and 2: Eric Kuna https://x.com/erikkuna)

Picture 3: Andrew McCarthy (https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy)

Picture 4: NASA

Galactic Core

A stunning new image of the Milky Way galactic core just dropped!

This view was captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a powerful network of radio telescopes in Chile.

What you’re seeing is the crowded, chaotic heart of our galaxy, a region packed with cold gas and dust, the raw material that forms new stars. The image maps an area called the Central Molecular Zone, stretching more than 650 light-years across.

Image credit:: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Longmore et al. Background: ESO/D. Minniti et al.

More info: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2603/

Helix Nebula

Webb has dropped an absolutely INSANELY detailed image of a portion of the Helix Nebula. The image was taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera. From NASA: “pillars that look like comets with extended tails trace the circumference of the inner region of an expanding shell of gas. Here, blistering winds of fast-moving hot gas from the dying star are crashing into slower moving colder shells of dust and gas that were shed earlier in its life, sculpting the nebula’s remarkable structure.”

You can learn more about the image and the Helix Nebula here: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/intricacies-of-helix-nebula-revealed-with-nasas-webb/

For comparison, here is the Helix Nebula as imaged by Hubble and Spitzer:

Warp-Drive Nacelles?

New paper just dropped! Dr. Sonny White, the physicist who took the energy requirements of Miguel Alcubierre's warp drive concept from "theoretically plausible but practically impossible" to "hmm...potentially doable," is continuing to pick away at the science and design concepts of such a drive.

Now he's refined the design of a theoretical warp drive, shifting from a single bubble to multi-nacelle channels, allowing for greater efficiency, stability and controllability.

Next, we just need to find the dollop of exotic matter required to create the field (and a few engineering breakthroughs, but we'll get those), and off to the stars we go!

Read more about the new design: https://thedebrief.org/new-warp-drive-propulsion-concept-moves-fictional-starships-closer-to-engineering-reality/