• Astronomical data has previously required telescope time or powerful computers, excluding many researchers.

• The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is now photographing the entire southern sky every few nights and making all data openly accessible through a web browser.

• Already during a test run, over 11,000 previously unknown asteroids were discovered, including 33 near Earth.

From a mountaintop in Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's 3,200-megapixel camera is photographing the entire southern sky every few nights.

The goal is a ten-year movie of the cosmos in ultra-high definition: pulsating stars, supernova explosions, asteroid orbits, and clues to dark energy and dark matter.

The camera is already working. During a six-week optimization run last summer, before the survey itself started, the observatory discovered over 11,000 previously unknown asteroids. 33 of them are near-Earth objects.

Ten terabytes of data every night

The observatory produces roughly ten terabytes of data every 24 hours. That is equivalent to almost two years of watching Netflix, or over 25 years of listening to Spotify.

Data travels down from the Cerro Pachón summit to the town of La Serena on fiber-optic cables installed specifically for the observatory. From there, the data continues to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. There, each new image is compared to older images to identify changes in the sky.

Every time a change is detected, an alert is sent to scientists. This happens about 7 million times every night. The entire process, from image to data transfer to alert, takes less than a couple of minutes.

When the Legacy Survey of Space and Time wraps in 2036, the observatory will have collected about 30 petabytes of raw image data, or 30,000,000 gigabytes. The dataset will contain billions of objects with trillions of measurements.

Opening science to more people

The dataset is too large to download to a single computer, which is the way scientists have historically worked with telescope data. Instead, all data is housed at data centers around the world. Scientists access it through their web browsers using the Rubin Science Platform, an online portal with tools for filtering data according to their specific areas of interest.

This opens the process of science to a much bigger group of people. Traditional methods, like reserving telescope time or downloading large datasets with powerful computers, excluded those without access to such resources. Now all it takes is an internet connection and the desire to do science.

The observatory also provides tutorials for scientists new to the platform, as well as an active online community of scientists working together with Rubin data.

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• A satellite identified what it was looking for on its own, without analysts on the ground.

• It was the first time an AI that both understands language and reads images was used in space.

• The technology can reduce the amount of raw data that analysts have to sift through today.

The satellite interpreted questions in plain language

In April, the first test took place in which an Earth observation satellite found what it was looking for on its own. It happened aboard YAM-9, a craft built by the space company Loft Orbital. A software package developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory pointed out areas of interest based on questions written in plain language.

Normally, satellites send large amounts of data down to analysts on Earth. There, machine learning or human eyes are used to interpret what the images show. In the test, the interpretation took place aboard the satellite instead.

The model classified images directly in orbit

The technology is based on Google DeepMind's model Gemma 3. It is what is called a vision-language model. A model like this can both understand text and read images. It reads a question written in plain language and then locates what is being asked for in an image. The model is built to run on limited hardware far from a data center.

The researchers asked the model to classify sensor data, for example where natural surroundings meet built-up areas, or to identify infrastructure around railway hubs. The model handled the tasks.

YAM-9 was launched in the fall of 2025 as a test craft for the company's space projects involving AI. On board is an Nvidia Jetson Orin AGX graphics card, one of the leading chips for computing in space.

The software was adapted for space

Juan Delfa Victoria, a technical leader in NASA JPL's AI group, led the development of the software package NAVI-Orbital. It served as the framework for Gemma 3. Even though the model is an off-the-shelf product, the engineers had to streamline the package to reduce the number of software libraries and the memory it required.

According to Loft, in the near term the technology can make space sensors more useful by sorting data already in orbit. That reduces the flood of raw data that analysts have to sift through today. In the longer term, the test is seen as proof that larger AI infrastructure can run in space.

According to Loft's head of AI, Paul Lasserre, a satellite with such a model can be given the task of keeping watch on an area and reporting when something changes, and the operator can carry on a back-and-forth dialogue with the satellite.

Loft currently operates twelve craft in orbit. To cover anywhere on Earth in real time would, according to Lasserre, require between 50 and 100 satellites of YAM-9's type.

The idea for the project came about when Delfa Victoria and JPL researcher Taran Cyriac John were thinking about digital assistants for astronauts on the Moon or Mars. The thought was that astronauts in pressurized suits cannot type on a keyboard, and that an interactive AI assistant could then help them.

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This week's article is a cross-publication with Smedjan, where it appears in Swedish. With their permission, I have translated it into English and am publishing it here on Warp News.

Astronomical valuation

This isn't a stock analysis, but we have to start at that end. SpaceX's IPO is the largest ever. The company is being listed at a value of around 1,750 billion dollars.

However you turn it over, that's a very high valuation. A full 94 times revenue. Compare that with Apple, Google and Microsoft, which are valued at around 10 times revenue. The world's most highly valued company, Nvidia, clocks in at 24, and Tesla at 15 times. On top of that, SpaceX—unlike the others—is running at a loss.

What investors believe is that SpaceX is the start of a dramatic expansion of the space economy. They're hoping Elon Musk will be a kind of modern Marco Polo on the Silk Road of space.

The classic Silk Road, as we know, wasn't a single road but a network of routes traveled by caravans. The journeys were expensive and dangerous. When transport is expensive, only the most valuable goods travel. Spices, jade, gemstones, metals, fine crafts and, of course, silk. These were goods that could bear high transport costs, risks and long lead times because the value per kilo was so high. No one put together a caravan across Central Asia to transport gravel.

The space economy has worked in a similar way until now. Just 15–20 years ago it cost roughly $20,000 to launch one kilo into low Earth orbit. Back then every gram mattered. If you could shave 10 grams off the weight, you saved $200. Only the more important satellites, scientific instruments, defense systems and crewed space projects could justify the cost.

The expedition phase

That was the space economy's first phase: the expedition phase.

In the expedition phase there was still no real space trade. There were missions. Every launch was like a dangerous journey through the desert with precious cargo. If something failed, the cargo was lost. If the fuel ran out, the satellite was dead. If a component broke, there was no workshop nearby. Everything therefore had to be built as light, compact and reliable as possible. That made every kilo even more expensive.

Since then the cost has dropped sharply. SpaceX's customers now pay somewhere around 60–70 percent less per kilo. The main reason is the Falcon 9 rocket, which is largely reusable.

For SpaceX the cost is even lower. Probably around $1,000–1,500 per kilo, a reduction of over 90 percent.

That's why the company has been able to launch over 12,000 of its own Starlink satellites in recent years, of which a good 10,000 are still up there. That's more satellites than the rest of the world combined.

Starlink is space-based internet connectivity and SpaceX's largest source of revenue, about twice the size of the launch business itself. Starlink means that anywhere in the world you have access to internet at broadband speed. Even on airplanes. I tried it myself recently on an SAS flight to Kiruna. The broadband was as fast as the internet at home, and I could easily have held a video meeting from 10,000 meters up at 800 kilometers an hour.

But Falcon 9 is only the beginning of the cost reductions. Even though it has become a real workhorse, with several of them used more than 30 times each, the whole rocket isn't reused. To fix that problem, the company is developing Starship.

Like an airplane, the entire rocket will be reused, and they're doing everything they can to keep turnaround time as short as possible. That's why they came up with the wild idea of landing the booster part of the rocket in two mechanical arms on the very tower it had been launched from minutes earlier. Which, spectacularly enough, they managed to pull off a couple of years ago.

Starship is a giant rocket and will be able to carry at least 100 tons to orbit, compared with Falcon 9's roughly 20 tons.

If they succeed in reusing each Starship several times, the price per kilo will be pushed down toward around $100.

The caravan phase

With that we enter the space economy's second phase: the caravan phase.

In the caravan phase, space is still expensive, but no longer a place for one-off expeditions. The traffic becomes recurring.

