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Corey S. Powell

@coreyspowell.bsky.social
9.9K followers 1.1K following 2.6K posts

Fascinated by things very big, very small, and beyond the limits of the human senses. Founder of OpenMind: www.openmindmag.org Creator of the Invisible Universe column: invisibleuniverse.substack.com

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Reposted by Corey S. Powell
Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026
Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
nyti.ms
Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)
An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Here comes the nor'easter, seen by the GOES-19 satellite. It's building outside my apartment, and it is *loud*. (The storm, that is, not the satellite.) 🧪 www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/conus.p...
Nor'easter imaged by the GOES-19 satellite.
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Reposted by Corey S. Powell
Ed Maibach @maibached.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Happy Stanislav Petrov Day He passed in 2017. As Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, “He is survived by his two children, two grandchildren, and the entire human race.” If you don't know his story, please take 3 minutes now to learn it. @gchalliance.bsky.social @docsforclimate.bsky.social
sammatey.substack.com
Happy Stanislav Petrov Day
Take five minutes to not destroy civilization
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
There's a lot we still don't know about how the Moon formed, but new computer simulations show that the Moon might have come together in just a *few hours*. Which makes me feel really unproductive today. 🧪🔭 www.swri.org/newsroom/pre...
Final state of three identical Moon-forming simulations with different initial temperature profiles, from cold to hot: Tsurf ≈ 400 K (top row), Tsurf ≈ 800 K (middle row), and Tsurf ≈ 2000 K (bottom row), with strength included, shown at t = 0.5, 5, 12, and 24 hr. Colors represent temperature (see color bar).
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The Moon shaped a lot of life on Earth, including holidays (like Yom Kippur) anchored to the lunar calendar. But moons are delicate things. We managed to keep ours. Venus may have eaten its moon. One more way it lost out... 🧪🔭 news.ucr.edu/articles/202...
Scientists have long speculated why Venus, with a similar size, mass, and structure to Earth, doesn’t have a moon. New UC Riverside research shows it’s because our hungry twin likely swallowed it.
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Reposted by Corey S. Powell
Kevin M. Gill @kevinmgill.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
New postcard from Curiosity using Navcams taken on Sols 5000 & 5003 science.nasa.gov/photojournal...
science.nasa.gov
Curiosity Postcard Celebrates Rover’s 5,000th Day on Mars - NASA Science
While parked at a sand ridge nicknamed “Chocolatal,” NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its black-and-white navigation cameras to capture panoramas at two times
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Wow: Giant new impact crater spotted on the Moon! An asteroid the size of an apartment building hit the lunar surface in early 2024 & created 220-meter (730-foot) wide McGetchin crater. It's "the largest contemporary impact crater found in the Solar System." 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/solar-system...
Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
 
The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses. Scientists estimate that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century or even longer.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Just in: A gorgeous new panorama of creation in our galaxy, taken by JWST. This image shows infant stars shooting out jets, baby stars emerging from dusty cocoons, young planet-like objects floating alone & starless, and one planet birthing planets of its own. 🧪🔭 science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/i...
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently observed IC 348, a star-forming region just 1,000 light-years away from Earth. Webb’s sharp vision revealed tiny brown dwarfs, some just twice Jupiter’s mass, and young stars ejecting powerful jets crashing into surrounding gas and dust.
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Kevin Luhman (PSU), Catarina Alves de Oliveira (ESA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Webb)
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
According to the standard model of the Big Bang, the universe was born containing 24.7% helium by mass. A new galaxy survey finds that the actual helium content was 24.6% (with a little uncertainty)! It's amazing that human brains figured out how the universe began. 🧪🔭 news.osu.edu/using-helium...
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured a spectacular view of the galaxy  I Zwicky 18 (I Zw 18) in this new image. The galaxy was first identified by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930’s and resides roughly 59 million light-years from Earth.

