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Universe Today

Europa Clipper starts odyssey to mysterious Jovian moon

Europa Clipper liftoff on SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket sends NASA's Europa Clipper into space from its Florida launch pad. (NASA Photo / Kim Shiflett)

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft today began its six-year cruise to the Jupiter system, with the goal of determining whether one of the giant planet’s moons has the right stuff in the right setting for life.

The van-sized probe was sent into space from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 12:06 p.m. ET (9:06 a.m. PT). A little more than an hour after launch, the spacecraft separated from its launch vehicle to begin a roundabout journey of 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) from Earth orbit to Europa.

For decades, scientists have been collecting evidence that Europa harbors a hidden ocean of salty water beneath its icy shell. Or are they hidden lakes? Europa Clipper is built to characterize the moon’s surface, and what’s beneath that surface, to an unprecedented degree.

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Universe Today

SpaceX catches a Starship booster on the first try

Starship SuperHeavy booster catch
SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy booster settles back into the arms of its launch-pad cradle in Texas. (Credit: SpaceX)

For the first time ever, SpaceX has followed through on a Starship test launch by bringing back the Super Heavy booster for an on-target catch in the arms of its “Mechazilla” launch-tower cradle in Texas.

“This is a day for the engineering history books,” SpaceX launch commentator Kate Tice said.

Today’s successful catch marks a giant step toward using — and reusing — Starship for missions ranging from satellite deployments to NASA’s moon missions to migrations to Mars.

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GeekWire

Rubin Observatory’s monster telescope takes shape

Rubin Observatory telescope mount assembly
The Simonyi Survey Telescope now has its mirrors and a camera in place. (Credit: Rubin Observatory)

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope in Chile has now been equipped with all three of its mirrors, plus a camera for good measure.

Last week’s installation of the telescope’s combined primary/tertiary mirror represented a major milestone in the observatory’s 15-year-long design and construction effort.

“We have a telescope!” the observatory team declared in updates posted to Instagram, Threads, BlueSky and X / Twitter.

The wide-field survey telescope, which is named after Microsoft software pioneer Charles Simonyi, is expected to shed light on astronomical mysteries ranging from the nature of dark energy and dark matter to the potential existence of an as-yet-unseen “Planet X” in the far reaches of our solar system.

The telescope’s 8.4-meter-wide (27.5-foot-wide) primary/tertiary mirror makes use of a continuous surface with different curvatures that are designed to optimize image resolution inside a relatively compact support structure. The 3.4-meter-wide (11-foot-wide) secondary mirror was installed in July.

When it’s fully up and running, the Simonyi Survey Telescope is expected to generate 20 terabytes of data every night. But the current version of the telescope isn’t yet ready for prime time.

“This iteration has the commissioning camera — a smaller 144-megapixel version of Rubin’s huge, 3,200-megapixel camera — which is used for testing and troubleshooting,” the observatory team noted. “Rubin’s LSST Camera, the biggest digital camera in the world that will #CaptureTheCosmos in science operations, will be installed early next year after our summit staff complete the next round of tests.”

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GeekWire

Nobel Prize in chemistry puts protein design in spotlight

Biochemist David Baker at home
Biochemist David Baker chats with a journalist online about his Nobel Prize. (Photo by Ian C Haydon / UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design)

University of Washington biochemist David Baker has won a share of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for more than two decades of discoveries about the molecular structure of proteins — discoveries that have led to new medical therapies, new materials and new startups.

“I’m very, very excited about the future,” Baker, who is the director of the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design, said today during a Seattle news briefing. “I think protein design has huge potential to make the world a better place, and I really do think we’re just at the very, very beginning.”

Baker shares the prize with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who have also pioneered computational techniques for predicting protein structure. They will be awarded their medals at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10.

In a news release, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Baker “has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins.”

“His research group has produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors,” the academy said.

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GeekWire

Space venture veterans boldly go on a Startup Trek

Candid photo of Andrew Woodfield and Chris Le
Andrew Woodfield and Chris Le are the founding partners of Actuate Ventures. (Photo Courtesy of Chris Le)

Two former employees of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company are striking out on their own with Actuate Ventures, a venture studio that specializes in supporting startups in the space industry and other deep-tech markets.

Actuate’s founding partners, Chris Le and Andrew Woodfield, set up shop less than a year ago — but the studio is already building up connections with collaborators, investors and entrepreneurs. This week, they’re participating in events at SF Tech Week, and they’re also in the midst of a campaign to create their first $25 million venture fund for investment.

Le said it’s not just about the money. “We think of ourselves as ‘co-founders in a box,’” he told me. “The venture studio model in particular is a hybrid. It’s like if an incubator and a VC had a baby. We’re here to be in it with you and help grow your company, and not just be a check in the door.”

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Universe Today

Hera probe heads off to investigate asteroid smash-up

Hera liftoff on SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches the Hera spacecraft into space from its Florida pad. (Credit: SpaceX)

The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft is on its way to do follow-up observations of Dimorphos, two years after an earlier probe knocked the mini-asteroid into a different orbital path around a bigger space rock.