Starlink is the first recurring caravan. Instead of a few large communication satellites in high orbits, thousands of satellites are launched into low Earth orbit. Each satellite is no longer a lone monument. It's part of a network. It can be replaced, upgraded and added to.

After that come more satellites. Many more. There are already satellites watching Earth, but nowhere near enough for us to have a constant picture of every single place. With future layers of satellites, we'll be able to know what's happening on Earth everywhere, every second.

Then new needs arise. Satellites, and everything else up there, need to be moved, serviced, refueled and removed. We'll get depots, service vehicles, tugs, refueling systems, inspection satellites and simple transfer points.

Slowly, a kind of space port begins to emerge.

The infrastructure phase

Then comes the next big cost threshold: $10 per kilo.

If Starship or successor systems push the cost down to there, the Silk Road of space changes fundamentally. This is the space economy's third phase: the infrastructure phase.

Rockets from Earth no longer need to deliver every cargo to exactly the right final orbit. They can deliver large amounts of mass to low Earth orbit. Like a harbor on Earth, space tugs take over and carry the cargo onward to geostationary orbit, lunar orbit, so-called Lagrange points or commercial stations.

The space port becomes a place where things don't just pass through, but are also built. Large antennas can be assembled there. Telescopes too big to launch in one piece can be put together in orbit. Communication platforms can get new modules. Data centers can be built up step by step. Space stations can grow as new parts are docked on. Solar power plants can be assembled from standardized panels.

As the cost of launching from Earth keeps falling, more and more things become profitable to have up there.

By now we're probably well into the future—we're talking several decades. But the main point is that as the cost of launching from Earth keeps falling, more and more things become profitable to have up there. That, in turn, drives further demand and the economy expands. When we reach a cost of $100, or even $10 per kilo to space, the space economy will become hundreds of times larger than it is today.

There will also be a great diversity of things that hold economic value in space, not just satellites.

Orbit or crash and burn?

Elon Musk has guided SpaceX through an almost unimaginably difficult journey so far. The company has transformed the space industry by routinely reusing rockets and has set off a steep drop in costs. Through Starlink, it has also shown a large and profitable space-based service. In doing so, it has demonstrated how a future space economy will emerge.

At the same time, Elon Musk himself has grown ever wilder, and more and more companies, conflicts and tweeting compete for his attention. He is the one who created SpaceX, and he is the one who can destroy it.

If that happens, the investors in the IPO will lose their money.

But the ball is rolling — or, to use a more fitting metaphor: the rocket has already reached the speed required to reach orbit. The space economy is underway, and it will become astronomically large.

And right now there is no other company even close to leading, and benefiting from, all of this as much as SpaceX.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

• The Artemis 2 crew traveled farther from Earth than any humans before — 406,778 kilometers (252,760 miles).

• It is the first time in over 50 years that humans have visited the moon, and the first time in history with a woman, a non-American and a Black person on board.

• The astronauts observed a total solar eclipse from space and photographed the far side of the moon with human eyes for the first time.

New distance record

On April 6, 2026, at 7:07 p.m. EDT, the Orion capsule reached its maximum distance from Earth: 252,760 miles (406,778 kilometers). The old record was set by the Apollo 13 crew on April 15, 1970, when they were 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers) from Earth. That record had stood for 56 years.

The Artemis 2 crew consists of Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen. It is the first time a woman, a non-American and a Black person have been part of a crew traveling to the moon.

The far side of the moon

The nearly seven-hour flyby gave the astronauts views of the moon that no human eyes had ever seen before. They also observed a total solar eclipse from their position beyond the moon.

The astronauts brought mobile phones and tablets on board and were able to take personal photos, including images of Earth through Orion's windows.

Science on board

Artemis 2 is a test mission and does not land on the lunar surface. Even so, a number of scientific experiments are being conducted during the journey.

The crew is measuring radiation from the solar wind with six times greater detail than Artemis 1 did, thanks to a contribution from the German space agency DLR. The astronauts are also monitoring their own health and collecting data on sleep patterns, cardiovascular health, stress and immune function.

One of the experiments is called "organ-on-a-chip" and builds on modern medical advances. The crew is also photographing ancient craters and lava flows on the lunar surface, guided by a team on the ground.

Future moon bases

The Artemis program aims to eventually land humans on the moon and build permanent bases there — a clear contrast to Apollo's flags-and-footprints approach.

The last people to visit the moon were Apollo 17's Gene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans in 1972.

The crew's tributes

During the flyby, the crew named two unnamed craters "Integrity" — the same name they gave their spacecraft — and "Carroll," named after Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman's wife, a nurse who passed away in 2020 after a five-year battle with cancer.

Before the April 1 launch, Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell had recorded a message for the crew. He passed away in August of last year, but his words reached the astronauts on April 6: "Welcome to my old neighborhood."

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• NASA's deliberate space collision with the asteroid Dimorphos shifted the asteroid pair's orbit around the sun.

• It is the first time scientists have been able to measure such a change, confirming that the technique works for deflecting dangerous asteroids.

• The cloud of debris ejected by the collision doubled the deflection effect compared to the impact alone.

First measurement of an altered solar orbit

In 2022, NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into the small asteroid Dimorphos. The purpose was to test whether humans can alter an asteroid's trajectory. The mission, called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), succeeded. The collision shortened Dimorphos's orbital period around the larger asteroid Didymos by 32 minutes.

Now a new study, published in the journal Science Advances, shows that the effect was greater than that.

The researchers found that the collision also changed the asteroid pair's shared orbit around the sun. The shift was small – 150 milliseconds per orbit around the sun – but it is the first time such a change has been measured.

According to Rahil Makadia, who led the study at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, it is precisely an asteroid's motion around the sun that needs to be altered if it is on a collision course with Earth. Even small changes can be enough to avoid a catastrophe.

Amateur astronomers contributed

To measure the changes in the asteroids' solar orbit, the research team enlisted the help of dozens of amateur astronomers in countries including Australia, Japan and the United States. They precisely measured when the asteroid pair passed in front of distant stars at different points along its orbit. The known positions of the stars made it possible to determine where Didymos and Dimorphos were in space.

The researchers also used radar data collected before and after the DART collision using the Goldstone Observatory in California and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Debris cloud doubled the effect

Before the collision, the asteroids traveled around the sun at more than 76,000 miles per hour. DART increased that speed by about two inches per hour.

A key finding was that the shift in solar orbit was not solely caused by the collision itself. The cloud of debris ejected into space gave the asteroid an additional push in the opposite direction, doubling the deflection effect. Steve Chesley, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-author of the study, described it as a recoil effect from the ejected material.

Hera to refine the measurements

Later this year, the spacecraft Hera, launched by the European Space Agency in 2024, will arrive at Didymos and Dimorphos. Hera will examine the aftermath of the DART collision in detail – including how the shape of Dimorphos changed, how much debris was released and whether the material resettled on one of the asteroids or left the pair entirely.

NASA and ESA also continue to monitor other potentially dangerous asteroids. In early 2025, astronomers identified asteroid 2024 YR4, which was assessed to have a small risk of hitting Earth in 2032. Within months, scientists were able to rule out a collision with Earth. In March, NASA and ESA announced that new observations with the James Webb Space Telescope show that the asteroid also poses no threat to the moon. It is estimated to pass approximately 13,200 miles above the lunar surface.

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• Blue Origin plans to launch 5,408 satellites for a new communications network called TeraWave.

• The network will be able to deliver data speeds of up to 6 terabits per second anywhere on Earth.

• The first satellites are scheduled to be placed in orbit during the fourth quarter of 2027.

Extreme data speeds

TeraWave is designed to deliver data speeds of up to 6 terabits per second anywhere on Earth. The high speed is made possible through optical communication between the satellites.

According to Blue Origin, the network is designed to serve a maximum of approximately 100,000 customers. Unlike Elon Musk's Starlink, which targets individual consumers, TeraWave is built specifically for enterprise customers.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp states that what sets TeraWave apart from competitors is that the network is purpose-built for enterprise customers.