This galaxy has gone through several sudden bursts of star formation. This galaxy is typical of the kinds of galaxies that inhabited the early Universe and it is classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy (much smaller than our Milky Way). Galaxies like this one make it possible to measure how much helium the universe was born with.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
There's a sense of community born out of shared trauma, and one born out of shared aspirations. 9/11 brought us the first, briefly. When I watched the launch of NASA's Roman telescope, I saw a lot of the latter. We need more of that kind of community: optimistic, forward-looking, sustainable. 🧪🔭
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope on board is seen transiting the sun during launch from Launch Complex 39A, Sunday, Aug. 30, 2026, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
NASA/John Kraus
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
A new study has exposed a major blind spot in our view of the cosmos. Objects that shine in extreme UV are among the most energetic sources in galaxies. Yet we've overlooked them because we lack the right instruments & they get hidden by interstellar fog. 🧪🔭 chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2026/m...
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Gas + gravity + time leads to surprising and gorgeous results. Look at this peculiar galaxy pair, NGC 7253. Gravity caused a couple hundred billion balls of hydrogen to light up as stars, held together in two great swarms that then collided, scattered & reassembled. 🧪🔭 noirlab.edu/public/image...
Nā ʻUhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola is the Hawaiian name given to this image of NGC 7253 — a pair of spiral galaxies caught in each other’s gravity. This image was captured by the Gemini North telescope on Maunakea, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF NOIRLab. The name of the image, which translates to “The Twin Spirits Pulling Together Creating Life,” was chosen by the 2026 Project Hōkūlani interns.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
A Chinese spy satellite broke up in an unusual retrograde (backward) orbit, creating a field of space debris that will remain up there for decades or more. There have now been more than 600 fragmentation events in Earth orbit. 🧪🔭 spacenews.com/chinese-reco...
A Long March 6A rocket lifts off from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, March 15, 2026, carrying the Yaogan-50 (02) satellite into orbit. Credit: CASC
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Reposted by Corey S. Powell
Dr Robin George Andrews @squigglyvolcano.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Quite enjoy getting this sort of alert. An asteroid has just been discovered before it’ll hit Earth! It’ll enter the atmosphere just northwest of Australia. (Don’t worry: it’s ~1m long, so it’ll just make a cool, brief fireball. We aren’t all about to die.)
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Reposted by Corey S. Powell
Robert McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
It can be hard to appreciate the vastness of just one (1) light-year. The most distant human-made object has been hurtling into space for almost 50 years, and its distance from Earth is just about to reach 1/365th of a light-year.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
The BepiColombo spacecraft just broke in two. In December, the remainder will split in two again. It's all part of the elaborate preparations for making the best-ever observations of the enigmatic planet Mercury. 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/Science_Expl...
Artist’s impression showing the Mercury Transfer Module separate from the BepiColombo Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) composite spacecraft. The transfer module is only needed for the journey to Mercury. The two science orbiters will be captured into Mercury orbit, and the small thrusters on MPO will be used to deliver MMO into its orbit. There, MMO will be ejected from MPO and spun up. MPO will then discard the sunshield, and continue into its own orbit around Mercury.Artist’s impression showing the Mercury Transfer Module separate from the BepiColombo Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) composite spacecraft. The transfer module is only needed for the journey to Mercury. The two science orbiters will be captured into Mercury orbit, and the small thrusters on MPO will be used to deliver MMO into its orbit. There, MMO will be ejected from MPO and spun up. MPO will then discard the sunshield, and continue into its own orbit around Mercury.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
The first private Venus probe--part of a planned set of Morning Star Missions--is taking shape in California. It will sample the Venusian clouds to see if they could possibly support life. But for now it's grounded, awaiting the debut of its Neutron rocket. 🧪🔭 www.leonarddavid.com/unveiling-ve...
Sara Seager holds a mission to Venus probe to investigate its atmosphere. Image credit: Sara SeagerAn illustration shows Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft above the clouds of Venus (Image credit: Rocket Lab)
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Happy Carrington Event Day to all who celebrate. On Sept 2-3, 1859, a huge solar flare hit Earth with the most intense magnetic storm on record. Auroras bloomed, magnetometers went wild, and telegraph machines sparked around the world. 🧪 link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Carrington’s (1859) carefully executed drawing of his sunspot group 520 on 1 September 1859, the first visual record of a solar flare. The initial (A and B) and final (C and D) positions of the white-light emission are indicated. Solar east is to the right. Below: Enlargement of region 520 from an early solar photograph made at Kew Observatory by Warren De la Rue on 31 August 1859.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
The Hubble telescope has spotted an enormous, 10-sized geometric cloud pattern encircling Saturn's south pole. And this Saturn decagon seems to be new, taking shape as we watch. Weird winds are wiggling on the ringed planet! 🔭🧪 science.nasa.gov/missions/hub...
