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Roman Arrives Early, Dark Energy Confirmed & Enceladus Organics
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA's Roman Space Telescope launches eight months ahead of schedule as dark energy's cosmic acceleration gets a decisive scientific vindication. Plus: Starship V3 engine anomalies, Firefly's $75M lunar drone contract, ALMA's planet-formation surprise, and new organics on Enceladus.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA just moved the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's launch date forward by eight months. That's not a minor scheduling adjustment.
That timing matters even more given what just happened to dark energy's scientific status. Late in twenty twenty-five, a set of claims emerged suggesting the universe's accelerating expansion might be weaker than measured.
SpaceX completed the twelfth test flight of Starship's V3 configuration, and the results are complicated in a way that deserves careful reading. The mission deployed twenty dummy satellites and both stages were recovered.
Firefly Aerospace won a seventy-five million dollar NASA contract to build four autonomous hopping drones for lunar surface exploration under the Artemis program. These aren't simple landers.
A fifteen-disk kinematic survey presented at the AAS two forty-eight meeting shows planet formation is earlier and messier than textbooks have described. Planets appear to begin dynamically reshaping their surrounding disk while they're still actively accreting mass, not after they've finished forming.
Fresh analysis of Cassini data has identified new complex organic molecules in ice grains venting from Enceladus, Saturn's small ocean moon. The chemistry is consistent with active prebiotic processes.
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