Launch planned for 2027

Blue Origin announces that the first satellites will be launched during the last quarter of 2027. The company's reusable New Glenn rocket, which has completed two launches so far, will likely play a central role in deploying the satellites.

TeraWave adds another satellite network linked to Bezos. He is also executive chairman of Amazon, which is building another network called Leo, formerly known as Project Kuiper. That network comprises 3,200 satellites and targets consumers and businesses. So far, Amazon has placed 180 satellites in orbit.

Increased demand for data capacity in space

The launch of TeraWave coincides with increased activity in the space industry to build data centers in space. Demand for large-scale AI data processing is growing, and such processing on Earth requires enormous amounts of energy and resources.

Bezos has predicted that space-based data centers will be commonplace in orbit within the next 10 to 20 years. Musk has also said he plans to build data centers in space to complement the Starlink network.

Starlink currently has approximately 10,000 satellites in orbit and has reported more than six million customers in at least 140 countries. The network serves individual consumers, businesses, governments and, through the Starshield variant, U.S. national security agencies.

Terminals can integrate with existing infrastructure

According to Blue Origin, TeraWave terminals can be rapidly deployed worldwide and connected to existing high-capacity infrastructure. This is intended to provide additional route diversity and strengthen the network's overall resilience.

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For the first time in more than 50 years, a group of humans will leave Earth and travel to the Moon. There are four people on the mission, and they include the first woman, the first Black person, and the first Canadian.

Before you get too excited — they will not land. They will “only” fly around the Moon. This is the preparatory mission, equivalent to what Apollo 8 was before Apollo 11.

Even though they won’t land, this mission is a big deal. Since 1972, no human has traveled farther from Earth than low Earth orbit. The farthest any human has been from Earth since Apollo 17 is 1,400.7 kilometers from Earth’s surface. That altitude was reached on September 11, 2024, during the private space mission Polaris Dawn.

Artemis II, which is the name of this mission, will take the four astronauts farther from Earth than any humans have ever been. Artemis II is planned to reach a maximum distance of about 413,000 kilometers from Earth.

The exact distance depends on where the Moon is in its orbit at the time of launch, but the plan is for the Orion spacecraft to fly roughly 7,400 kilometers beyond the far side of the Moon.

The current record for the greatest distance humans have traveled from Earth was set by the crew of Apollo 13 in 1970. They reached a distance of 400,171 kilometers when they rounded the Moon to return home after their accident. Artemis II will therefore break this record by more than 10,000 kilometers.

Apollo 8, which preceded the Moon landing of Apollo 11, also gave us one of the most iconic photographs of all time: Earthrise.

On Christmas Eve 1968, as their spacecraft emerged from behind the Moon, astronaut Bill Anders looked out a window and saw something no human had ever seen before. He saw the Earth “rise.” Instead of the Sun rising, it was the Earth emerging from the black void.

Seeing Earth like that — a Christmas ornament suspended in the vastness of space— did something to both the astronauts and the people back on Earth.

It made us more deeply realize how small and fragile our home is, and that we should take better care of it. The environmental movements of the 1960s were strengthened by the photograph, and it was used when Earth Day was established.

We went out into space to explore the Moon, but discovered Earth.

We don’t know everything we will discover during Artemis II, and that is a crucial part of why exploration is so important. It’s only when you are there that unexpected insights emerge.

After Artemis II comes, logically enough, Artemis III — and then we will land. That is when the first woman will step onto the surface of the Moon.

The long-term goal now is to stay

A decisive difference between Artemis and Apollo is that the long-term plan this time is to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon.

This will be done through a step-by-step build-up of infrastructure. The process begins in orbit with the Lunar Gateway space station, which will be crewed. On the lunar surface, the permanent presence will take shape in the early 2030s through two critical steps:

• With Artemis VII, a pressurized rover will be delivered (developed by the Japanese space agency JAXA and Toyota). This will function as a mobile motorhome where astronauts can live and work in a “shirtsleeve environment” (without spacesuits) for up to 30 days, dramatically increasing the range of exploration.

• Then comes Artemis VIII, when a fixed habitation module will land. It will be able to house four astronauts for extended periods and will form the core of the base camp.

After that, more buildings and capabilities will gradually be added.

Since November 2, 2000, when the first crew arrived at the International Space Station, at least one human has always been in space.

From the 2030s onward, there may also be humans permanently on the Moon.

When Reid Wiseman, Victor J. Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen lift off from Kennedy Space Center, it is hopefully the beginning of a new era for humanity—one in which we exist on two celestial bodies.

Interview with Christer Fuglesang

Sweden’s first astronaut is spending time with his grandchildren, but gets back to me the following day with answers to my questions.

Why has it taken more than 50 years since we last went to the Moon?

“The reason the United States (it wasn’t really ‘we,’ but people like to feel it was all of humanity) went to the Moon in the 1960s was that they felt compelled to show themselves and the world that they were better than their archenemy, the Soviet Union, in the middle of the Cold War. This became a very large and important national undertaking, for which the U.S. was willing to spend enormous sums of money.

When the goal was achieved (which had nothing at all to do with research, although that became a very positive side effect), it was not feasible to continue spending several percent of the national budget on it. The idea was to first build cheaper ways of getting into space, which became the Space Shuttle. However, it never became cheap.

But today, one could say that technology has finally caught up with economics, and it is no longer unreasonably expensive to travel to the Moon. Another reason is that there was no geopolitical competition over the Moon until recently, when China also announced that it intends to send humans there.”

These astronauts will not land on the Moon, but fly around it. Can you describe what is special about this journey and what NASA and the other Artemis partners hope to learn from it?

“There is nothing particularly special from a research or exploration perspective. The same journey was first made in 1968 with Apollo 8, which even entered lunar orbit—something Artemis II will not do. But there are a couple of new aspects: it is international (Apollo was 100 percent national and American), with a Canadian astronaut, and the service module for the Orion capsule is European.

The main purpose is partly to test that everything works with a crew onboard (Artemis I tested most systems uncrewed in November 2022) and to demonstrate that we are now beginning the journey back to the Moon.”

The difference between then and now is that this time the long-term goal is to stay and establish a permanent presence on the Moon. What is required for that, compared to “just” making individual trips?

“More logistics at the beginning. Water, oxygen, food must last longer. Power supply systems. Then building systems to recycle waste products (urine, exhaled carbon dioxide). Much of this has been developed on the ISS and can be applied, or modified, for the Moon.
In the long run—the holy grail—is to learn how to use the Moon’s own resources, which are quite limited. Very little water, for example, but with new smart technologies it will be possible. ISRU—In-situ Resource Utilization, as it’s called.”

Which space news do you think is bigger: that I’ve been elected to the board of the Swedish National Space Agency, or that we’re going back to the Moon?

“Mathias on the Space Agency board! More unexpected than ‘us’ finally heading back to the Moon again. ☺️”

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

• Eric and Wendy Schmidt are investing in building four large telescopes, including a space telescope that will rival Hubble.

• The projects use existing technology and are expected to be operational within four years, compared to the ten years or more that traditional telescopes take to build.

• One of the telescopes, Argus Array, consists of 1,200 small telescopes that together can photograph the entire northern sky in a few minutes.

Schmidt Sciences, which is part of Eric and Wendy Schmidt's philanthropic activities, is funding the construction of four new telescopes. Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google. The organization presented its plans at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix on January 9, 2026.

The four telescopes are collectively named the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System. They include the Lazuli space telescope, the Argus Array that continuously photographs the night sky in the Northern Hemisphere, the Deep Synoptic Array that scans cosmic radio frequencies, and the Large Fiber Array Spectroscopic Telescope that collects light from distant stars, planets and galaxies.

