Daily Archives: March 16, 2024

SpaceX gets E-band radio waves to boost Starlink broadband – SpaceNews

Posted: March 16, 2024 at 10:16 am

TAMPA, Fla. SpaceX has secured conditional approval to use extremely high-frequency E-band radio waves to improve the capacity of its low Earth orbit Starlink broadband constellation.

The Federal Communications Commission said March 8 it is allowing SpaceX to use E-band frequencies between second-generation Starlink satellites and gateways on the ground, alongside already approved spectrum in the Ka and Ku bands.

Specifically, SpaceX is now also permitted to communicate between 71 and 76 gigahertz from space to Earth, and 81-86 GHz Earth-to-space, using the up to 7,500 Gen2 satellites SpaceX is allowed to deploy.

SpaceX has plans for 30,000 Gen2 satellites, on top of the 4,400 Gen1 satellites already authorized by the FCC.

However, the FCC deferred action in December 2022 on whether to allow SpaceX to deploy the other three-quarters of its Gen2 constellation, which includes spacecraft closer to Earth to improve broadband speeds.

The regulator also deferred action at the time on SpaceXs plans to use E-band frequencies, citing a need to first establish ground rules for using them in space.

In a March 8 regulatory filing, the FCC said it found SpaceXs proposed operations in the E-band present no new or increased frequency conflicts with other satellite operations.

But the order comes with multiple conditions, including potentially forcing SpaceX to modify operations if another satellite operator also seeks to use the radio waves.

Starlink satellites use Ku-band to connect user terminals. In October, the FCC allowed SpaceX to also provide fixed-satellite services from Gen2 spacecraft using V-band spectrum, which like E-band is also extremely high frequency (EHF) and in its commercial infancy.

Higher frequency spectrum bands promise more bandwidth and throughput as they become increasingly subject to weather attenuation and other issues.

Last year, SpaceX said using E-band radio waves for backhaul would enable Starlink Gen2 to provide about four times more capacity per satellite than earlier iterations, without elaborating.

There are currently around 1900 Starlink satellites launched under the Gen2 license in orbit, according to spacecraft tracker and astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell about two-thirds of these satellites are significantly larger and more powerful than Gen1 but smaller than full-scale versions slated to launch on SpaceXs Starship vehicle. Around 3,600 separate satellites in orbit are classed as Gen1.

The FCC continues to defer action over whether to allow SpaceX to deploy the other 22,500 satellites in its proposed Gen2 constellation.

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Review: Tripping on Utopia Complicates the History of Psychedelics – AOL

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Grand Central Publishing

In one common account of modern psychedelic culture's origins, LSD was initially monopolized by the national security state, which saw such drugs as tools for "control of human behavior." The results included MKULTRA, an infamous CIA program that experimented on people without their consent. But in the 1960s, the story goes, the establishment lost control of these tools. Suddenly, utopian individualists like Timothy Leary were urging people to use drugs to seize control of theirownconsciousnessand the deep state was less interested in deploying LSD than in cracking down on its unauthorized use.

Benjamin Breen'sTripping on Utopiacomplicates this tale. The book focuses on the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who in the 1930s developed their own utopian visions of fluid identities and resistance to psychological manipulation; while psychedelia was not at the center of their work, it was in their constellation of sources. They also developed strong ties to the national security state during World War II, and in the early Cold War their social circles included people directly tied to MKULTRA. Bateson backed away in horror, but Mead maintained her CIA connections for years.

Some of the book's conclusions have been disputed, with Bateson's daughter Nora arguing that Breen misconstrued archival documents and otherwise botched his facts. But no matter how that debate plays out,Tripping on Utopiamakes it clear that these two conceptions of psychedelic drugsas tools of liberation and as tools of controlwere uncomfortably entwined well before the 1960s. The '60s crowd does not always come off well here either, but I'll say one thing for Leary: For all his overstatements and opportunistic personal behavior, which Breen recounts unsparingly, he believed it was just as wrong to coercively "alter the consciousness of thy fellow man" as it was to "prevent thy fellow man from altering his own consciousness."

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SpaceX’s Crew-7 capsule returns 4 astronauts to Earth with predawn splashdown (video) – Space.com

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The four astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-7 mission returned to Earth early Tuesday morning (March 12), with their homecoming broadcast live.

Crew-7's Dragon capsule, Endurance, splashed down at 5:50 a.m. EDT (0950 UTC) off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. The recovery crew arrived at the capsule around three minutes later, with thermal cameras tracking the recovery operations.

Related: SpaceX Crew-7 astronauts undock from ISS for return to Earth

The parachutes that had guided Endurance back to Earth were recovered with the recovery crew checking for both pyrotechnic residuals and poisonous materials. After these safety checks, the Dragon capsule was lifted from the Gulf of Mexico onto a recovery ship at 6:13 a.m. EDT (1013 GMT) using a hydraulic lift.

The Crew-7 astronauts exited the Endurance Dragon capsule at 6:36 a.m. EDT (1036 UTC), with Andy Mogensen assisted from the capsule first. After 199 days in low-Earth orbit and their descent back to Earth, the crew will visit a medical facility to check their health.

