Breaking News & Random Musings on Space, Technology, Sci-Fi & the View From A Writer’s Window
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.
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.”
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 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.
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.”
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 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.
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/
I am transfixed by this capture of a sunrise on Mars by Opportunity, an incredible 22 years ago. Hauntingly beautiful.
Processed and shared by Jason Major here.
I am obsessed with this image. It’s from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which spent 5 years observing more than 47 million galaxies and quasars to create a 3D map centered on the Earth.
Learn more about the survey here: https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2610.
Image from APOD: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260423.html
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.
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
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/
The Rosette Nebula's blue-white speckles are among the most luminous stars in the galaxy, with some burning millions of times brighter than the Sun. Happy Valentine's Day!
Via APOD: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260214.html
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:
The Cassini spacecraft imaged Jupier and Ganymede together on January 6, 2001, from about 11.8 million km beyond Jupiter. What a lovely, haunting image!
Cassini was such a gift. It revealed our solar system to be as beautiful as we'd long dreamed it must be.
Via Jason Major.
Jim Lovell: “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth."
Earthrise, captured on Christmas Eve 1968 during Apollo 8, remains one of the most captivating and enduring images in history.
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/
Absolutely gorgeous capture of Earth’s atmosphere from the ISS, courtesy of astronaut/astrophotographer Don Petit.
“The colors of our atmosphere seen from space! Multiple vibrant layers of green atomic oxygen, orange hydroxyl radicals, and red airglow excited from solar activity.” Source
Fantastic launch (and landing) today by Blue Origin - there's another reusable rocket on the table.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, in its second official launch, sent NASA's ESCAPADE mission on its way to Mars. The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (NASA makes such great acronyms) mission will use two small satellites (built by another private space company, Rocket Lab) to study space weather conditions at Mars.
In only its second try, Blue Origin executed a perfect landing of New Glenn's booster on their drone ship, "Never Tell Me The Odds."
As awesome as SpaceX's achievements are, we need MORE private space companies doing amazing things, so Blue Origin's success today is great news. Like SpaceX, Blue Origin will be headed to the moon as part of Artemis, and they have grand plans for orbital stations and beyond.
Learn more about the launch today here.
Image Credit: Dave Limp (link) and Blue Origin.