Faster and cheaper than traditional projects

The goal is to have all four telescopes operational within four years. This is a short time compared to the ten years or more that world-class astronomical facilities often take to complete.

Arpita Roy, head of the Astrophysics and Space Institute at Schmidt Sciences, described the project as an experiment in accelerating astrophysical discoveries.

The projects largely use technology that is already available, particularly the high-performance computer chips that have driven developments in artificial intelligence. The technology is combined in new ways to offer new capabilities for astronomers.

Schmidt Sciences has quietly funded preliminary studies, technology development and prototypes for several years. The organization now has agreements with universities that will manage the ground-based systems, and manufacturing of components has begun.

Shorter lifespan but lower cost

Unlike traditional telescopes that are built to operate for decades, Schmidt Sciences is planning for shorter operational periods.

Roy said the organization plans to operate these experiments for defined lifetimes and then move on to the next project. The lifetimes they are committing to now are three to five years.

The idea is that the telescopes can be replaced by new observatories that take advantage of constantly improving technology. This can still be cheaper than the traditional approach.

Stuart Feldman, president of Schmidt Sciences, said the Lazuli space telescope costs hundreds of millions of dollars. The ground-based telescopes are not cheap either, but the Schmidts did not want to reveal exactly how much they are investing.

The Lazuli space telescope will rival Hubble

Lazuli will have a mirror slightly larger than the one in the Hubble Space Telescope. Originally, a mirror six meters in diameter was manufactured, which would make it more than twice as wide as Hubble's. But that mirror consists of a single piece of glass and can only be sent into orbit with Starship, the SpaceX rocket still under development.

Because Starship development has been slower than promised, Schmidt Sciences changed their plans in the fall of 2024.

Feldman said Starship schedules are malleable and that they will revisit the issue in the future.

The project originated from discussions between Feldman and Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at Berkeley who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 for the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Lazuli will be more capable of measuring the colors of exploding white dwarfs. The shift of wavelengths toward the redder part of the spectrum shows how quickly distant galaxies are moving away from us. More recent observations indicate that white dwarf supernovae are not all exactly alike, and that the nature of dark energy has changed over time. Lazuli can provide data to help solve the mystery.

The spacecraft can also pivot faster in space than Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope, allowing it to measure newly discovered supernovae when they reach maximum brightness. Lazuli will also be able to study planets around other stars by blocking the glare from the stars.

1,200 small telescopes will photograph the entire night sky

Argus Array will consist of 1,200 small telescopes, each with an 11-inch mirror. They are arranged on top of eight circular mounts that move in unison. The design does not include a traditional protective telescope dome but is instead housed in what looks like a warehouse building with skylights.

Nicholas Law, professor of astronomy and physics at the University of North Carolina who oversees Argus, said the small telescopes will scan the entire sky within minutes. The 1,200 telescopes cannot as easily detect fast-moving objects like asteroids and are not designed to see as far out into space. But they cover the sky faster.

Because Argus continuously covers the entire sky, it can immediately follow up when another instrument makes a discovery. If LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, detects gravitational waves from a black hole collision somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere sky, Argus can see if there is any visual counterpart to the event.

Argus saves all data collected during the previous week. Astronomers can go back and see if there were signs of something happening before LIGO detected the gravitational waves.

According to Law, the system can function almost like a time machine.

The location of the telescope has not yet been announced, but Law said it will likely be in Texas. He hopes it will collect its first light in 2027. Alex Gerko, a Russian-born British billionaire and financial trader, is co-funding the project with Schmidt Sciences.

Radio telescope with 1,650 dishes

Deep Synoptic Array will consist of 1,650 radio dishes, each 20 feet wide, spread across 60,000 acres in Nevada. It surveys the sky at radio wavelengths instead of visible light.

Gregg Hallinan, professor of astronomy at California Institute of Technology, said the telescope is unparalleled compared to any telescope now or in the future currently planned. He pointed out that every radio telescope ever built in the last century combined has found about ten million radio sources. Deep Synoptic Array will double that in the first 24 hours.

During the five-year survey, the telescope is expected to find one billion radio sources in the universe. Construction could begin next year.

Spectroscopy at scale

Large Fiber Array Spectroscopic Telescope, LFAST, will consist of many optical telescopes. Its main purpose is to measure spectra, or colors, not take photographs. That color information is key to understanding brief events like supernovae and identifying the contents of atmospheres on planets around other stars.

Chad Bender, astronomer at the University of Arizona who is in charge of LFAST, said astronomers want to collect many more spectra, but there is not enough time available on current telescopes.

Because many smaller telescopes are cheaper than one large one, the hope is that LFAST will provide that capacity at a lower cost. The Arizona team is currently building a prototype to be tested, and depending on how it works, the design can be modified and expanded.

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• Overview Energy has tested transmitting thousands of watts from an aircraft to a ground-based receiver using near-infrared laser light.

• The company plans to launch a demonstration satellite in low Earth orbit in 2028 and operational satellites in geosynchronous orbit as early as 2030.

• The technology makes it possible to deliver solar energy to existing ground-based solar facilities when the sun is not shining.

Successful flight test at five kilometers altitude

The American startup Overview Energy has conducted a test where they transmitted power from an aircraft at 5,000 meters altitude to a receiver on the ground. The test used near-infrared laser light to send thousands of watts of power. On the ground, the laser light was converted into electricity.

The company's founder and CEO Marc Berte describes the test as an integrated system test of all components. The tracking and guidance methodology is the same as will be used in space.

A different approach than previous concepts

Space-based solar power has been discussed for over 50 years. Overview Energy uses a different method than many previous proposals. Instead of microwaves, the company uses near-infrared laser light. This allows the transmission antenna on the spacecraft to be reduced from hundreds of meters to about half a meter.

The laser is low intensity. This means it is safe to stand in the beam. Being in the beam in daylight is roughly equivalent to being on a white sand beach or in snow on a sunny day.

The company plans to send the power to existing solar facilities on Earth. These facilities can then generate electricity even when the sun is not shining locally.

Network of receivers solves the cloud problem

The near-infrared laser light cannot penetrate clouds. The company plans to work with a network of receivers at different locations. This way, one or more receivers are likely to always be available.

Satellite plans for 2028 and 2030

Overview Energy has booked a slot on the SpaceX Bandwagon-7 mission launching in early 2028. A demonstration satellite in low Earth orbit will then be tested. The satellite will use the same type of laser and optics as the flight test.

After the demonstration in low Earth orbit, the company plans to place operational spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit. The first could launch as early as 2030. Each spacecraft will deliver at least one megawatt of electricity using large deployable solar arrays.

The spacecraft are designed to be about twice as massive as today's large commercial communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit. They can be launched on several different types of rockets.

Mass production over large-scale satellites

The company plans to mass-produce spacecraft instead of making individual spacecraft larger. Berte refers to how Starlink and other mega-constellations have shown that mass production is often more economically advantageous than scaling up individual units.

Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, who now advises the company, has stated that this is the first concept for space-based solar energy in 48 years that he believes could work.

Company background

Marc Berte began working on the concept in 2017. The company started in 2021 within Vast, a space company founded by billionaire Jed McCaleb. When Vast chose to focus on commercial space stations, Overview Energy became a separate company.

Since then, Overview Energy has raised nearly 20 million dollars in two investment rounds. The company is headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia, and has approximately 25 employees.

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• Saab invests 10 million dollars in Pythom and leads the company's latest funding round.

• Pythom was founded by Swedish explorers Tina and Tom Sjögren who have three records in the Guinness Book of Records.

• The company develops lightweight rockets that can be deployed quickly to make access to space more flexible and affordable.

Founders with unique background

Swedish defense company Saab has made a strategic investment in Pythom, a space technology company founded by Swedes Tina and Tom Sjögren. Pythom develops lightweight rockets that can be deployed quickly. The company's rockets are designed to make access to space more flexible, affordable and resilient.