Endurance undocked from the International Space Station on Monday (March 11) after the astronauts' 6.5-month stay on the orbiting laboratory to begin Crew-7's journey home.

Crew-7 consists of NASA astronaut JasminMoghbeli, Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Satoshi Furukawa and Konstantin Borisov, a cosmonaut with Russia's space agency,Roscosmos.

The mission launched to the ISS atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Aug. 26, 2023 and arrived at the orbiting complex a day later. The liftoff kicked off the first spaceflight for Moghbeli and Borisov and the second for Mogensen and Furukawa.

The Crew-7 quartet overlapped briefly with their successors, the four astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-8 mission, which arrived at the ISS last Tuesday (March 5).

As those mission names suggest, SpaceX has now launched eight operational astronaut flights to the ISS for NASA (plus one crewed test flight to the orbiting lab). The agency selected SpaceX for this job in September 2014.

Aerospace giant Boeing got a commercial crew contract back then as well, but has not yet flown an astronaut mission for NASA. That should change soon, however: The first astronaut flight of Boeing's Starliner capsule is scheduled to launch in early May.

That mission, called Crew Flight Test, will send two astronauts to the ISS for a roughly 10-day stay.

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Starship launch: Third flight reaches space but is lost on re-entry – New Scientist

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SpaceXs Starship taking off on 14 March

SpaceX

SpaceXs third and most ambitious Starship test flight appeared to be at least a partial success today as it reached space, carried out fuel transfer tests and travelled further and faster than ever before. But the craft failed to make its scheduled landing and appears to have either self-destructed or burned up in Earths atmosphere.

After lift-off from SpaceXs site at Boca Chica, Texas, the first and second stages separated cleanly and the first stage the booster that lifts it on the first part of its journey began descending for a landing at sea. SpaceX ultimately intends to recover and re-use both stages, but in these early test flights they are both destined for a safer and easier ocean ditching.

While the first stage steered itself on the descent it seemingly struggled to slow its fall as intended and appeared to hit the sea at speed.

The second stage went on to reach an altitude of around 230 kilometres and successfully opened and closed its payload door as a test. It also shuffled fuel from one tank to another as an experimental first step towards the eventual refuelling of one Starship by another, which will be vital for long-range missions.

But during re-entry the craft reached extremely high temperatures, with live video showing glowing plasma around its surface, and both video and telemetry data was lost.

The craft had been due to attempt to relight its Raptor engines which has never been done in space before for a controlled re-entry to Earths atmosphere starting at almost 27,000 kilometres per hour. But this re-light part of the mission was skipped by the company, and the craft was subsequently lost.

A view of SpaceXs Starship captured 9 minutes into the mission

SpaceX

The US Federal Aviation Administration granted permission for the test flight on 13 March, the day before the planned launch, and tweeted that SpaceX had met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements.

Starship is the most powerful rocket ever built. Its 121-metre length is made up of two stages: a booster and a spacecraft, both of which are designed to be reusable to keep costs low and enable fast turnarounds between flights.

The Starship heating up as it re-entered Earths atmosphere after about 47 minutes of flight, leading to the loss of the spacecraft

SpaceX

Todays launch was the companys third with Starship. It follows the first test in April last year, which exploded before the first and second stages could separate, and another in November that saw the second, upper stage reach space but self-destruct when it stopped transmitting data, with the first stage blowing up just after separation.

The ultimate aim of the project is to put humans on the moon and, later, Mars.

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Starship lifts off on third test flight – SpaceNews

Posted: at 10:16 am

Updated 5 p.m. Eastern with additional information and reactions.

WASHINGTON SpaceXs Starship vehicle lifted off on its third test flight March 14, making significant progress compared to its first two by achieving most of its planned test milestones.

The Starship/Super Heavy vehicle lifted off from the companys Starbase site at 9:25 a.m. Eastern. The liftoff was delayed by nearly an hour and a half because of ships in restricted waters offshore. SpaceX reported no technical issues during the countdown.

The Super Heavy booster fired all 33 of its Raptor engines for nearly three minutes before executing hot staging, with the Starship upper stages engines igniting while still attached to Super Heavy before separating.

The booster then performed burns to attempt what SpaceX webcast hosts called a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, where it would not be recovered. However, the landing burn did not appear to go correctly, and the company later said that the booster broke apart 462 meters above the ocean after lighting several Raptor engines for a landing burn.

The Starship upper stage performed its burn, placing the vehicle onto its planned suborbital trajectory. It avoided the fate of the previous Starship launch in November, when the vehicle broke apart late in its burn after catching fire while venting propellant.

While in space on its suborbital trajectory, SpaceX opened a payload bay door that will be used on later Starship vehicles for deploying Starlink satellites. It also performed an in-space propellant transfer demonstration as part of a NASA contract where it would move propellant from one tank within the vehicle to another. SpaceX said it was evaluating the data from both tests.

