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Webb Decodes Brown Dwarf Weather, WASP-17b's Shape & Japan's Phobos Mission
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA's Webb Space Telescope has cracked the weather system of a brown dwarf 20 light-years away and mapped the lopsided 3D atmosphere of hot Jupiter WASP-17b. Plus: SpaceX delivers medical research to the ISS, JAXA's MMX mission targets Phobos, and a Russian satellite closes in on a US radar asset.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A world twenty light-years away just got a lot easier to read. NASA's Webb Space Telescope has cracked the weather patterns of SIMP 0136, a brown dwarf with an atmosphere that looks, at first glance, like pure chaos.
And Webb didn't stop there. On a hot Jupiter called WASP-17b, sitting thirteen hundred light-years out, Webb detected something that previous instruments couldn't resolve: the atmosphere bulges asymmetrically.
Closer to home, SpaceX's Dragon capsule has delivered a fresh cargo run to the International Space Station, and the manifest reads like a medical research wishlist. Artificial retina manufacturing equipment.
Meanwhile, Japan is about to make its boldest move in planetary science. JAXA's MMX mission is launching this week, targeting Phobos, one of Mars' two moons.
One more thread worth tracking: a Russian satellite, Kosmos 2612, recently maneuvered to within one to two kilometers of a US-registered radar satellite. That's close enough to matter.
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