Saab is investing 10 million dollars in Pythom and acting as lead investor in the company's latest funding round. The goal of the funding round is to accelerate the company's development and deployment of its launch systems.

Tina and Tom Sjögren founded Pythom after building careers as explorers and adventurers. Warp News has previously written about the couple and their plans to travel to Mars. Tina Sjögren appears twice in the Guinness Book of Records as the first woman to complete an unassisted ski trip to the North Pole and as the first woman to complete the three poles challenge. Together with Tom Sjögren, she also holds the record for the fastest time to reach both poles without support.

After climbing Mount Everest and reaching both the North and South Poles, the couple began thinking about space as their next challenge. They started attending space conferences and talking with astronauts, scientists and rocket engineers. There they learned that the technology to take humans to Mars has existed for decades, but that politicians have not prioritized investing enough money in it.

Built own rocket engine

The couple realized they had to build their own rocket, their own rocket engine and their own spacecraft. They used the internet to access old patents, studies and courses from Stanford and MIT.

Pythom developed the Asterex rocket engine which achieved the highest chamber pressure for a small rocket engine ever. The pressure was twice as high as their best competitors and over 90 percent of what was theoretically possible.

Operations in two countries

Pythom now has operations in both Sweden and the United States. The company's approach to developing rockets focuses on three main areas: affordability, simplicity and speed. This aligns with Saab's long-term vision for dispersed and resilient launch infrastructure.

Strengthens Sweden's position

The investment in Pythom supports Saab's strategy to close capability gaps in the space domain. It will accelerate innovation in areas critical to national security and strengthen Sweden's space capabilities. This aligns with Saab's ambition to contribute to emerging global space-related defense requirements.

Marcus Wandt, head of Group Strategy and Technology at Saab, says that Pythom's vision and technology offer an opportunity to advance Sweden's and its allies' space capabilities in a way that is both pragmatic and forward-looking. Saab is proud to support Pythom's journey toward their first orbital flight.

• Blue Origin became the second company ever to land an orbital rocket on a platform at sea.

• The landing shows that reusable rockets are no longer unique to SpaceX, which increases competition in the space industry.

• NASA's ESCAPADE mission consists of two identical satellites heading to Mars to study the planet's magnetic environment.

Historic landing creates competition

Blue Origin launched its New Glenn rocket on November 13, 2025, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket lifted off at 20:55 UTC with NASA's ESCAPADE mission on board.

What makes the launch historic is that Blue Origin became the second company ever to land an orbital rocket on a platform at sea. Previously, only SpaceX has accomplished this feat. SpaceX has performed over 500 such landings with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

Blue Origin succeeded in landing the rocket's first stage on the platform Jacklyn, which is named after Jeff Bezos' mother. This was the second time New Glenn flew and the first time the company succeeded with the landing.

That two commercial space companies can now reuse their rockets shows that SpaceX's success was not a fluke. Reusing rockets has been key to reducing the cost of reaching space.

Blue Origin's landing creates real competition for SpaceX, particularly its Starship rocket. It also provides more launch options for NASA, the U.S. government, and other commercial customers. This reduces reliance on SpaceX or any other single launch company.

New Glenn's capabilities and significance

New Glenn is Blue Origin's first orbital rocket. The rocket stands 98 meters tall and can carry approximately 45 tons of payload to low Earth orbit. The first stage is designed to fly at least 25 times.

The rocket is powered by seven BE-4 engines. New Glenn is taller and more powerful than SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, which is currently SpaceX's most powerful available rocket, and can carry more payload to orbit.

Blue Origin has several New Glenn rockets in production and several years of orders. Customers include NASA, Amazon's Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile, and several telecommunications providers.

The mission was New Glenn's second certification flight for the National Security Space Launch program. Blue Origin is certifying the rocket with the U.S. Space Force to meet national security objectives. Once certification is complete, the company can compete for contracts to launch sensitive reconnaissance and defense satellites for the U.S. government.

Two identical satellites to Mars

ESCAPADE is an acronym for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers. The mission consists of two identical satellites called Blue and Gold after the University of California, Berkeley's colors.

The satellites will study how the solar wind interacts with Mars' magnetic environment and how this interaction drives away the planet's atmosphere. The goal is to understand how Mars lost its thick atmosphere billions of years ago.

Each satellite carries the same four scientific instruments. Both satellites will be in orbit around Mars simultaneously and take measurements from nearly the entire planet's upper atmosphere and magnetosphere, from altitudes between 160 and 10,000 kilometers.

This is the first time a Mars mission has sent more than one satellite to orbit around the planet.

Unusual route to Mars

ESCAPADE follows an unusual route to Mars. The satellites first travel to Lagrange Point 2, a gravitationally stable point approximately 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. There they will wait for a year studying space weather until the next transfer window to Mars opens.

In late 2026, the satellites will leave Lagrange Point 2, swing by Earth for a speed boost, and then begin their journey to Mars. They are expected to reach Mars orbit in September 2027.

Normally, transfer windows to Mars open every 26 months, and missions are launched in waves during these periods. The last launch to Mars before ESCAPADE was NASA's Perseverance rover on July 30, 2020.

The flexible route that ESCAPADE uses could make it possible for future missions to launch over several months instead of during a specific transfer window. This could be useful if hundreds or thousands of spacecraft need to be sent to Mars.

Rocket Lab's first interplanetary mission

The two ESCAPADE satellites were built by the company Rocket Lab. This is the first time the California-based company has participated in an interplanetary mission. Rocket Lab previously sent NASA's CAPSTONE mission to the Moon in June 2022.

The company is also working on a private mission to search for signs of life in Venus' clouds. They are also involved in NASA's work to bring home samples from Mars that the Perseverance rover is collecting.

The ESCAPADE mission is part of NASA's SIMPLEx program, which stands for Small, Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration. The program aims to encourage researchers and companies to develop ways to use small and inexpensive satellites for scientific investigations. The ESCAPADE mission's cost was estimated at under 100 million dollars, compared to 300 to 600 million dollars for other NASA satellites orbiting Mars.

Significance for NASA's lunar program

Blue Origin plans to use New Glenn for various missions for customers such as NASA and Amazon. This includes missions to Earth orbit and eventually to the Moon to support Blue Origin's own lunar and space exploration goals, as well as NASA's.

New Glenn could become important for NASA's Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the Moon. In recent months, several space policy leaders and NASA officials have expressed concern that Artemis is progressing too slowly. If Artemis stagnates, China may have the opportunity to take the lead and reach the Moon's south pole before NASA and its partners.

Blue Origin has outlined its plans for lunar exploration. They begin with the launch of their uncrewed lunar lander Blue Moon early next year. The company is also developing a crewed version of Blue Moon that they will use on the Artemis V mission, the planned third lunar landing with humans.

Blue Origin officials have said they are in discussions with NASA about how they can help accelerate the Artemis program.

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Last week, two things happened that mostly showed up as brief notes in the news. Blue Origin landed an orbital rocket, and Waymo began operating robotaxis on highways.

Having followed both of these developments for several years, I’m fascinated by how little attention they receive. Each of them will, on its own, have a massive impact on our world.

Take two minutes out of your day and absorb the future.

The significance of self-driving vehicles

Hundreds of thousands of taxi trips are now being completed without a driver. So far only in limited areas, but these are expanding quickly. Waymo has previously operated in just a handful of cities; now they are adding highways across large parts of California. Tesla also offers a taxi service, still with safety drivers for the moment, but they will disappear soon. Several Chinese companies are well underway, and smaller pilots will be carried out in Europe.

The development is steady, and generative AI has opened new possibilities to create virtual environments where cars can practice driving.

There seems to be no obstacle to achieving near-perfect self-driving vehicles in the coming decade. It’s “just” a matter of continuing to develop.

