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Falcon 9 Crater Imaged, 1,000 Launches by 2030 & Mars Habitable Phases
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has confirmed a Falcon 9 impact crater on the Moon with striking precision — and that's just the start of today's stories. From Trump's bold 1,000-launches-by-2030 space policy to Perseverance uncovering three distinct habitable phases in Jezero Crater, this episode unpacks the biggest space and astronomy news of the day.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage hit the Moon on August fifth, and we now have the crater on camera. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned detailed imagery of a sixty-foot impact site, complete with bright and dark debris streaks radiating outward and freshly excavated material pulled from roughly one and a half feet below the surface.
On August twenty-first, the Trump administration signed a new national space transportation policy with a specific, measurable target: more than one thousand launches and reentries per year by two thousand thirty. That replaces the Obama-era framework from two thousand thirteen, and the numbers involved represent a fundamental scaling challenge.
On Mars, the Perseverance rover has produced findings that change how researchers think about habitability in Jezero Crater. A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research documents three distinct phases of water activity at the site, each with different chemical conditions.
Three threads worth tracking closely. First, the LRO will continue monitoring new lunar impact sites as launch rates increase.
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