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Webb Detects Beta Pic's Third Planet & FAA Eyes Launch Deregulation
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed a third planet in the Beta Pictoris system using atmospheric chemistry alone — a landmark for exoplanet detection. Plus: Starlink hits 10,865 satellites, FAA proposes waiving environmental laws for commercial launches, and Curiosity's wheels show 14 years of Martian wear.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A telescope has just found a planet that no camera could see. The James Webb Space Telescope identified a new Jupiter-mass world in the Beta Pictoris system, not by imaging it directly, but by reading its atmosphere.
Beta Pictoris is a young system, roughly twenty-three million years old. It's already given us two directly imaged planets, and it functions as something close to a live laboratory for planetary formation.
Meanwhile, the scale of low Earth orbit infrastructure keeps growing. A Falcon Nine launched from Vandenberg on July twenty-fifth, deploying twenty-four more Starlink units and pushing the active constellation to ten thousand eight hundred and sixty-five satellites.
There's a regulatory counterpart to that consolidation, and it deserves attention. The FAA has proposed rules that would let it waive environmental requirements for commercial space licenses.
Two supporting developments round out the picture. SES has confirmed its O3b mPOWER constellation will provide continuous relay communications for Starlab, the commercial station being developed as part of NASA's post-ISS transition.
The two metrics that matter most from here. First, whether spectroscopic discovery of Beta Pictoris d prompts a systematic re-examination of other dust-obscured young systems.
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