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Starship Heat Shield Survives, Roman Telescope & Mars Organics
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Space exploration news breaks on multiple fronts: Starship Flight 13's upper stage survives reentry intact for the first time, unlocking the path to orbital refueling for Artemis. Plus NASA's Roman Telescope is ahead of schedule, JWST maps Uranus in 3D, and Perseverance finds ring-shaped organic carbon on Mars.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Starship's upper stage came back intact. That's the headline from Flight thirteen, which flew on July twenty-fourth and changed what we know this vehicle can actually do.
There's a real caveat to carry alongside that progress. Five of thirteen planned landing engines on the booster misfired during descent, causing a harder splashdown than intended.
Flight thirteen also carried twenty Starlink Gen-three satellites, and here's the part that tends to get underplayed. These weren't test masses.
Shifting to what's coming next. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now in final launch preparation, with a window set for August twenty twenty-six.
JWST has now produced the first three-dimensional map of Uranus's ionosphere, reaching five thousand kilometers above the cloud tops. What it found is that the planet's severely tilted magnetic field is directly shaping the upper atmosphere, driving auroras and controlling how ions distribute vertically.
Finally, Perseverance has detected ring-shaped organic carbon structures in Jezero Crater rocks, embedded in carbonate and sulfate minerals. The molecules contain carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.
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