¶NASA details cuts required to support Trump’s FY26 budget; Jared Isaacman is out. Trump’s proposed budget would cut NASA by 47% in 2026, fire 5,000 people, and force the cancellation of dozens of science missions (pdf), including Earth science missions (terminating OCO-2 and -3, Terra, Aqua, and Aura which are actively functioning in orbit, and under development missions in the AOS and SBG programs), every Venus mission, and abandon cheap extended missions such as Juno, Mars Odyssey, Maven, Mars Express, OSIRIS-APEX, and New Horizons (even as it offers a truly unique vantage point to produce new science about our solar system). The Dragonfly and Roman Space Telescope missions appear to survive, albeit at lower levels of funding. This budget puts NASA at pre-1961 levels of funding, canceling 41 in-development and active NASA science efforts, about a third of the Agency’s entire science portfolio. Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society estimates that $12B of previous NASA spending will be lost due to the decision, about twice what would be returned through the cuts. And, Jared Isaacman is also apparently out as a nominee to lead NASA, perhaps due to his association with Musk (who may be falling out of favor) or his previous donations to Democrats (he also donated to Trump), and because, as administrator, he might have stood up for the Agency’s civilian/science mission. Isaacman was widely well-regarded and supported by much of NASA’s astronaut corps. The White House said, “It’s essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda.” (Meanwhile, many space industry experts worry that massive cuts to NASA will likely cede American leadership in space to China.) If you disagree with this direction for America, please write to your Congressperson. |
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¶Papers- A future mission to Uranus could study its icy moons, including potentially detecting subsurface oceans, using passive radio sounding with the planet Uranus itself as the radio source (paper). Kilometric radiation is long-wavelength radio cyclotron radio emissions from electrons orbiting planetary magnetic field lines, and is seen on Earth, Jupiter, Uranus, and other planets. Passive sounding has been demonstrated experimentally on Earth, detecting radio emissions from the Sun reflecting off the ocean, sand, and even water beneath 1 km of ice in Greenland.
- Neutrinos oscillate between flavors (and thus have mass, experimental proof of which won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics). Because the rate of these oscillations is affected by the density of matter that a neutrino passes through (the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein effect), mapping the flavors of neutrinos coming from the Sun can tell us something about its internal structure and density distributions (paper), letting us begin to create a picture of our star’s guts.
- WR 104, aka the "Pinwheel Star", is a binary star system and a supernova candidate. The spectacular pinwheel effect, from stellar-wind-generated dust, was assumed to show the spin axis of the system, and it appears to be pointed more or less directly at Earth. If one of the stars goes supernova, there would be some chance that the resulting axis-aligned gamma-ray burst (GRB) could come our way. This would be bad. Fortunately, recent spectroscopic measurements by Keck found that the rotational plane is actually tilted 30-40 degrees away from Earth (paper). (Another recent paper suggests that two of Earth’s five largest mass extinction events—the Late Devonian and the Late Ordovician—may have been caused by supernovae.)
- Models based on the orbits of Jupiter’s tiny moons Amalthea and Thebe and conservation of angular momentum suggest that the giant planet used to be even more giant: at formation, it may have been twice its current size and with a magnetic field 50X stronger (paper). Note that Jupiter’s mass likely hasn’t changed much; what changed was its rate of rotation and its temperature, which determines the density of the gas portion of a gas giant, and thus its size.
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 | “Juno mission data suggests that Jupiter actually contains Matryoshka doll-style nested copies of every other planet in the Solar System.” XKCD #3083 |
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| ¶News in brief. Psyche switched to its backup fuel line after previously detecting a pressure drop in the primary line and will begin firing its electric thrusters again to stay on course to reach the asteroid Psyche in 2029 ● ispace may make its second private lunar landing attempt tomorrow (live stream) ● Firefly Aerospace added the UAE’s Rashid 2 rover – nearly identical to the first Rashid rover lost in ispace Japan's 2023 lunar lander crash – to its Blue Ghost mission to the Moon’s far side ● Tianwen-2 (c.f Issue 320) launched successfully to gather samples from Earth’s quasi-satellite 469219 Kamoʻoalewa ● Rocket Lab acquired Arizona-based electro-optical and IR sensor company Geost for $275M ● Chinese commercial satellite manufacturer MinoSpace secured $110M to build a remote sensing satellite constellation for Sichuan Province ● Bulgarian startup EnduroSat raised $48.8M to scale production of their Gen3 ESPA-class satellites ● SpaceX launched the eighth GPS III satellite, and the Space Force ordered two more from Lockheed Martin for $509.7M ● Northrop Grumman invested $50M into Firefly Aerospace to advance production of Eclipse, the companies’ co-developed medium launch vehicle ● Blue Origin sent six people to suborbital space on their 12th crewed New Shepard flight ● Spanish EO analytics platform company Xoople raised €115M ● Saudi Arabian startup SARsatX raised $2.6M for SAR analytics ● Chinese rocket maker Sepoch conducted the first vertical liftoff and splashdown landing of their Hiker-1 demonstration vehicle ● Karman Space & Defense acquired energetic propulsion provider Industrial Solid Propulsion (ISP) for $60M ● Taiwan wants to launch its first home-built rocket capable of carrying a 200-kilogram satellite into orbit by 2034 ● Astrobotic’s Xodiac VTOL test hopper (originally built by Masten Space Systems) crashed last week in the Mojave—it had flown 175 successful missions—a larger successor, Xogdor, is in the works ● Korean startup Unastella completed a test launch of a small suborbital rocket powered by a 5-ton-class engine, becoming the first private company to independently launch a space vehicle from South Korean soil. |
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 | Unastella’s Express No. 1 test rocket launching from Goheung, Jeollanam-do, marking the first time that a private company has succeeded in launching a rocket in Korea on its own. |
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Hubble captured Jovian auroras in far-ultraviolet, revealing interactions hundreds of times more energetic than those on Earth. At Jupiter, high-energy particles from the Sun, combined with those thrown out by Io’s volcanoes, are entrained by the giant planet’s powerful magnetic field and funneled into a collision course with gas in the planet’s atmosphere near the poles, creating auroras. In parallel to Hubble’s imaging, Juno is studying the solar wind around Jupiter. (At least until it gets cancelled.) |  |
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