Recent NASA Hubble Space Telescope images show the gas giant Saturn and its southern pole, where astronomers have discovered a 10-sided atmospheric wave. Observations show the decagon extends through multiple layers of Saturn’s atmosphere. Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, Agustin Sánchez-Lavega (UPV), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), Michael Wong (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Something weird showed up in the data from the LZ dark-matter detector in South Dakota. It's a single event. It could be an error. But it's an intriguing, anomalous signal with no obvious physical observation...and "weird" can be the gateway to big discoveries. 🧪🔭 news.ucsb.edu/2026/022780/...
The LUX-ZEPLIN main detector in a surface lab before installation underground at the SURF facility in Lead, South Dakota.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Liftoff! The Roman Space Telescope is on its way to the place where it was built to live. 🔭🧪
Roman Space Telescope
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
In Florida, awaiting the launch of the Roman Space Telescope--NASA's next great space observatory. 🔭🧪 science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman/
Roman telescope launchRoman telescope launch
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Take a look outside if you can. Lunar eclipse time!
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Amazing: Scientists see evidence of flowing liquid on the surface of Pluto. Pluto! The fluid is probably liquid nitrogen. In every environment, it seems, some elements or compounds behave in dynamic ways, producing active geology from Mercury to Pluto (and beyond?). 🧪🔭 www.swri.org/newsroom/pre...
Pluto’s northern Sputnik Planitia glacier (in the western or left side of Pluto’s brightheart) is shown here in a color mosaic made from New Horizons imagery. The direction of north is shown on the image. The image is ~ 700 x 350 kilometers across. The red box has been added to show most of the region containing dark features attributed to the wetting of the glacier by liquid nitrogen sourced from a “basil melting” process beneath the glacier, as described in the published paper by Stern et al. (2026)
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Another fusion startup with a clever concept, promising technology, and a few orders of magnitude of development yet to go.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
The historic first Earthrise photo from the Moon was received 60 years ago today. It was shot on film, developed onboard the Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft, scanned, transmitted home...and then meticulously restored decades later. 🧪🔭 www.lpi.usra.edu/features/lun...
On August 23, 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photo of Earth as seen from lunar orbit. While a remarkable image at the time, the full resolution of the image was never retrieved from the data stored from the mission. In 2008, this earthrise image was restored by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA Ames Research Center. They obtained the original data tapes from the mission (the last surviving set) and restored original FR-900 tape drives to operational condition using both 60s era parts and modern electronics.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Life may have originated more than once on Earth...and today's living cells might have two separate origins. Fascinating new research traces life's likely beginnings to a hydrothermal vent environment. 🧪 www.hhu.de/en/news/two-...
Mineral-laden water emerging from a hydrothermal vent on the Niua underwater volcano in the Lau Basin, southwest Pacific Ocean. As the water cools, minerals precipitate to form tower-like “chimneys.” Image taken during 2016 cruise “Virtual Vents.”
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
I'd like to know what this same scene would look like 1 second later.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
The mission to rescue NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has failed; the observatory will probably burn up in Earth's atmosphere later this year. This was a high-risk effort, and will aid future rescue missions. A bitter disappointment all the same. 🔭🧪 www.nasa.gov/news-release...
Shortly after launching on a mission to save NASA’s Swift space telescope, the LINK spacecraft successfully deployed its solar arrays. But the mission has now ended in failure. Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
I needed something spectacular, and here it is: a view of the August 12 solar eclipse as seen from South Korea's Danuri satellite, in orbit around the Moon. You can see the lunar shadow sweeping across Greenland. 🔭🧪 www.mt.co.kr/amp/tech/202...
