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LIGO's Record Black Hole, Mars Clay Band & Post-ISS Future
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
LIGO confirms the largest gravitational-wave black hole merger ever detected — 225 solar masses — while a 600-kilometre clay band on Mars strengthens the case for ancient life. Plus SpaceX reusability milestones and the race to replace the ISS.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX hit a genuinely significant reusability milestone yesterday. Booster B1088 touched down on the drone ship OCISLY after delivering twenty-four Starlink V2 Mini satellites to orbit from Vandenberg, and that landing was the two hundredth successful booster recovery on that single ship.
Pull back considerably from Earth, and the most striking physics story this cycle is coming out of gravitational-wave astronomy. The LIGO collaboration has confirmed a detection designated GW231123, and the numbers are hard to absorb at first.
On Mars, the science case for the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover just got stronger. A new study published in Icarus has mapped a continuous band of clay deposits stretching six hundred kilometres across Oxia Planum into Mawrth Vallis.
Curiosity is working its way through a site called Campo Marte, at the base of Mount Sharp. The rover successfully drilled and analyzed the sample using its full instrument suite, including CheMin for mineralogy and SAM for volatile chemistry.
The longer-term structural story in low Earth orbit is the approaching retirement of the International Space Station after twenty thirty. Three commercial platforms, Axiom Station, Orbital Reef, and Starlab, are all in development to fill that gap.
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