SpaceX had planned to perform a brief relight of a Raptor engine on Starship about 40 minutes after liftoff, but the company said on the webcast that this test was skipped for reasons not immediately known. The company later said the engine test was called off because of the vehicles roll rates.

Several minutes later, the vehicle started reentry. A camera mounted on a flap on Starship provided dramatic images of the reentry, relayed through Starlink satellites. Telemetry was lost about 49 and a half minutes after liftoff when the vehicle was descending through an altitude of 65 kilometers. SpaceX later said on the webcast that it lost contact through both its own Starlink satellites as well as through NASA TDRSS data relay satellites at the same time, speculating that the vehicle may have broken up.

While the mission did not achieve all its test objectives, the company considered the launch a success. What we achieved on this flight will provide invaluable data to continue rapidly developing Starship, it said in a statement.

NASA agreed with that assessment. Congrats to SpaceX on a successful test flight! Starship has soared into the heavens, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson posted on social media. The agency is closely following Starships development since it awarded contracts to SpaceX worth about $4 billion to develop versions of Starship for its Human Landing System program to be used starting with Artemis 3 as soon as late 2026.

Congratulations to our colleagues at SpaceX on their third Starship flight test! said Cathy Koerner, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development. Lessons learned from this milestone take us one step closer to returning astronauts to the lunar surface with Human Landing Systems provided by U.S. industry.

There was praise across the Atlantic as well. SpaceX continues to push the boundaries and the U.S. continues to set a model for how public and private can join forces to meet societal needs and boost commercialization within the space industry, said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, noting that his agency was drawing from that experience for its own upcoming launcher competition.

The launch came after a final regulatory milestone, an update Federal Aviation Administration launch license, issued late in the day March 13. The license required an additional environmental review after SpaceX changed the vehicles trajectory from the first two integrated test flights, targeting a splashdown in the Indian Ocean rather than near Hawaii.

That environmental assessment revealed that SpaceX expected Starship to explosively break apart upon splashdown. While Starship would vent some propellant while in space before reentry, the assessment stated that the company expected to have 70,000 kilograms of liquid oxygen and methane propellants in its main tanks and 30,650 kilograms in header tanks in the nose of the vehicle.

Starship would impact the Indian Ocean intact, horizontally, and at terminal velocity, the environmental assessment states. The impact would disperse settled remaining propellants and drive structural failure of the vehicle. The structural failure would immediately lead to failure of the transfer tube, which would allow the remaining liquid oxygen (LOX) and methane to mix, resulting in an explosive event.

The assessment noted that SpaceX did not plan to recover any Starship debris or have any boats or aircraft in the area to monitor the reentry and splashdown. It added that any debris is expected to have sufficient mass to sink to the seafloor.

The different trajectory allowed the company to perform tests such as the first in-space firing of the Raptor engine. Flying a steeper suborbital trajectory, with a planned maximum altitude of 235 kilometers, allows a test without substantially altering the splashdown location and threatening public safety, SpaceX hosts said on the companys launch webcast.

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SpaceX successfully launches Starship but loses spacecraft while in orbit – News 13 Orlando

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NATIONWIDE SpaceX was able to successfully launch Starship on Thursday morning and while the spacecraft itself was in space for the first time, it was lost while orbiting the planet. Its exact fate is currently unknown after the company stated it was not sending out a signal.

The liftoff happened at 9:25 a.m. ET with a mixture of cheers from the Starship team heard over SpaceX's live feed and the roar of the Starship's Raptor engines.

The launch took place at SpaceXs Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

Collectively known as Starship, the first-stage rockets 33 Raptor engines, fueled with thousands of tons of sub-cooled liquid oxygen and liquid methane, lit up as it went into the sky.

The new hot stage separation worked as designed, just like during the second launch attempt in November 2023. While it worked last time, it resulted in the rocket being destroyed. (Please see below for more.)

The first-stage Super Heavy rocket had a hard-water landing in the Gulf of Mexico, confirmed SpaceX. The damage to it is unknown.

The Starship spacecraft was doing various tests while in orbit, including the opening and closing of the payload door, affectionately known as the "Pez door".

At one point, the Starship was traveling 40 miles (65 kilometers) above the round Earth and moving at 15,973 mph (25,707 kmh).

The plan was for Starship to have a water landing in the Indian Ocean. However, about 51 minutes after liftoff, SpaceX announced on its live feed, "We are making the call now that we have lost ship 28."

The ship's signal back down to the team was lost and SpaceX confirmed that it would take a "little bit of time" to find out what exactly happened to the ship.

SpaceX admitted during its live feed that there was always a chance the Starship and the Super Heavy rocket would not survive their splashdowns.

However, SpaceX considered that the third flight test made some accomplishments, some not seen before:

SpaceX stated it will review the data that was collected and use that for the next Starship test.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called it a "successful test flight" of the Starship on X.

"Together, we are making great strides through Artemis to return humanity to the Moonthen look onward to Mars," Nelson stated about NASA's and SpaceX's plans.

