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Universe Today

Odysseus moon lander makes a tenuous touchdown

Selfie view of Odysseus lander with moon in background
A "selfie" captured before Odysseus' landing shows the lander with the lunar surface in the background. (Credit: Intuitive Machines)

Intuitive Machines‘ Odysseus lander made space history today — becoming the first commercial spacecraft to survive a descent to the moon, and the first U.S.-built spacecraft to do so since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. But it wasn’t a trouble-free landing.

Ground controllers had a hard time establishing contact with the robotic lander just after the scheduled touchdown time of 6:23 p.m. ET (3:23 p.m. PT). Several minutes passed, and then Intuitive Machines mission director Tim Crain reported that there was a faint signal coming from Odysseus’ high-gain antenna.

“We’re not dead yet,” he said.

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First Mode’s clean-tech factory uses smart tech as well

Ribbon-cutting ceremony at First Mode factory
First Mode CEO Julian Soles wields a giant scissors at a factory ribbon-cutting ceremony with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to the right and Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, to the left. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

There’s not much that’s bolted down the floor of the 40,000-square-foot factory in Seattle’s SoDo district where First Mode plans to build powertrain conversion kits for mining trucks — and that’s by design.

“The factory itself represents the latest in smart manufacturing,” First Mode CEO Julian Soles said during today’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee in attendance. “It’s ‘software-defined’ rather than a hard-point-constrained facility. Nearly every components shelf and assembly sequence is digitized for maximum speed and data management.”

If the production requirements change, the floor plan can change accordingly. First Mode is also taking advantage of digital tools for tracking the supply chain.

“Every workstation, every inventory location, every product that moves through the facility is equipped with a bar code and has a digital twin,” Philipp Nonnast, senior global supply manager for First Mode, explained during a factory tour.

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Jeff Bezos gets revved up over New Glenn rocket’s rise

Two men look at New Glenn
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp and founder Jeff Bezos get a look at New Glenn. (Blue Origin via LinkedIn)

For the first time, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture lifted up an orbital-class New Glenn rocket on its Florida launch pad — with the billionaire boss keeping watch.

“Just incredible to see New Glenn on the pad at LC-36,” Bezos wrote today in an Instagram post that referred to Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. “Big year ahead. Let’s go!”

Blue Origin’s CEO, Dave Limp, agreed that the sight was incredible.

“Its size alone — more than 30 stories high and a 7-meter diameter fairing with 487 cubic meters of capacity — is humbling,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.

The rocket-raising party marked the climax of New Glenn’s first-ever rollout. “Pending weather, the vehicle will remain on the pad for at least a week for a series of tanking tests, including flowing cryogenic fluids for the first time,” Limp said.

But this pathfinder rocket isn’t destined for liftoff. The coming round of tests will be conducted without New Glenn’s BE-4 rocket engines, which are powered by liquefied natural gas and have been going through tests in Huntsville, Ala., and at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in Texas. Eventually, the rocket will be rolled off the pad — and then an engine-equipped version, incorporating components from the test vehicle’s first stage, will be prepared for launch.

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Universe Today

Scientists confirm that our galaxy’s ‘wave’ is waving

Radcliffe Wave model
This illustration shows how the Radcliffe Wave moves through the backyard of our sun (shown as a yellow dot). The white line represents the wave's current shape and motion. Magenta and green lines show how the wave is expected to move over time. (Credit: Ralf Konietzka, Alyssa Goodman and WorldWide Telescope via CfA)

Astronomers say there’s a wave rippling through our galactic neighborhood that’s playing a part in the birth and death of stars — and perhaps in Earth’s history as well.

The cosmic ripple, known as the Radcliffe Wave, was identified in astronomical data four years ago — but in a follow-up study published today in the journal Nature, a research team lays out fresh evidence that the wave is actually waving, like the wave that fans in a sports stadium create by taking turns standing up and sitting down.

“Similar to how fans in a stadium are being pulled back to their seats by the Earth’s gravity, the Radcliffe Wave oscillates due to the gravity of the Milky Way,” study lead author Ralf Konietzka, a researcher at Harvard and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, or CfA, said in a news release.

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Universe Today

Odysseus moon lander takes selfies with Earth in view

Odysseus selfie with Earth in the background
A fisheye photo captured by a camera on the Odysseus lander shows the lander itself with Earth in the background. (Credit: Intuitive Machines)

Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander has beamed back a series of snapshots that were captured as it headed out from the Earth toward the moon, and one of the pictures features Australia front and center.

The shots also show the second stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched the spacecraft, floating away as Odysseus pushed onward. The pictures were taken on Feb. 16, the day of the launch.

“Payload integration managers programmed the lander’s wide and narrow field-of-view cameras to take five quick images every five minutes for two hours, starting 100 seconds after separating from SpaceX’s second stage,” Houston-based Intuitive Machines explained in a posting to X / Twitter. “Out of all the images collected, Intuitive Machines chose to show humanity’s place in the universe with four wonderful images we hope to inspire the next generation of risk-takers.”

If Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission is successful, Odysseus is due to become the first commercial spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon, and the first U.S. spacecraft to do so since NASA’s Apollo 17 crewed mission in 1972.

