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Webb's Brain Nebula, Mars Habitability Cycles & NASA's Lunar Rescue Gap
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
James Webb reveals a dying star that looks eerily like a human brain, while Perseverance uncovers Mars's repeated habitability windows spanning billions of years. Plus: Starship's T-zero abort, 31 ancient quasars from Euclid, and NASA's alarming Artemis rescue gap.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The James Webb Space Telescope has just released detailed infrared images of PMR 1, a dying star's nebula that looks, with unsettling precision, like a human brain. Layered gas structures, shaped by powerful jets from the star at the center, form lobes and ridges that have no business resembling anything biological.
On Mars, Perseverance has been reading a very old story. At the rim of Jezero Crater, the rover found tilted rock layers, physical evidence of repeated asteroid impacts from the late heavy bombardment period, roughly four point one to three point eight billion years ago.
SpaceX aborted Starship Flight 13 at one second before launch. Multiple Raptor engines on the booster failed to ignite, triggering an automatic abort exactly as designed.
ESA's Euclid telescope has identified thirty-one quasars from the earliest period of the universe. The two oldest formed roughly six hundred and seventy million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was barely five percent of its current age.
The sharpest near-term concern in human spaceflight right now is this: NASA has no rescue plan for astronauts stranded on the Moon's South Pole. The Inspector General's warning is now public and specific.
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