This means that in the next decades, all vehicles will become self-driving.

These vehicles will drive much more safely and efficiently. Transport will become cheaper, vehicles will be designed differently, city planning will change as our need for parking spaces shrinks or shifts, business models for transport companies will evolve – and much more. An entire profession – drivers – will disappear, but we have decades to adjust.

This massive shift should receive far more attention and shape how we view and plan our future.

The significance of landing rockets

Ten years after SpaceX became the first to land an orbital rocket, Blue Origin has now replicated the feat. On the first attempt, it landed cleanly on a drone ship at sea.

For SpaceX, this is routine. The day before yesterday they landed a Falcon 9 rocket for the 500th time. But the fact that another company can now do it too means this capability is becoming commonplace.

When a rocket is landed, it can be reused. That is of course much cheaper than building a new one every time. As a result, the cost of reaching space has begun to fall and will drop dramatically. Around ten years ago, it cost about 100,000 SEK to launch one kilogram into space. In the future, that cost may drop as low as 100 SEK.

This means launch costs in the coming decades will fall by 99.9 percent.

This makes space accessible in an entirely new way. In addition to having millions of satellites and more missions around the solar system, we’ll also see several increasingly large space stations. Above all, near-Earth space will become an additional layer around our planet.

Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos, envisions moving more and more industry into space.

This massive shift should receive far more attention and shape how we view and plan our future.

Wake up!

Regular readers of Warp News have followed this development since we launched in 2020. Under the tags self-driving cars and space, we’ve reported news and tried to explain what’s happening.

But the rest of the world needs to wake up. Negative news repeatedly gets big headlines, even when the stories are worn out. This kind of news should receive at least as much attention. Not only because these things are crucial to understand – they are also exciting and interesting.

Now the two minutes I promised are up, but keep these two developments in mind when thinking about both the present and the future.

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• SpaceX will build data centers in space using upgraded Starlink satellites.

• Starlink V3 satellites will have a capacity of 1 Tbps, ten times more than current satellites.

• SpaceX can launch approximately 60 V3 satellites per Starship rocket starting in the first half of 2026.

SpaceX uses Starlink satellites

Interest in space-based data centers is growing as artificial intelligence requires more computing power and storage space. SpaceX now announces that the company will build data centers in space, writes Ars Technica.

SpaceX announced on X that Starlink satellites can be used for data centers in space. The company explained that it is sufficient to scale up Starlink V3 satellites that have high-speed laser links.

SpaceX owns and operates more space-based infrastructure than any other company or country in the world. The Starlink constellation already delivers broadband to millions of customers globally and makes a profit.

Ten times higher capacity

Current Starlink V2 mini satellites have a maximum downlink capacity of approximately 100 Gbps (gigabits per second). The V3 satellites will have a capacity of 1 Tbps (terabit per second), which is ten times higher.

The first generation Starlink satellites launched just over five years ago weighed approximately 300 kg and had a capacity of 15 Gbps. Starlink V3 satellites will weigh 1,500 kg.

Starship enables large-scale launches

SpaceX plans to launch approximately 60 Starlink V3 satellites per Starship rocket. Launches could occur as early as the first half of 2026. SpaceX has already tested a satellite dispenser on Starship.

No other player in the satellite industry comes close to this capacity. By comparison, it took Viasat nearly a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to build Viasat-3 with Boeing. This geostationary satellite has a capacity of 1 Tbps and consists of a single satellite.

More tech companies invest in space-based data centers

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted earlier in October that gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years. In May, it emerged that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space due to his interest in space-based data centers.

Several startup companies such as Starcloud have already begun working with the technology. Data centers in space receive unlimited energy from the sun and avoid the environmental costs of ground-based facilities.

Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, notes that the momentum from major players in the tech industry is worth paying attention to. If they start investing money, it could lead to a transformation of what is done in space.

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• SpaceX conducted its 135th Falcon 9 launch during 2025, which surpasses the company's total number for all of 2024.

• The number 135 equals the total number of launches that NASA's space shuttles completed during the program's 30-year lifetime.

• The company also set a new record for the fastest turnaround between launches from the same pad in California with two days and 10 hours.

More launches than any previous year

SpaceX launched a batch of Starlink satellites on Saturday morning that became the company's 135th Falcon 9 launch of the year. This broke the company's record for the number of orbital launches achieved during all of 2024.

The mission came nearly a week after SpaceX launched its 10,000th Starlink satellite. Spaceflight Now reports on the records.

As many launches as the space shuttle in 30 years

The number 135 equals the number of launches that NASA's space shuttles completed during the entire program's 30-year lifetime. SpaceX will thus launch more Falcon 9 rockets during 2025 than the space shuttles did in three decades.

Fastest turnaround from Vandenberg

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Monday. The Starlink 11-21 launch occurred two days, 10 hours, 22 minutes and 59 seconds after the previous launch from the same pad. The previous record from the same week was two days, 18 hours, 52 minutes and 20 seconds.

The rocket left Space Launch Complex 4 East at 5:43 p.m. local time. The launch placed 28 V2 Mini satellites into low Earth orbit.

The rocket landed after seventeen previous flights

The Falcon 9 rocket used has the designation B1082. It has flown 17 times previously, including missions USSF-62, NROL-145, OneWeb Launch 20 and 13 Starlink missions.

Just over eight and a half minutes after launch, the rocket landed on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You". This was the 161st landing on that vessel and the 525th rocket landing in total for SpaceX.

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• Deep Loop Shaping reduces noise by 30 to 100 times in the LIGO observatory.

• The method can help astronomers detect hundreds more collisions between black holes and neutron stars per year.

• The technique was successfully tested on the real LIGO system in Louisiana.

Deep Loop Shaping

Researchers at Google DeepMind have developed a new AI method that improves control of gravitational wave observatories. The method is called Deep Loop Shaping and helps astronomers better understand the dynamics and formation of the universe.

Deep Loop Shaping reduces noise and improves control in the observatory's feedback system. This helps stabilize components used for measuring gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in the fabric of space and time created by events such as collisions between neutron stars and mergers of black holes.

The method was developed in collaboration with LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) operated by Caltech, and GSSI (Gran Sasso Science Institute). The researchers proved that the method works at the observatory in Livingston, Louisiana.

LIGO measures with extreme precision

LIGO measures the properties and origins of gravitational waves with incredible accuracy. But the slightest vibration can disrupt its measurements, even from waves crashing 100 miles away at the Gulf of Mexico coast. To function, LIGO relies on thousands of control systems that keep every part in near-perfect alignment and adapt to environmental disturbances with continuous feedback.

Deep Loop Shaping reduces the noise level in the most unstable and difficult feedback loop at LIGO by 30 to 100 times. This improves the stability of the interferometer's sensitive mirrors. Applying the method to all of LIGO's mirror control loops can help astronomers detect and gather data about hundreds more events per year, with much greater detail.

The observatory uses interference of laser light to measure the properties of gravitational waves. By studying these properties, scientists can understand what caused them and where they came from. The observatory's lasers reflect off mirrors positioned four kilometers apart, housed in the world's largest vacuum chambers.

Disturbances from the smallest vibrations

As gravitational waves pass through LIGO's two four-kilometer arms, they warp the space between them, changing the distance between the mirrors at either end. These tiny differences in length are measured using light interference to an accuracy of 10^-19 meters, which is one-tenth the size of a proton. With such small measurements, LIGO's detector mirrors must be kept extremely still, isolated from environmental disturbances.

This requires one system for passive mechanical isolation and another control system for actively suppressing vibrations. Too little control causes the mirrors to swing, making it impossible to measure anything. But too much control actually amplifies vibrations in the system instead of suppressing them, drowning out the signal in certain frequency ranges.

These vibrations, known as "control noise," are a critical obstacle to improving LIGO's ability to peer into the universe. The research team designed Deep Loop Shaping to move beyond traditional methods and eliminate the controller as a meaningful cause of noise.