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Cosmic Space

Webb Telescope detects activity within dwarf planets

Makemake and Eris
An artist's conception compares the size of 889-mile-wide Makemake and 1,445-mile-wide Eris. (SWRI Illustration)

They may be dwarf planets, but they’re not dead planets.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has provided scientists with evidence of geothermal activity deep within two far-out dwarf planets, Eris and Makemake.

“We see some interesting signs of hot times in cool places,” Christopher Glein, an expert in planetary geochemistry at the Southwest Research Institute, said this week in a news release. Glein is the lead author of a study analyzing the JWST findings that was recently published by the journal Icarus.

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Scientists take a freeze-frame look at excited electrons

Illustration: X-ray pulses blasting water molecules
Scientists used a pair of X-ray pulses (shown in pink and green) to study the energetic response of electrons (gold) in liquid water on attosecond time scales, while the hydrogen (white) and oxygen (red) atoms are ‘frozen’ in time. (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory / Nathan Johnson)

An international team of scientists has blazed a new trail for studying how atoms respond to radiation, by tracking the energetic movement of electrons when a sample of liquid water is blasted with X-rays.

The experiment, described in this week’s issue of the journal Science, required “freezing” the motion of the atoms with which the electrons were associated, on a scale of mere attoseconds. An attosecond is one-quintillionth of a second — or, expressed another way, a millionth of a trillionth of a second.

Attosecond-scale observations could provide scientists with new insights into how radiation exposure affects objects and people.

“What happens to an atom when it is struck by ionizing radiation, like an X-ray? Seeing the earliest stages of this process has long been a missing piece in understanding how radiation affects matter,” Xiaosong Li, a chemistry professor at the University of Washington and a laboratory fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said in a UW news release. “This new technique for the first time shows us that missing piece and opens the door to seeing the steps where so much complex — and interesting — chemistry occurs!”

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IonQ opens the doors to its quantum computer factory

Facade of IonQ's quantum computer factory in Bothell, Wash.
IonQ says its 100,000-square-foot Bothell factory is the first dedicated quantum computer manufacturing facility in the U.S. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

BOTHELL, Wash. — IonQ’s quantum computer factory is still ramping up to full operation, but the company is already expanding its footprint by tens of thousands of square feet.

A year ago, when IonQ revealed its plans to create a new kind of research and manufacturing facility in the Seattle area, the idea was to use roughly 65,000 square feet of space on two floors of a three-story building in Bothell that once housed offices for AT&T Wireless.

“We’re happy to announce today we’ve taken the third floor, so we have the entire building now,” IonQ CEO Peter Chapman said during a ribbon-cutting ceremony. “So, a 50% increase in our footprint in one year. … Now we’re up to about 100,000 square feet in the building.”

IonQ considers its Bothell facility to be the first dedicated quantum computer manufacturing facility in the United States. The building will house the company’s research and development team — and also serve as IonQ’s second quantum data center, following in the footsteps of its Maryland HQ.

Chapman said it cost about $20 million to upgrade the building’s infrastructure for IonQ’s purposes.

“We now have, in the Seattle area, about 80 people at IonQ,” he said. “A year ago, we had something less than that — a handful. So, we’re growing quickly in the Seattle area. And I expect that in this next year, we will invest probably somewhere close to $80 million in the Seattle area, which will go to our promise of investing a billion dollars over the next 10 years.”

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Universe Today

Intuitive Machines’ moon lander begins historic odyssey

SpaceX launch of Intuitive Machines' Odysseus moon lander
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rises from its Florida launch pad to send Intuitive Machines' Odysseus moon lander spaceward. (NASA via YouTube)

Now it’s Intuitive Machines’ turn to try making history with a robotic moon landing.

Today’s launch of the Houston-based company’s Odysseus lander marks the first step in an eight-day journey that could lead to the first-ever soft landing of a commercial spacecraft on the moon. Odysseus would also be the first U.S.-built spacecraft to touch down safely on the lunar surface since Apollo 17’s mission in 1972.

The lander — which is as big as an old-fashioned British phone booth, or the Tardis time portal from the “Doctor Who” TV series — was sent spaceward from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 1:05 a.m. ET Feb. 15 (10:05 p.m. PT Feb. 14).

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Cosmic Tech

GoAERO Prize offers $2M for emergency vehicles that fly

Engineer working on rotorcraft
A scene from the GoAERO Prize introductory video shows an engineer working on a rotorcraft. (GoAERO via YouTube)

A newly announced program called GoAERO is offering more than $2 million in prizes for the development of single-person flying vehicles that are customized for emergency responders — four years after a similar competition ended without awarding its top prize.

The GoAERO Prize program is led by Gwen Lighter, the same woman who was in charge of the earlier GoFly Prize. And as was the case for the GoFly Prize, Boeing is one of the sponsors. Other supporters include NASA, RTX ( the umbrella company for Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace), Iridium and Xwing.

Back in 2017, the GoFly Prize offered $2 million to support the development of personal aerial vehicles — and three years later, the organizers held a fly-off in California to determine the winners.

None of the teams won the $1 million top prize, but a $100,000 prize was awarded to Japan’s teTra Aviation for building a rotor-equipped vehicle that looked like a cross between a motorcycle and an ultralight airplane. At last report, teTra was still developing a commercial version of its vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle, or VTOL.

The GoAERO Prize tightens the focus of the competition to concentrate on VTOL aircraft that are optimized for emergency-response applications — for example, to handle search and rescue, medical emergencies, wildfires, natural disasters or humanitarian crises.

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