The Korean lunar orbiter Danuri succeeded in capturing the total eclipse observed on the European continent on the 12th (local time). The part of the shadow that touches the surface of the moon (top left) is a total solar eclipse. /Photo: Korea Aerospace Research Institute
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
By chance, an extraordinary new telescope captured an extraordinary step in evolution: the moment when a dying star donates its remains to the galaxy, seeding the next generation of stars. 🧪🔭 news.northwestern.edu/stories/2026...
The Helix Nebula and the cosmic recycling of stellar material. The bright central nebula surrounds a white dwarf, the remnant of the star that created it. Farther out, newly revealed bow shocks show fragments of material cast off by that star colliding with surrounding interstellar gas. The fragments become progressively smaller and more disrupted as they are stripped, shredded and mixed into space. The new MOTHRA data are combined with previous data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Kitt Peak 4m telescope to create this color image. Credit for the previous data: NASA, ESA, C. R. O’Dell (Vanderbilt University) and M. Meixner, P. McCullough and G. Bacon (Space Telescope Science Institute).
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
A particle made of force? Chinese researchers claim they've definitively detected a "glueball"--a particle of bound gluons, which carry the strong force. Gluons bind together protons & neutrons, but they can also stick to each other. No ordinary matter required. 🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...
The Beijing Spectrometer III has provided evidence for glueballs, which are made almost entirely of force-carrying particles.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
It amazes me every time that pinhole projection really works. We got just a 9% eclipse in Brooklyn, but that was enough to put an obvious dent in the Sun. 🧪🔭
Today's solar eclipse from New York, seen via pinhole projection
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Lots of people bought eclipse glasses for the 2017 and 2024 solar eclipses. If you've still got them & live anywhere within today's eclipse track--bust them out! Even seeing a tiny bite missing from the Sun is a magical experience. 🔭🧪 science.nasa.gov/eclipses/fut...
This map shows where a solar eclipse will be visible on Aug. 12, 2026.

The red band that crosses Greenland, Iceland, and Spain shows where a total solar eclipse can be seen. Yellow curves across the map show where a partial eclipse will be visible, and percentages indicate the maximum area of the Sun covered by the Moon during the eclipse along those lines.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Today is Peak Perseid: The best night of the year's best meteor shower, especially easy to view because of a new Moon. I love Marcin Rosadziński's fish-eye photo of the 2024 Perseids, which captures the feeling of us all sitting on a little rock in space. 🧪🔭 apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap26081...
It looks like a view from the Little Prince's planet. The featured image is a throwback to the 2024 Perseid meteor shower, surrounded in this projection by the Bieszczady Mountains in Poland. Visible in the sky is the arch of the Milky Way, along with several nebulas in red and over a hundred meteors pointing to the radiant. The Perseids are easily visible and quite popular in the Northern Hemisphere summer. (Watching meteor showers in the winter is less convenient for a good reason). This year they are expected to offer an even more dazzling spectacle than usual, because the peak coincides with a new moon. The 2026 Perseid meteor shower will peak tonight with as many as 50-100 meteors per hour, when the Earth's path crosses through debris left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle. Typically, the best times for seeing the meteors are between midnight and pre-dawn. You won't need binoculars to see the meteors, but a lawn chair and a dark sky location help.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
From the very-cold-case files: First confirmed death by trebuchet, 722 years ago.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Our view of the universe keeps getting bigger, richer, deeper. The latest sky survey from DESI (an experiment studying dark energy) covers 4 billion celestial objects & contains 5.6 trillion pixels. And it's open to anyone, if you want to take a look. 🧪🔭 noirlab.edu/public/news/...
A group of galaxies nicknamed the Copeland Septet, in the constellation of Leo. Astronomers using images from Kitt Peak National Observatory and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory have created the largest ever map of the sky, comprising over a billion galaxies. The final data release from the  ambitious DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys sets the stage for a ground-breaking 5-year survey with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which aims to provide new insights into the nature of dark energy. Credit: DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys/LBNL/DOE & KPNO/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
The most amazing thing I saw this past week: Extreme-resolution images that show the surface of the Sun more clearly than ever before. For the first time, they reveal rippling "shear" waves where zones of solar plasma blow past each other at different velocities. 🔭🧪 nso.edu/press-releas...
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Observatory (Danuri) has just imaged the location where a Falcon 9 rocket stage hit the Moon and created a small new impact crater. 🔭🧪
Danuri captured footage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage impacting the lunar surface on August 5 at 15:34 Korean time!