Reinforcement learning with frequency domain rewards

Deep Loop Shaping uses a reinforcement learning method with frequency domain rewards and surpasses state-of-the-art feedback control performance. In a simulated LIGO environment, the researchers trained a controller that tries to avoid amplifying noise in the observation band used for measuring gravitational waves.

Through repeated interaction, guided by frequency domain rewards, the controller learns to suppress control noise in the observation band. The controllers learn to stabilize the mirrors without adding harmful control noise, bringing noise levels down by a factor of ten or more.

Successful tests on real hardware

The researchers tested their controllers on the real LIGO system in Livingston, Louisiana. They found that they worked as well on hardware as in simulation. The results show that Deep Loop Shaping controls noise up to 30-100 times better than existing controllers.

The method eliminated the most unstable and difficult feedback loop as a meaningful noise source on LIGO for the first time. In repeated experiments, the researchers confirmed that their controller keeps the observatory's system stable over prolonged periods.

Applying Deep Loop Shaping to LIGO's entire mirror control system has the potential to eliminate noise from the control system itself. This paves the way for expanding the observatory's cosmological reach. Beyond improving how existing gravitational wave observatories measure more distant and dimmer sources, the researchers expect their work to influence the design of future observatories, both on Earth and in space.

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• NASA's rover Perseverance has collected a sample from Jezero Crater that may contain evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars.

• The sample comes from a rock containing organic carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus that could have provided energy to microorganisms.

• The discovery was made in younger sedimentary rocks than expected, suggesting Mars was habitable for a longer period.

Sample from ancient riverbed

NASA's rover Perseverance has collected a sample from an ancient dry riverbed in Jezero Crater that could preserve evidence of ancient microbial life. The sample was taken from a rock called "Cheyava Falls" last year and has been named "Sapphire Canyon". According to a study published in the journal Nature, the sample contains potential biosignatures.

A potential biosignature is a substance or structure that might have biological origin but requires more data before conclusions can be drawn about the presence or absence of life.

Rich chemical composition

The rover's scientific instruments found that the formation's sedimentary rocks consist of clay and silt, which on Earth are excellent preservers of past microbial life. The rocks are also rich in organic carbon, sulfur, oxidized iron, and phosphorus.

The combination of chemical compounds found in the Bright Angel formation could have been a rich energy source for microbial metabolisms. Although all these compelling chemical signatures were present in the data, additional analysis was required to understand what the results could mean for identifying a potential biosignature.

Leopard spots reveal minerals

Perseverance investigated Cheyava Falls, an arrowhead-shaped rock measuring 1 meter by 0.6 meters. The PIXL and SHERLOC instruments found colorful spots on the rock. The spots could have been left behind by microbial life if it had used the raw ingredients - the organic carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus - in the rock as an energy source.

In high-resolution images, the instruments found a distinct pattern of minerals arranged into reaction fronts that the team called leopard spots. The spots carried the signature of two iron-rich minerals: vivianite and greigite. Vivianite is frequently found on Earth in sediments, peat bogs, and around decaying organic matter. Certain forms of microbial life on Earth can produce greigite.

Electron transfer reactions

The combination of these minerals, which appear to have formed through electron transfer reactions between the sediment and organic matter, is a potential fingerprint for microbial life. Such life would use these reactions to produce energy for growth.

The minerals can also be generated abiotically, meaning without the presence of life. There are ways to produce them without biological reactions, including sustained high temperatures, acidic conditions, and binding by organic compounds. However, the rocks at Bright Angel do not show evidence that they experienced high temperatures or acidic conditions.

Younger rocks than expected

The discovery was particularly surprising because it involves some of the youngest sedimentary rocks the mission has investigated. An earlier hypothesis assumed signs of ancient life would be confined to older rock formations. This finding suggests that Mars could have been habitable for a longer period or later in the planet's history than previously thought.

Sapphire Canyon is one of 27 rock cores the rover has collected since landing at Jezero Crater in February 2021. Perseverance is exploring the "Bright Angel" formation, a set of rocky outcrops on the northern and southern edges of Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley measuring 400 meters wide that was carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.

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• The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile can photograph the entire visible sky in just three days with its 3200-megapixel camera.

• The telescope will detect up to 10 million changes in the sky each night and send automatic alerts within one minute.

• During the first 10 years, the observatory will collect more optical astronomical data than all previous telescopes combined.

Telescope built for speed

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón in Chile is designed to move quickly. The 350-ton telescope floats on a thin film of oil and can rotate so fast that a runner wouldn't be able to keep up. The steel mount that holds the mirror is low and robust but also lightweight to be able to move quickly and stop abruptly, writes Science.

The three-ton camera is as large as a car and can take 3200-megapixel images in less than three seconds. Each snapshot takes 30 seconds, then the telescope moves to a new view in less than five seconds. In this way, it builds up a patchwork picture of the entire sky visible from Chile in just three days before starting over again.

Universe filmed in slow motion

Unlike most telescopes that zoom in on particular objects, Rubin marches relentlessly across the firmament, capturing sections with a field of view that covers the equivalent of 45 full moons. At each stop, the camera records the view with 189 light sensors cooled to minus 100 degrees Celsius. The images become so detailed that it would require a wall of 400 ultra-high-definition TV screens to display them in full size.

By comparing each new image with what has come before, Rubin detects everything that has moved, changed brightness, or suddenly appeared. Within one minute of dispatching an image, the processing center at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California will generate alerts for each new change - up to 10 million every night.

New discoveries in the solar system

Some of the discoveries will be close to home, in the solar system: millions of new asteroids and other objects. The telescope might even find the elusive Planet 9, a hypothetical planet beyond Neptune. Farther out, in and around the Milky Way, each Rubin snapshot will capture on average about 7200 variable stars, such as Cepheids, which are used to measure distances and probe the chemical makeup of stars.

Beyond the Milky Way, Rubin will spy hundreds of thousands of cosmic cataclysms each night. They could include a giant star ending its life in a supernova blast, a huge black hole tearing apart a star that strayed too close, or two orbiting neutron stars merging in a titanic crash.

Deepest map of the cosmos

Rubin won't ignore objects that persist through time. By repeatedly "stacking" images as the 10-year survey progresses, it will slowly build up the deepest and most detailed map ever made of the cosmos. It will include billions of galaxies, some of them shining with light that began its journey 11 billion years ago, when the universe was less than one-quarter of its current age.

The vast archive grows by 20 terabytes each night and will after one year contain more optical astronomy data than all previous telescopes combined have produced. The survey is scheduled to begin in about six months. The first test images will be revealed to the public on June 23.

800 million dollar investment

The 800 million dollar observatory is funded by the US National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and private donors. It is as much a data factory as a telescope. SLAC and the US National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory have created a whole new infrastructure to handle Rubin's deluge of images.

In addition to generating the nightly alerts about changes, SLAC, along with satellite centers in Europe, will clean up the images, compile data into annual releases, and make them available via an online portal to astronomers and the public in the United States as well as Canada, Chile, France, and the United Kingdom.

Machine learning for the future

Around the world, researchers have spent years developing machine learning and artificial intelligence systems to cope with the coming flood of new objects. Scores of other telescopes, some of them completely robotic, are ready to zoom in and monitor the new transients to see what they are and how they evolve.

Researchers will learn how galaxies evolve and grow, and from their distribution across time and space, infer how they are influenced by dark matter and dark energy - two mysterious substances that, though unseen, are thought to together make up 95 percent of the contents of the universe.

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• British company Pulsar Fusion is developing Sunbird, a fusion-powered spacecraft that can reach speeds up to 805,000 kilometers per hour.

• Nuclear fusion in space may be easier to achieve than on Earth, as vacuum is a more natural environment for the fusion process.

