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Starship's Full Catch Attempt, Euclid's Billion-Galaxy Census & Webb's Hidden Planets
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX targets history's first dual-stage rocket catch on Starship Flight 15, while Euclid drops 1.7 petabytes of cosmic data covering 900 million galaxies. Plus: a smarter Webb algorithm, a mystery Soviet probe, and Mars sample news.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX is about to attempt something that has never been done in the history of spaceflight: catching both stages of an orbital rocket as they return to Earth. Flight 15 of Starship is targeted for Friday, and if it works, it changes the economics of space access in a fundamental way.
While SpaceX looks forward, the European Space Agency released a dataset that looks back across nearly the entire observable universe. The Euclid space telescope has just published its first major data drop: one-point-seven petabytes covering more than nine hundred million galaxies, sixty million quasars, and fifteen thousand gravitational lens candidates, all from thirteen months of observations.
The James Webb Space Telescope just got a computational upgrade it didn't know it needed. Caltech researchers published a technique called FLIP that creates a digital twin of Webb to model and subtract starlight from images, revealing planets that were previously hidden in the glare.
A thirty-six-foot object called 1998 KY26 is behaving in a way that gravity alone can't explain. A new study rules out the dark comet theory, where outgassing from ice drives unexpected acceleration.
Elsewhere, the Perseverance rover has collected a sample called Singita after a thirteen-month drilling gap. The rock is gabbro, likely pulled from deep in the Martian crust by ancient impacts, and it may preserve evidence of early magmatic activity on Mars that surface rocks simply can't hold.
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