Later after the launch test, Federal Aviation Administration stated that it will be investigating the Starship flight.

"No public injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA is overseeing the SpaceX-led mishap investigation to ensure the company complies with its FAA-approved mishap investigation plan and other regulatory requirements," the FAA stated. "The FAA will be involved in every step of the mishap investigation process and must approve SpaceXs final report, including any corrective actions."

The launch did not go off on time due to wind concerns and giving boats in the splashdown areas time to get out of the way.

The 110-minute launch window was originally set for 8 a.m. ET, but SpaceX pushed the time back to 8:02 a.m. ET. Then SpaceX pushed it to 9:10 a.m. ET, so that boats in the splash down zones had time to move out of the area, stated SpaceX.

On Wednesday afternoon, the California-based company announced that it would be testing its 397-foot-tall stacked Starship for a third time on Thursday from its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

SpaceX was waiting for the FAA to grant its approval for the third flight attempt. The company announced last week that it was aiming for Thursday for the launch date.

SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk posted on X, stating that "Starship will make life multiplanetary."

Starship is where SpaceXs hopes and dreams are stored. If all goes well, it will take humans back to Earths moon and eventually, it will go to Mars.

It is a two-stage heavy lift launch rocket that will be a fully reusable transportation system to carry humans and cargo into space. The rocket is known as the Super Heavy and the spacecraft is called Starship, but collectively, they are known as Starship.

Both the Super Heavy rocket, with its 33 Raptor engines fueled by thousands of tons of sub-cooled liquid oxygen and liquid methane, and the Starship are designed to be reusable.

The Starship is planned to carry 100 crew members and cargo to Earth orbit, the moon and eventually Mars,according to the ships user guide.

For the third test, SpaceX stated it built on the two previous launches and planned to showoff a series of demonstrations.

The third flight test aims to build on what weve learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starships payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stages coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship. It will also fly a new trajectory, with Starship targeted to splashdown in the Indian Ocean, SpaceX explained.

If things had gone according to plan, this would have been Starship's flight path.

SpaceXs first launch attempt of Starship happened on April 2023, which saw a series of failures that caused the rocket to explode.

The FAA issued a series of requirements before the California-based company could try again, which included 63 corrective actions.

For the second test in November 2023, SpaceX was forced to blow up Starship.

The new stage separation, called hot stage separation, worked as designed, but it resulted in the Super Heavy rockets destruction.

Following stage separation, Super Heavy initiated its boostback burn, which sends commands to 13 of the vehicles 33 Raptor engines to propel the rocket toward its intended landing location. During this burn, several engines began shutting down before one engine failed energetically, quickly cascading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the booster, SpaceX described.

SpaceX believed the likely cause of the booster blowing up was a filter blockage where liquid oxygen fuel goes to the engines.

Minutes later after the hot stage separation, SpaceX could not regain a signal to the Starship spacecraft and the company was forced to destroy it.

A leak in the aft section of the spacecraft that developed when the liquid oxygen vent was initiated resulted in a combustion event and subsequent fires that led to a loss of communication between the spacecrafts flight computers. This resulted in a commanded shut down of all six engines prior to completion of the ascent burn, followed by the Autonomous Flight Safety System detecting a mission rule violation and activating the flight termination system, leading to vehicle breakup, the company stated.

SpaceX stated it has corrected the issues (17 corrective actions) that occurred during the second flight attempt.

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SpaceX Starship launch livestream: Watch the third launch live – Mashable

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NASA expects the SpaceX Starship to land astronauts on the moon, as soon as 2026.

The largest rocket ever built standing 397 feet high (with its booster) and powered by a whopping 33 engines still has a long road ahead before it's operational. But SpaceX is making progress. The commercial space company, known for revolutionizing rocketry by building reusable rockets that land back on Earth, has announced Starship's third test flight at 9:25 a.m. ET on March 14 and you can watch it live.

The test is a high-altitude demonstration that, if all goes as planned, will see the spacecraft blast-off from its Boca Chica launchpad, separate from its rocket booster, coast in Earth's orbit, and reenter the atmosphere, ultimately falling into the Indian Ocean.

Amid the journey, SpaceX says it will test out a number of "ambitious challenges," including the transfer of 11 tons of fuel between tanks as the craft is coasting in space.

Crucially, the space exploration company has tempered expectations for these launches, and rightfully so. Starship isn't nearly a finished vehicle. It's still in the demonstration phase. The first launch test in April 2023 saw Starship fly for around three minutes before SpaceX deliberately destroyed the wayward rocket. The second launch in November 2023 saw Starship explode at around eight minutes into flight after an engine problem triggered the craft's flight termination system.

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The Elon Musk-owned company said that its Starship progress is in "rapid iterative development" as the company tests the craft and makes the necessary modifications. One day, SpaceX plans for Starship to be "a fully reusable launch system capable of carrying satellites, payloads, crew, and cargo to a variety of orbits and Earth, lunar, and Martian landing sites."

You can watch the third Starship test directly on the SpaceX website or on its X account page. The webcast will begin 30 minutes before liftoff.

