¶Dark Energy might not be constant. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s new DR2 data release from Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), when combined with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations and data from other observational efforts (Pantheon+, Union3, DESY5), provides increasingly substantial evidence that dark energy isn’t constant—its influence seems to be changing as the Universe ages (paper). The results haven’t quite reached the gold standard 5σ of statistical significance yet (2.8σ-4.2σ depending on which additional data are used), but they’re getting closer. We mentioned this possibility when DESI’s first data release came out last year, but now things are getting real. Dr. Becky explains in more detail in this video, and here’s a good thread from one of the researchers. Maybe we finally have a path to resolving the Hubble Tension… and maybe the cosmological constant ain’t so constant after all. (And, take a look at this 4K visualization of the field of galaxies present in the updated DR2 data). |
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 | A general audience annotated version of a key chart drawn from the DESI DR2 data. Credit: Claire Lamman (Check out her site for more awesome annotations like this one.) |
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¶Transporter-13. Transporter-13 launched last week, carrying the usual hodgepodge of breakbulk cargo to orbit. This mission marked the 400th landing of an orbital-class rocket for SpaceX—no other company has even landed one. You’ll appreciate that we won’t list details on the more than 74+ payloads onboard, but here are a few highlights: - Albedo’s first VLEO satellite, Clarity-1, launched, with claimed resolutions as low as 10 cm in visual and 2 m in thermal infrared.
- Varda launched its third orbital manufacturing mission, to again land in Australia in a few weeks.
- NASA’s Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE) formation-flying trio of 6U cubesats launched to map auroral electrojets: upper atmospheric electrical currents that link the aurora to Earth’s magnetosphere.
- Muon Space, Earth Fire Alliance, and Google Research’s FireSat0 Protoflight launched, the start of a future fire monitoring constellation funded by philanthropic organizations, including EDF, Google.org, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and others.
- A bundle of Earth Observation satellites were deployed, including 7 Lemurs from Spire (each with multiple radio/EO/tracking sensors), 4 ICEYE SAR sats, and 2 Tomorrow.io sounding sats, along with many more visual, hyperspectral, microwave, SAR, maritime and aircraft surveillance, and climate monitoring missions and payloads.
- Botswana launched the country’s first satellite, BOTSAT-1, with a hyperspectral imaging instrument from South African company Dragonfly Aerospace.
- Also along for the ride were assorted space situational awareness & debris monitoring, Mission Space’s first commercial space weather sensor, general space tech demos (propulsion, etc), aircraft comms (Startical’s IOD-1), and more.
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 | Credit: SpaceX |
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¶Papers- A depleted deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio in exoplanetary atmospheres could be a possible technosignature for alien societies that slowly ran out of deuterium as fusion fuel over tens to hundreds of millions of years (paper).
- To practice talking with aliens, SETI researchers had a conversation (sort of) with a humpback whale. A known ‘contact’ call was played, and a visiting whale repeated it back, matching variations, multiple times (paper).
- The APACE project is working on a bio-inspired solar-pumped laser (using chromatophores from purple bacteria and chlorosome-baseplate-FMO complexes from green sulfur bacteria) to directly convert unconcentrated sunlight into a coherent laser beam for long-distance power transmission (paper). Their goal is to achieve overall system efficiencies of 1-10% (which is 2-3 orders of magnitude better than previous solar-pumped lasers on non-concentrated sunlight, but we suspect still not enough to be particularly useful).
- A laser-guided, nuclear-powered lunar tunnel boring machine (pdf); proposed in 1988. 🌔🚇
- How about a rover that shoots a bunch of tiny spectrometers into the lunar regolith around a crater to map its composition (paper)? “The bullet-like, expendable micro-spectrometer can penetrate into soil to spectrally identify the components of soil, such as water, He-3, or other minerals.” A lunar rover with an onboard spectrometer machine gun definitely feels on-brand for humanity.
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 | “The flags were probably vaporized on impact, because we launched it before we had finished figuring out how to land. That makes sense from an engineering standpoint, but also feels like a metaphor.” XKCD #2125 (We know we reuse this one a lot, but also… we kind of have to.) |
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| ¶News in brief. Isar scrubbed the first launch attempt for their Spectrum rocket due to high winds along its retrograde orbital flight path from the Andøya, Norway launch site—no next launch attempt has been announced ● Spanish propulsion startup Pangea Aerospace raised a €23M Series A to develop an aerospike engine for rocket boosters and upper stages ● Intuitive Machines released a post-mortem on IM-2 that was light on details and heavy on the mission’s few successes (we deeply want IM to succeed, but would like to see more transparency) ● Chinese commercial launch company Galactic Energy sent eight satellites into orbit aboard their Ceres-1 rocket ● Swedish startup Remos Space secured €1M in seed funding to expand their satellite ground station technology to Africa ● StarLab Space is moving toward the production phase of their commercial space station after completing a preliminary design review with NASA ● NASA is looking into different options (crewed vs uncrewed, etc.) for another Starliner test flight with vehicle changes, including a modified propulsion system ● The US restored commercial satellite imagery support to Ukraine after a little less than two weeks ● According to a Space Force official, China has been ‘practicing dogfighting’ in space, as in conducting coordinated maneuvers with ‘synchrony” and ‘control’ ● Fram2, a private Crew Dragon mission, could launch on March 31st and would become the first crewed polar flight ● Chinese commercial space company AZSpace plans to conduct crewed orbital spaceflight tests in 2027 ● Samara Aerospace raised pre-seed funding to conduct an in-space tech demo of their novel spacecraft attitude control system that uses piezoelectric actuators to vibrate PV panels in a circular motion, replacing reaction wheels ● Rocket Lab conducted its fifth and final launch for Kinéis, completing the deployment of the 25 IoT satellite constellation in less than a year. |
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 | Rocket Lab’s Electron lifting off during its fifth and final launch of 25 IoT satellites for Kinéis. |
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¶Etc.- ESA’s Euclid also released initial data from its sky survey. For a sense of scale, this first release, which includes a classification survey of 380,000 galaxies, represents just 0.4% of the number of galaxies expected to be imaged over Euclid’s lifetime.
- The Space Industry Database’s 2025 Satellite and Space event list.
- A video of a sunset on the lunar surface as Blue Ghost Mission 1 ended its 100% successful mission. Here’s the official mission debrief and a final moving message from the craft, which returned 51 GB of science data from its 10 CLPS payloads. Firefly will check back to see if, like SLIM and against the odds, Blue Ghost wakes back up around April 1st.
- Brycetech’s annual launch in review for 2024.
- ‘Can NASA remain nonpartisan when basic spaceflight truths are shredded?’ and ‘Inside Trump and Musk’s Takeover of NASA.’
- An honest take on how weather balloon launch reductions (yet another product of federal budget cuts) will impact weather forecasting.
- A detailed PDF about the history of the Corona program, which is also very much about the history of Silicon Valley.
- A load of interesting charts visualizing existing and planned satellite constellations, by technology and other categories. NewSpace.im currently tracks 420 constellations in various stages of development, launch, or cancellation.
- Mark Litwintschik dug into Satellogic’s open satellite feed and its 10 TB of content, providing detailed instructions on how to explore and use the data. (Lots more Earth observation data available at Microsoft’s Planetary Computer, EOS’s Land Viewer, Earth on AWS, Google Earth Engine, and the USGS’s EROS Archive… for now.)
- ‘Designing space hardware is hard,’ a 35-minute video about a hinge. It’s worth a watch
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