• The Sunbird system could deliver 2000 kg of cargo to Mars in less than six months and make interplanetary missions more time-efficient.

British company plans fusion propulsion in space

Creating nuclear fusion on Earth has long been a challenge for researchers worldwide. Now British company Pulsar Fusion is taking a different approach - they're moving the technology to space. With funding from the UK Space Agency, the company has presented Sunbird, a concept for a spacecraft that uses nuclear fusion for propulsion.

"It's very unnatural to do fusion on Earth," says Richard Dinan, founder and CEO of Pulsar to CNN. "Fusion doesn't want to work in an atmosphere. Space is a far more logical, sensible place to do fusion, because that's where it naturally wants to happen."

The Sunbird concept is based on spacecraft docking with fusion-powered units that then accelerate them to speeds up to 805,000 kilometers per hour - faster than NASA's Parker Solar Probe which reached 692,000 kilometers per hour, the fastest vehicle humans have built to date.

Testing and development plan

Some components will be tested in orbit this year. "They're basically circuit boards that go up to be tested, to make sure they work. Not very exciting because there's no fusion, but we have to do it," explains Dinan.

According to plans, a smaller part of Sunbird will be sent up in 2027 to verify that the physics works as calculated. This will be the company's first orbital demonstration, where they hope to achieve fusion in space - and be the first to succeed in doing so.

The prototype will cost approximately 70 million dollars. A fully functional Sunbird system is expected to be ready four to five years later, provided that necessary funding is secured.

Advantages of fusion in space

Unlike fusion reactors on Earth, which must produce more energy than they consume, a space fusion engine can be valuable even if inefficient. The goal is not to generate electricity but to create propulsion.

The Sunbird system would use only grams of fuel, primarily an expensive isotope called helium-3, to create protons that become a "nuclear exhaust" for propulsion.

The system could deliver up to 2000 kilograms of cargo to Mars in less than six months, send probes to Jupiter or Saturn in two to four years, and enable a round-trip journey to a nearby asteroid in one to two years instead of three.

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• Saturn now has a total of 274 moons, making it the leading planet in the solar system in terms of moon count.

• The newly discovered moons are irregular objects just a few kilometers in size and can provide insights into the early history of the solar system.

• Researchers used the "shift and stack" technique, where astronomers take sequential images that track the moon's path across the sky and combine them to make the moon bright enough to detect.

Saturn takes the lead in the solar system's moon count

Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, giving the planet a clear lead in the number of moons in the solar system. Until recently, Jupiter held the title of "moon king," but Saturn now has a total of 274 moons, almost twice as many as all other planets combined.

The research team behind the discovery had previously identified 62 Saturnian moons using the Canada France Hawaii telescope. After seeing faint signs that there might be more moons, they conducted additional observations during 2023.

"We actually found 128 new moons," says research leader Dr. Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Academia Sincia in Taiwan. "Based on our projections, I don't think Jupiter will ever catch up."

Jupiter has 95 moons with confirmed orbits as of February 5, 2024.

Naming and formal recognition

The moons have been formally recognized by the International Astronomical Union this week and are currently assigned strings of numbers and letters. They will eventually receive names based on Gallic, Norse, and Canadian Inuit gods, in accordance with the convention for Saturn's moons.

Most of the new moons belong to the Norse group, which means astronomers are now searching for dozens of lesser-known Viking gods. "Eventually the criteria may need to be relaxed somewhat," says Ashton.

Discovery technique and moon characteristics

The moons were identified using the "shift and stack" technique, where astronomers take sequential images that track the moon's path across the sky and combine them to make the moon bright enough to detect.

All 128 new moons are "irregular moons," potato-shaped objects that are just a few kilometers across. The increasing number of these objects highlights potential future disagreements about what actually counts as a moon.

"I don't think there's a proper definition for what is classified as a moon. There should be," says Ashton. However, he adds that the team may have reached a limit for moon detection – for now.

"With current technology, I don't think we can do much better than what has already been done for moons around Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune," says Ashton.

Scientific significance

Closer observations of these small moons can give scientists insight into a turbulent period in the early solar system, where planets migrated in unstable orbits and collisions were common.

The new moons are grouped together, suggesting that many of them are remnants of much larger objects that collided and shattered within the last 100 million years. The moons all have large, elliptical orbits at an angle to moons closer to the planet.

"They are likely all fragments of a smaller number of originally captured moons that were broken apart by violent collisions, either with other Saturnian moons or with passing comets," says Professor Brett Gladman, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia.

Understanding the dynamics of Saturn's many moons can also help resolve questions about the origin of Saturn's rings, which scientists have suggested could be the aftermath of a moon that was torn apart by the planet's gravity.

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• Researchers have discovered that the first water in the universe formed in Population III supernovae approximately 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.

• Dense molecular cloud cores in supernova remnants proved to be the primary sites of water production, with concentrations almost as high as in our solar system today.

• These water-rich, dense cloud cores may also be sites where protoplanetary disks and planets formed early in the universe's history.

Water formation in the universe's first explosions

New numerical simulations conducted by researchers from Portsmouth University and United Arab Emirates University show that water formed as early as 13.5 billion years ago in the first supernova explosions. The researchers modeled explosions of Population III stars (the universe's first generation of stars) with masses of 13 and 200 solar masses.

When these early stars exploded as supernovae, heavy elements were ejected into space, including oxygen with masses of 0.051 and 55 solar masses for the two simulated explosions. In the expanding explosion remnant, the oxygen reacted with hydrogen and hydrogen gas (H₂) to form water.

"Diffuse water vapor later permeated both galaxy clusters with mass fractions of 10⁻¹⁴ to 10⁻¹² in core-collapse supernovae and 10⁻¹² to 10⁻¹⁰ in pair-instability supernovae," the researchers explain in the study published in Nature Astronomy.

Cloud cores: the cradle of water

The largest amounts of water, however, were not formed in the diffuse gas but in dense cloud cores that were contaminated by metals from the explosions and then collapsed to high densities. In these environments, the rate of water formation increased dramatically.

In pair-instability supernovae, water masses increased sharply from 10⁻⁶ solar masses to 10⁻³ solar masses in just 3 million years. In core-collapse supernovae, the amount rose from 10⁻⁸ solar masses to 10⁻⁶ solar masses over 30-90 million years.

The cloud cores reacted differently to the explosions depending on their metallicity. The researchers explain: "The pair-instability supernova core becomes self-gravitating much earlier than in core-collapse supernovae because its higher metallicity results in faster cooling and collapse."

Planets already at the dawn of the universe?

A fascinating conclusion from the study is that these dense, dusty cores may also have been sites where planets formed. The numerical simulations show that the gas clump from core-collapse supernovae could produce protoplanetary disks that fragment into Jupiter-like planets.

The higher metal content in the pair-instability supernova core could potentially lead to the formation of rocky planetesimals in protoplanetary disks with low-mass stars. In fact, Jeans masses (minimum mass for gravitational collapse to occur) fell to 1-2 solar masses in the center of the pair-instability supernova core.

Simulations show that these disks were heavily enriched with primordial water, to mass fractions that were 10-30 times greater than in diffuse clouds in the Milky Way in the core-collapse supernova's core and only a factor of a few times lower than in the solar system today in the pair-instability supernova's core.

Water in the first galaxies

The researchers conclude that water was present in primordial-related galaxies due to its earlier formation in their constituents. Water mass fractions in diffuse supernova remnants could reach 10⁻¹⁰, only one order of magnitude less than in the Milky Way today.

Some of this water would have been photodissociated by massive stars in these galaxies or destroyed through other chemical reactions. But increasing dust fractions in early galaxies would also have protected water from ultraviolet radiation and reduced its destruction.

The research findings suggest that a fundamental ingredient for life was in place in the universe earlier than previously thought, and that water was likely a key component in the first galaxies.

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