You'll be watching a major player in the future of spaceflight.

UPDATE: Mar. 14, 2024, 8:33 a.m. EDT The launch, originally scheduled for 8:30 a.m. ET, has been delayed to approximately 9:25 a.m. ET as SpaceX monitors wind conditions.

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Hubble Telescope spies stormy weather and a shrinking Great Red Spot on Jupiter (video) – Space.com

Posted: at 10:15 am

The gas giant Jupiter steals the show in these two new portraits of the planet's opposing faces, showing the swirling storms and tumultuous cloud bands blown by winds raging at hundreds of miles per hour.

The Hubble Space Telescope took these images on Jan. 5-6, 2024. Jupiter rotates once every 10 hours, Hubble was able to image one hemisphere with the famous Great Red Spot visible, and wait for the other hemisphere to come into view before imaging that.

The latest images show that Jupiter is currently experiencing some action. "The many large storms and small white clouds are a hallmark of a lot of activity going on in Jupiter's atmosphere right now," said Simon in a press statement.

Related: Mystery of Jupiter's Great Blue Spot deepens with strangely fluctuating jet

Jupiter passed through perihelion its closest point in its orbit around the sun on 21 January 2023, and it seems that a year later the extra solar heating of Jovian summer is still stirring up its atmosphere.

The gas giant's most distinctive feature is its dark and light banding, visible through even a four-inch back-garden telescope. With Hubble's vision, we see every detail of those bands. The lighter bands are called 'zones' and are areas where the atmosphere is rising. The darker bands are referred to as 'belts' and are areas where the atmosphere is sinking. The whole atmosphere is undulating as it rotates around Jupiter, but it doesn't rise or sink too much the clouds are only about 30 miles (50km) deep, which is a shallow layer compared to the rest of the atmosphere that extends tens of thousands of miles deep.

In one hemisphere we can see the famous Great Red Spot, which has been raging for at least nearly 200 years, and quite possibly for much longer if observations by English astronomer Robert Hooke and the Italian Giovanni Cassini and 16645 were of the same storm. However, there's a big question mark over the Great Red Spot's continued longevity, because it is shrinking at an alarming rate.

In the late nineteenth century the Great Red Spot was measured to be about 25,500 miles (41,000 km) across, with enough area to squeeze three Earths inside of it. However, when the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Jupiter in 1979 they measured that the Great Red Spot to be 14,500 miles (23,300 km) in diameter; by 1995, when Hubble viewed Jupiter, its diameter had decreased to 13,020 miles (20,950km).

In 2014 it was 10,250 miles (16,500 km); in 2021 just 9,165 miles (14,750 km); and in November 2023 ace amateur astrophotographer Damian Peach measured it to be 7,770 miles (12,500km). The Great Red Spot has gone from being a huge oval big enough to fit three Earths, to being circular and not even large enough to fit a single Earth (which has a diameter of 7,926 miles (12,756 km).

The cause of this shrinking remains a mystery. Is the Great Red Spot going to blow itself out, or will it find a second wind in the future? One of the purposes of OPAL is to track the Great Red Spot and monitor how it is changing to try and work out what's happening to it.

Nevertheless, its size is still impressive a huge storm the size of our planet, with roots 500km (~300 miles) deep in the Jovian atmosphere and with winds raging at between 430 and 680 kilometers per hour (267422 mph)!

The Great Red Spot isn't the only red spot on Jupiter, however. In the late 1990s three 'white ovals' smaller storms that had been observed throughout the twentieth century merged to form a new storm called Oval BA. Then, in 2006 Oval BA turned red, prompting the nickname 'Red Spot Junior'. It too has shrunk somewhat over the years, and can be seen below and to the right of the Great Red Spot in Hubble's image.

What makes the storms turn red is another unanswered mystery. Evidently it is to do with chemistry, possibly involving the dredging up of phosphorous or sulfur, or organic molecules that react with solar ultraviolet light when they rise up into the cloud deck.

At first glance the other hemisphere appears a little more bland without the two big, main red spots to spice things up, but on closer inspection there is plenty going on. In the planet's North Equatorial Belt (the first red band north of the equator) we can see two smaller storms, one deep red, another a paler red, bumping next to each other. The deep red storm is a cyclone, meaning that it is rotating counterclockwise in Jupiter's northern hemisphere, while its paler companion is an anticyclone, which is rotating in a clockwise direction. Because they are swirling in opposite directions they won't merge, but rather will bounce off each other.

And as an added bonus, on the left hand side of the image close to the limb of the South Equatorial Belt, we can see Jupiter's innermost moon, the volcanic and fiery Io.

Hubble's portraits of Jupiter, and the other gas giants, have become an annual event as part of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, headed up by planetary scientist Amy Simon of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. With the help of both Hubble and an army of amateur astronomers all around the world, OPAL is able to keep tabs on the giant planets and monitor activity in their atmosphere.

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope mission Live updates – Space.com

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Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to spot several of the building blocks of stars, planets, and even life in ice form swirling around two infant stars, or "protostars."