Danuri began observations about 30 minutes before the collision and, through orbit control, passed over the impact site multiple times, conducting a total of 8 imaging sessions.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Update: So far there are no confirmed observations of the rocket stage hitting the Moon, but one possible detection of the impact plume from Paranal Observatory in Chile. 🧪 www.bbc.com/news/live/cr...
bbc.com
SpaceX rocket expected to have crashed into Moon - live updates
The stray upper stage (section) of the Falcon 9 rocket is about the size of a five-storey building, with a mass of at least 4,000kg.
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Reposted by Corey S. Powell
Dr Space Junk (Alice Gorman) @drspacejunk.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
On August 5, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is predicted to crash onto the Moon. What has crashed on the Moon before? The very first human object to touch the Moon - Luna 2 in 1959. A probe, 3 bombs, and a rocket body! 🧪 🔭
m.youtube.com
1959: Luna 2 (USSR)
YouTube video by International Astronautical Federation
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
At 2:35am EDT tonight, a Falcon 9 rocket upper stage will hit the Moon. The impact will occur just over the lunar limb, out of sight from Earth, but there's a chance the debris plume will be visible. We should be able to image the crater later. 🔭🧪 www.projectpluto.com/25010d.htm#v...
The impact point will be at lunar latitude 19.461 N, longitude 266.707 E = 93.293 W. The image shows how it'll look from the earth, with the impact at the blue circle-and-cross symbol. Somewhere close to that place and time, anyway; some parts of the motion of this object aren't entirely predictable. It will be close to the edge ("limb") of the moon as seen from earth, on the sunlit part. The moon will be a little more than half illuminated at the time.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
When and how did Earth get its oxygen? The answer used to seem simple...but the more we learn, the more complicated it looks. The path to breathable air may have been twisted by shifting continents & runaway glaciers. 🧪🔭 www.science.org/content/arti...
 A nearly full moon shines brightly on the Earth's atmosphere on Mar.8, 2015 enticing astronauts aboard the International Space Station to snap this image as part of the Earth Observation program.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Bluesky seems to be having another growth spurt. Anyone else seeing it?
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
The inner moons of Neptune look like they were turned inside out, with deep-interior minerals spattered across their surfaces. Probably these moons are the shattered remains of earlier satellites that were shredded when a Pluto-like object came barreling in. 🧪🔭 www.caltech.edu/about/news/n...
Neptune's satellite Proteus, seen in a colorized image from Voyager 2. JWST/ Near-Infrared Camera (NIRSpec) images of Neptune's moon Larissa and rings, acquired on two dates when Larissa was on opposite sides of Neptune. The bright spots are Larissa and the bright rings can be seen clearly. Neptune itself is positioned at the center and the calculated positions of Neptune's rings are overlaid in gray.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Legend has it that the Pythagoreans murdered the man who discovered that the diagonal of a unit square is an irrational number, upsetting their mathematical philosophy.
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
The mission to rescue the Swift Observatory is experiencing technical problems. They may be solvable, but it's a nail-biter. Unclear if the observatory will survive. 🧪🔭 arstechnica.com/space/2026/0...
A camera mounted on Katalyst's Link satellite captured this view of one of its solar arrays in orbit. Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies
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China Space Watch @chinaspace.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Africa could make lunar history in 2029. China's Chang'e-8 mission may carry Africa's first Moon mission to the lunar south pole. The Africa2Moon project will deploy three small spherical probes to form a pioneering radio astronomy array. 🌕...🧵
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
I appreciate the creative use of units here to call attention to a growing problem: The amount of junk in Earth orbit is now equivalent to 13 million adult cane toads. 🧪
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Corey S. Powell @coreyspowell.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Not a splashy mission, but a technically significant one: the upcoming CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft pair will test autonomous navigation, rendezvous, and formation flying around the Moon. 🧪🔭 www.nasa.gov/directorates...
An artist’s rendering of NASA’s CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft in lunar orbit. The mission features two identical small spacecraft that will further mature technologies to support Artemis, Moon Base, and deep space exploration. Image: Terran Orbital
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