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Chandra Cracks 14-Year Mystery, Artemis Accelerated & Starship Flight 15
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory solves a 14-year stellar mystery, the Artemis moon landing is pushed to 2028, and SpaceX targets a historic dual-catch with Starship Flight 15. Plus: Pentagon loans for rival launchers, ESA's Hera at Dimorphos, and a controversial new age for the universe.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has finally cracked a mystery that's been running for fourteen years. A massive star called AT 2016blu has been producing regular, violent outbursts every hundred and thirteen days since twenty twelve, and nobody could explain why.
Switching to human spaceflight, NASA has compressed the Artemis timeline in a significant way. The lunar landing target has moved from the previously discussed twenty twenty-nine-plus window to twenty twenty-eight, with an orbital test for Artemis III now set for twenty twenty-seven.
SpaceX is pushing hard on a parallel front. Flight fifteen of Starship is targeting a November thirteenth launch from Starbase, with the goal of simultaneously catching both the Super Heavy booster and the Ship upper stage.
The Pentagon has made a pointed move in parallel. The Office of Strategic Capital awarded a hundred and fifty million dollars each to Rocket Lab and Stoke Space to accelerate their medium-lift rocket programs.
Europe's Hera spacecraft is now within fifteen to twenty miles of asteroid Dimorphos, four years after NASA's DART deliberately impacted it. Hera's job is forensics: mapping the crater, measuring the mass distribution, and deploying cubesat landers to understand what the impact actually did to the asteroid's structure.
Out of Columbia University comes something more theoretical but worth tracking. Physicists working through Einstein's field equations have identified a process they're calling gravitational reconnection, where gravitational field structures can break and reform, releasing energy in a way that mirrors magnetic reconnection in solar plasma.
One more item from the cosmology side. Researchers at the University of Ottawa have tested an alternative model suggesting the universe is twenty-six point seven billion years old, roughly double the standard estimate.
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