The complex organic molecules (COMs) spotted range from relatively simple molecules to complex compounds. Some of the familiar compounds spotted around the protostars IRAS 2A and IRAS23385 include ethanol, which we call alcohol on Earth, acetic acid found in vinegar, and formic acid, the compound that makes bee stings and ant bites painful.

The discovery of the compounds around IRAS 2A is particularly interesting because these protostars, a lot like the sun, would have 4.6 billion years ago in its infancy before the formation of the planets. That means the discovery of these icy compounds may help confirm that the vital ingredients for life were delivered to Earth by comet bombardments.

"This finding contributes to one of the long-standing questions in astrochemistry,"team leader and Leiden University researcher Will Rochasaid in a statement."What is the origin of COMs in space? Are they made in the gas phase or in ice? The detection of COMs in ices suggests that solid-phase chemical reactions on the surfaces of cold dust grains can build complex kinds of molecules."

Related: James Webb Space Telescope spots the icy building blocks of life swirling around infant stars

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has double-checked the Hubble Space Telescope's calculations of the expanding universe, finding its older sibling telescope was spot on the money. This possibly intensifies an existing headache for cosmologists called the "Hubble tension."

The Hubble Tension arises from the fact that measurements of the rate of the expansion of the universe made with a cosmic fossil called the cosmic microwave background (CMB) don't tally with a measurement technique referred to as the "cosmic distance ladder." One possibility for Hubble tension was that measurements made by the Hubble telescope to form the bottom rung of this ladder were inaccurate.

This distance ladder is made up of "rungs" of different techniques to measure increasingly larger cosmic distances. The JWST discovered that the bottom rung, measurements to stars that pulse in brightness called "Cepheid variables," isn't a little loose after all. Observations made with the increased resolution of the JWST revealed that a suspected error in Hubble's measurement of Cepheid variables isn't present.

"We've now spanned the whole range of what Hubble observed and we can rule out a measurement error as the cause of the Hubble tension with very high confidence," research leader and John Hopkins University scientist Adam Riess said in a statement. "With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility we have misunderstood the universe."

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope complicates expanding universe paradox by checking Hubble's work

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) researchers identified a population of supermassive black hole-powered quasars that could help explain how such objects grew to sizes equivalent to millions or billions of times that of the sun.

The relatively small quasars, which were identified as tiny red dots of light, represent a transitional stage on the road to becoming truly gigantic supermassive black holes. This means that this quasar population could fill a mass gap, the existence of which has perplexed scientists.

"One issue with quasars is that some of them seem to be overly massive, too massive given the age of the universe at which the quasars are observed," Jorryt Matthee, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, said in astatement. "We call them the 'problematic quasars.'"

Read more: How do some black holes get so big? The James Webb Space Telescope may have an answer

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have observed small galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 1 billion years old, finding they were responsible for shaping the entire cosmos.

The galaxies with masses less than 1 billion times that of the sun provided most of the light that transformed neutral hydrogen to ionized hydrogen during a point in the universe's evolution called the epoch of reionization.

"We're really talking about the global transformation of the entire universe," Hakim Atek, research lead author and an astronomer at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris told Space.com. "The main surprise is that these small, faint galaxies had so much power, their cumulative radiation could transform the entire universe."

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope finds dwarf galaxies packed enough punch to reshape the entire early universe

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) astronomers have discovered an extremely red supermassive black hole that existed when the universe was under 1 billion years old.

Not only is the supermassive black hole as massive as 40 million suns, it is growing by rapidly swallowing or accreting matter. Its red color comes from the shroud of gas and dust that surrounds it.

"Several other supermassive black holes in the early universe have now been found to show a similar behavior, which leads to some intriguing views of the black hole and host galaxy growth, and the interplay between them, which is not well understood," Princeton University researcher Jenny Greene said.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope finds 'extremely red' supermassive black hole growing in the early universe

Thousand-mile-per-hour winds are blowing a hail of tiny quartz crystals through the silicate-enhanced, scorching hot atmosphere of a distant gas giant planet called WASP-17b, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found.

"We knew from Hubble [Space Telescope] observations that there must be aerosols tiny particles making up clouds or haze in WASP-17bs atmosphere, but we didnt expect them to be made of quartz," Daniel Grant of the University of Bristol in the UK and leader of a new study on the discovery, said in astatement.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope detects quartz crystals in an exoplanet's atmosphere

A star-studded cosmic neighbor 210,000 light-years away is now available to view on our computer screens in unprecedented detail, thanks to NASAs mighty James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the power of modern internet connection.

The newly releasedJames Webb Space Telescopephoto captures NGC 346, a star-forming region in a satellite galaxy of theMilky Waycalled theSmall Magellanic Cloud(SMC).

