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Webb's 4-Year Gallery, Impossible Exoplanet & China's Booster Catch | Jul 14
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
James Webb Space Telescope marks four years with 25 iconic images while a gas giant that defies formation models shocks planetary scientists. Plus China recovers an orbital booster, Dream Chaser clears its final hurdle, and objects survive near Sagittarius A*.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Four years in, and the James Webb Space Telescope keeps rewriting what we thought we knew. This week's anniversary milestone isn't just a celebration.
The clearest example of that impact landed this week with a planet that probably shouldn't exist. TOI-5205 b is a gas giant orbiting a star far too small to have formed it.
Shifting from discovery to operations, China crossed a significant threshold this week. The Long March-10B successfully recovered its orbital first-stage booster, making China only the second country after the United States to achieve this milestone.
Sierra Space's Tenacity spaceplane has now completed acoustic testing at Kennedy Space Center, its final certification hurdle before flight. The vehicle is heading back to Colorado for tile work and software integration, with a year-end launch target that's becoming more concrete by the week.
One more result worth noting: new infrared observations using the ERIS instrument have confirmed that several dusty objects and binary stars orbiting very close to Sagittarius A*, our galaxy's central black hole, are still intact. G2, D9, X3, X7.
And before the week closes, SpaceX is scheduled to launch twenty-nine Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday, July fourteenth. The window opens at three fifteen in the morning Eastern time.
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