Scientists say the close-up observations that Hera is due to make millions of miles from Earth, starting in 2026, will help them defend our planet from future threats posed by killer asteroids.

“Hera’s ability to closely study its asteroid target will be just what is needed for operational planetary defense,” Richard Moissl, who heads ESA’s Planetary Defense Office, said today in a news release. “You can imagine a scenario where a reconnaissance mission is dispatched rapidly, to assess if any follow-up deflection action is needed.”

The car-sized probe lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 10:52 a.m. ET (7:52 a.m. PT) today, just as Hurricane Milton was approaching from the Gulf of Mexico. The day before the launch, forecasters put the chances of acceptable weather at just 15 percent.

Nevertheless, SpaceX persisted.

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Cosmic Science

Scientists map a fruit fly’s brain — and are thinking ahead

Fruit fly connectome
This image shows how a fruit fly's neurons are connected. (Credit: Amy Sterling and Julia Kuhl for FlyWire, Princeton University / Dorkenwald et al., Nature)

Researchers say they have created a complete map of an adult fruit fly, showing how almost 140,000 individual neurons are linked up to each other and turn sensory inputs into behavioral responses.

The connectome — basically, a wiring diagram that traces the connections between brain cells — is the subject of a flurry of research papers published today by the journal Nature.

It’s not the first such brain wiring diagram, or connectome, to be traced out: Previous projects have charted the brain of a roundworm (302 neurons), plus the brains of a larval sea squirt and a larval marine worm, as well as the brain of a larval fruit fly (3,016 neurons).

But the adult fruit fly connectome, encompassing 139,255 neurons and roughly 50 million connections — raises the bar considerably. And it’s getting scientists thinking about what it will take to achieve a similar feat focusing on the human brain.

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GeekWire

Starfish Space raises more funds for servicing satellites

Illustration: Starfish's Otter spacecraft in orbit
Artwork shows the Otter spacecraft in orbit near another satellite. (Starfish Space Illustration)

Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space is bringing in more funding after announcing several agreements to use its Otter spacecraft for missions ranging from inspecting dead satellites to extending the life of an operational satellite.

Starfish reported that it has raised nearly $21 million of a larger investment round in a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Sept. 27. Investors are not identified.

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GeekWire

Get a wide-angle view of the Simonyi Survey Telescope

Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Rubin Observatory
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope will make use of an 8.4-meter primary mirror and an 3.5-meter secondary mirror. Note the size of the support structure compared with the size of the workers on the platform. (Credit: Rubin Observatory / NSF / AURA / F. Munoz Arancibia)

Hubble. Webb. Chandra. Spitzer. Rubin. Roman. And now, Simonyi.

With the ramping up of the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, Microsoft software architect Charles Simonyi joins a select group of scientists and technologists, policymakers and philanthropists who have had world-class telescopes and observatories named after them.

But here’s the thing: Technically speaking, the Simonyi Survey Telescope isn’t named after Charles Simonyi alone.

“The idea was to create something that carries the family name, and I was more thinking about my dad, Simonyi Károly,” Charles Simonyi told GeekWire, using the Hungarian manner of speech for personal names. “He was a professor at Budapest University. He wrote a wonderful book called ‘The Cultural History of Physics,’ which is available now in English at Amazon.”

Simonyi said his father was best-known for his work in popularizing science, “to make science understandable to the great public.” The physicist’s son arguably had an even greater impact on our computer-centric society by taking a leading role in creating Word, Excel and other tools for Microsoft’s Office suite of applications back in the 1980s. Four decades later, Word is still the world’s most widely used word processing software, and Excel is the most widely used spreadsheet.

Now the Simonyi Survey Telescope promises to have a similarly transformative and long-lasting impact on astronomy. Built at the Rubin Observatory on the edge of Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, the telescope will survey the full sky every three nights, generating about 20 terabytes of raw data daily.

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GeekWire

OceanGate tale gets new twists as hearings wrap up

Coast Guard's Jamie Frederick at hearing
Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick, at center, testifies at a hearing looking into last year’s loss of the Titan sub. (Coast Guard Photo)

The tragic tale of OceanGate’s Titan submersible took on a few added twists today as the U.S. Coast Guard concluded two weeks of public hearings into last year’s catastrophic loss of the sub and its crew.

One former employee of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate quoted the company’s CEO as saying years earlier that he’d “buy a congressman” if the Coast Guard stood in the way of Titan’s development. And the master of Titan’s mothership told investigators that he felt a “shudder” on the sea around the time that the sub imploded on June 18, 2023.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, the sub’s pilot, was among the five who died as Titan made its last descent to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The others were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet; British aviation executive and citizen explorer Hamish Harding; and Pakistani-born business magnate Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Rush’s determination to dive to the Titanic, despite the warnings he received from OceanGate employees and outside engineers, emerged as a major theme during this month’s hearings in South Carolina. Matthew McCoy, a Coast Guard veteran who worked as an operations technician at OceanGate for five months in 2017, reinforced that theme today.

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