Read more and see the entire image: James Webb Space Telescope spotlights gorgeous young stars in a galaxy next door (photo)

Approximately 2,200 light-years from where you're sitting lie the Cheerio-shaped remains of a dying star remnants that form a structure famously known as the Ring Nebula. And on Monday (Aug. 21), scientists announced theJames Webb Space Telescopehas struck gold once again, earning a rather beautiful new view of this iconic cosmic halo.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope offers a mesmerizing look at the Ring Nebula (photos)

Astronomers have begun measuring the most distant star ever detected, thanks to the powerful eyes of theJames Webb Space Telescope(JWST).

That star, known as Earendel, wasdiscovered last yearby theHubble Space Telescope. It has taken 12.9 billion years for Earendel's light to reach Earth, meaning the star was shining less than a billion years after the Big Bang spurred our universe into existence.However, Earendel doesn't lie a mere 12.9 billion light-years away from us.

Read more: Earendel revealed: James Webb Space Telescope lifts veil on the most distant star known in the universe

This marks the most detailed image yet of the striking stellar pair Herbig-Haro 46/47 located about 1,470 light-years away.

Produced with the scope's powerful infrared eyes, the image showcases a striking salmon-colored smear at its center. This represents the area where the stars, collectively named Herbig-Haro 46/47, are found.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope stuns with glowing portrait of actively forming stars (photo)

Astronomers have for the first time discovered that rocky alien worlds could possess large amounts of water from the moment they form, a new study finds.

Life is found virtually wherever there is water onEarth. As such, the search for potentially habitableexoplanetshas mainly focused on hunting for the presence of water.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope spies water near center of planet-forming disk in cosmic 1st

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected the earliest-known carbon dust in a galaxy ever.

Using the powerful space telescope, a team of astronomers spotted signs of the element that forms the backbone of all life in ten different galaxies that existed as early as 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope makes 1st detection of diamond-like carbon dust in the universe's earliest stars

July 12 marks one year since the James Webb Space Telescope's first four images were released to the public.

To mark the occasion, NASA expert Taylor Hutchison spoke to Space.com about the impact the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)has had on science in its first 12 months. The astrophysicist also explained what could be forthcoming from the JWST during its second year of operations.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope's 'exquisite' 1st year has some astronomers in tears - but in a good way (exclusive video)

To mark the one-year anniversary of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations on Wednesday, July 12, 2023, NASA has released a stunning image that shows star birth in a way that it has never been seen before.

The new JWST image features the closest star-forming region toEarth, the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. Though a small and relatively peaceful stellar nursery, the powerful telescope's visualization represents a chaotic close-up of the region located 390light-yearsfrom Earth.

Read more and see the photo here: New James Webb Space Telescope image released to celebrate 1st year of observations is absolutely stunning (photo)

A new 3D visualization from the James Webb Space Telescope takes viewers on a journey back in time to just after the Big Bang.

In the video, over 5,000galaxiescan be seen in gorgeous full color and three dimensions. The cosmic journey begins with relatively nearby galaxies located within a few billion light-years of Earth and concludes at Maisie's Galaxy, which at 13.4 billion light-years fromEarthis one of the most distant galaxies ever observed by humanity and is seen as it was just around 390 million years afterthe Big Bang.

Read more and watch the video here: James Webb Space Telescope time travels billions of years in amazing 3D visualization (video)

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected the most distant active supermassive black hole.

The galaxy that hosts the ancientblack hole, CEERS 1019, formed fairly early in the universe's history, just 570 million years afterthe Big Bang. The active supermassive black hole at the center of CEERS 1019 is unusual not only for its age and distance but also in that it weighs in at just 9 million solar masses, meaning it's 9 million times heftier thanthe sun.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope detects most distant active supermassive black hole ever seen

With the aid of theJames Webb Space Telescope(JWST), astronomers have seen starlight from two early galaxies that host feeding supermassiveblack holes, orquasars, for the first time.

The active galaxies and the feeding supermassive black hole-powered quasars are seen as they were when the universe was less than one billion years old.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope sees 1st starlight from ancient quasars in groundbreaking discovery

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first incredible images of the gas giant Saturn, but they aren't quite ready for the public yet.

The raw images ofSaturnwere revealed on the unofficial websiteJWST feed, which contains every piece of data collected by the powerful space telescope since itbegan operationsin mid-2023.

Read more: Saturn looks incredible in these raw James Webb Space Telescope images (photos)

New data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows that the atmosphere of a rocky exoplanet in the TRAPPIST-1 system is either non-existent or incredibly thin, making it unfavorable for hosting life as we know it.

Astronomers usingJWSTwere able to calculate the amount of heat energy coming fromTRAPPIST-1 c, revealing that the dayside temperature of the rocky world is about 225 degrees Fahrenheit (107 degrees Celsius) the coolest rockyexoplanetever characterized. At this temperature, the exoplanet's atmosphere is likely extremely thin, if it exists at all, according to a statement from NASA.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope spies on rocky TRAPPIST-1 exoplanet, finds bad news for life

Shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was a dark and mysterious place.The gas between stars and galaxies was opaque, so no light could shine through.

