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New Glenn Explosion, WASP-94A b Weather & 118 New Exoplanets | May 28
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket is destroyed in a ground test explosion — and the fallout could ripple all the way to Artemis. Plus, JWST captures real-time weather on a hot Jupiter 600 light-years away, and AI finds 118 hidden exoplanets in TESS data.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
For the first time, we're watching weather happen on another world in real time. The James Webb Space Telescope has caught mineral clouds forming over the morning side of a hot Jupiter called WASP-94A b and then dissolving completely by evening.
The Blue Origin story is harder to frame as progress. On May twenty-eighth, the New Glenn rocket was destroyed during a static fire test at Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex thirty-six.
While hardware was failing at Cape Canaveral, software was quietly succeeding somewhere else. A machine learning pipeline called RAVEN processed over two point two million star observations from NASA's TESS survey and validated one hundred and eighteen previously unconfirmed exoplanets.
Routine by design. SpaceX flew Falcon Nine booster B1085 for its sixteenth mission, deploying twenty-nine Starlink satellites and landing cleanly on a drone ship.
Rounding out the day, the European Space Agency selected two new Scout-class Earth observation missions: Hibidis and SOVA-S. Scout missions are small, fast, and targeted.
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