Using observations from NASA'sJames Webb Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers led by Simon Lilly of ETH Zrich in Switzerland has found how the universe changed in opacity. The team looked back in time at galaxies from the end of theEra of Reionization, a dramatic period in the universe's history in which gas was heated, cooled and then reionized (given an electrical charge once again).

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope reveals how galaxies made the early universe transparent

The James Webb Telescope has unveiled hundreds of ancient galaxies that could be among the first members of the universe a leap from only a handful that were previously known to exist at the time.

93% of the newfound galaxies that Webb spotted had never been seen before.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope discovers 717 ancient galaxies that flooded the universe with 1st light

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected the faintest galaxy yet in the infant universe.

The galaxy, known as JD1, is part of the first generation of galaxies to pop up inour universe's 13.8-billion-year history. It's about 13.3 billion light-years away from us, meaning we're observing it as it looked when the universe was only a few hundred million years old a meager 4% of its current age.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope spots faintest galaxy yet in the infant universe (photo)

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a stunning image of a distant barred spiral galaxy as astronomers aim to study star birth in the deeper regions of space.

JWSTobserved the galaxy NGC 5068, located 17 million light-years away in the constellationVirgo, as part of its mission to build what the European Space Agency (ESA)calls a "treasure trove"of star formation observations in relatively nearby galaxies.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope peers behind bars to reveal a cosmic 'treasure trove' (video)

The James Webb Space Telescope has spied the oldest known examples of complex organic molecules in the universe, a new study reports.

These chemicals much like ones found in smoke and soot on Earth reside within an earlygalaxythat formed whenthe universewas about 10% of its current age. The chemicals were spotted in a galaxy known as SPT0418-47 more than 12 billion light-years from Earth.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope spies earliest complex organic molecules in the universe

The James Webb Space Telescope has found traces of water vapor in the atmosphere of a super-hot gas giant exoplanet some 400 light-years away from Earth.

Theexoplanetin question,WASP-18 b, is agas giant10 times more massive than thesolar system's largest planet,Jupiter.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope finds water in super-hot exoplanet's atmosphere

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted water around a rare comet located in the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars.

The observation represents another scientific breakthrough for theJames Webb Space Telescope(JWST), representing the first time that gas, in this case, water vapor, has been detected around a comet in the main asteroid belt. This is important as it shows that water in the early solar system could have been preserved as ice in themain asteroid belt.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope discovers water around a mysterious comet

A mode of the JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) is receiving less sensor "throughput", meaning it's receiving less than the expected amount of light at the longest wavelengths. NASA officials are currently investigating the cause.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope faces sensor glitch in deep space

A stunning new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a galaxy with a supernova, three times over. That phenomenon is due to light bending from the massive gravitational influence of a foreground galactic cluster, as predicted byAlbert Einstein. The lensing object is the galactic cluster RX J2129, located around 3.2 billion light-years away in theconstellation Aquarius.

Read more: James Webb Space Telescope 'sees triple' with help from Einstein (photos)

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Secret remains: James Webb measures the rate of expansion of the Universe – The Universe. Space. Tech

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Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to measure the rate of expansion of the universe. Its data confirmed the results of observations by the Hubble telescope. This indicates the reality of the so-called Hubble Tension.

Since the Big Bang, our universe has been continuously expanding. This process is described by Hubbles Law, the key component of which is the Hubble constant, a coefficient that makes it possible to relate the distance to an object in the universe to its speed.

Astronomers have long been trying to calculate the exact value of the Hubble constant using various methods. During these attempts, they encountered an unexpected problem: the discrepancy between the values obtained. Thus, observations made using the Hubble telescope showed that the coefficient value is 74 km/s per megaparsec. At the same time, data from the Planck mission, which calculated the rate of expansion of the Universe by observing the relict cosmic microwave background, gives a completely different number: 68 km/s per megaparsec.

This discrepancy, called the Hubble Tension, is one of the main mysteries of modern cosmology. Of course, the simplest explanation is that one of the data sets contains errors, which explain the discrepancy. Therefore, astronomers have repeatedly verified the results of Hubbles observations, making more and more new observations. But each time they only confirmed the received figure.

After the launch of JWST, it was decided to use it for independent verification of Hubble. Astronomers have focused on Cepheids, variable stars whose distance measurements make up the second rung of the ladder of cosmic distances. They are usually used to determine the distance to galaxies.

Some researchers have suggested that the light of epheids may mix with the light of neighboring stars, affecting the accuracy of measurements. JWST was used to verify this assumption. Its observations covered five galaxies that are home to more than a thousand Cepheids, as well as eight Type Ia supernovae. The latter emit the same amount of energy and are therefore used by astronomers as standard candles for calibrating and calculating distances for more distant galaxies, where it is no longer possible to see Cepheids.

JWST has confirmed the reliability of Hubbles measurements. This means that the Hubble Tension is unlikely to be caused by measurement errors, and astronomers should focus on finding other explanations for its mystery.

According to https://science.nasa.gov

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Secret remains: James Webb measures the rate of expansion of the Universe - The Universe. Space. Tech

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