¶Skyfall? AeroVironment (in partnership with JPL) announced a fun new Mars rotorcraft mission concept last week, which builds on the success of Ingenuity (conops video). The Skyfall mission would target a launch as soon as the 2028 Mars transfer window, with a focus on speed of development and low cost (likely in part due to recent budget chaos). The mission more-or-less carbon-copies Ingenuity six times, sending a small swarm of ~2 kg rotorcraft to the red planet. Unlike Ginny, which was a technology demonstration and carried no dedicated science payloads, the swarm would be equipped with sub-surface radar and better imaging capabilities. The mission’s primary goal is to conduct a subsurface water survey and survey potential landing sites for future human arrival, currently anticipated in the 2030s. One key difference from previous Mars missions is a new descent and deployment sequence, which relies on each of the six helicopters detaching from the entry and descent craft mid-air and making their powered final descent to the Martian surface independently. This saves the mission the substantial cost of a sky crane and/or other complex landing and deployment components. Ginny’s smashing success (72 flights instead of its planned 5), along with the built-in redundancy of six separate rotorcraft, makes this mission relatively low risk. Details are still scarce from AeroVironment, and it’s not clear if this drone MIRV-style concept supersedes the larger Mars Science Helicopter mission concept previously proposed as a follow-up to Ingenuity. |
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 | A half dozen Mars helicopters just before they detach and fly down to the surface. Credit: AeroVironment |
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¶Papers- Normal matter is only 5% of the Universe’s energy budget—dark matter (26%) and dark energy (69%) make up the remainder. However, even within that 5%, when you add up all the stars and galaxies we know about, much is still missing. A new study uses the dispersion of flashes of radio light from fast radio bursts to image diffuse matter between galaxies, finding that the intergalactic medium and filaments of gas and dust in these galactic-scale interstitial spaces account for 76% of the Universe’s normal matter. This finding seemingly solves the ‘missing baryon’ mystery. One of these filaments was also recently imaged using X-ray spectroscopy.
- A vast, dark cloud of molecular hydrogen, named Eos, has been identified 300 light years from our solar system, essentially next door in astronomical terms (paper). The primordial hydrogen molecular cloud is unlikely to form stars, as it is expected to photoevaporate within 6 million years. It sits at the edge of the Local Bubble, a region of supernova-cleared space that our solar system is currently passing through. It is the first cloud identified via far-ultraviolet fluorescence. This one was found using a spectrograph called FIMS-SPEAR on the Korean satellite STSAT-1. If visible to the naked eye, Eos would cover an impressively large area—40x the size of the full Moon.
- A new sea-floor-based neutrino detector spotted a neutrino 20x more energetic than any previously seen. The Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT), while not complete, had enough spherical glass light detectors on the Mediterranean seafloor (at a depth of ~3,500m) in 2023 to detect a muon carrying 60-230 PeV (paper). That muon was likely produced by a neutrino of incredible energy interacting with terrestrial matter as the ghostly particle attempted to pass through the Earth (but not quite making it). The original neutrino’s source is unknown, but it might be the first cosmogenic neutrino, a hypothesized neutrino resulting from ultra-high-energy cosmic rays colliding with background photons, such as those that make up the cosmic microwave background. (Some of the figures in the paper were made with the Makie visualization library, as they share in a showcase.)
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 | “Unfortunately, KM3NeT led to the discovery of the Pauli anglerfish, which emits Cherenkov radiation to prey on neutrino researchers.” XKCD #3053 |
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| ¶News in brief. The ISS celebrated 25 years of continuous habitation ● Europe’s first dedicated carbon dioxide monitoring satellite, MicoCarb, launched aboard a Vega-C ● NASA’s workforce looks to be reduced by at least 20%, as 4,000+ employees have already accepted deferred resignation ● Relatedly, Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, the director of NASA Goddard, which is the largest field center primarily devoted to scientific research and robotic space missions, is set to leave the agency ● Senegal becomes the 56th nation to join the Artemis Accords, and the second nation to join that is also part of China’s ILRS initiative ● Iran conducted a suborbital test with a launch vehicle designed to carry satellites ● After delays due to an FAA power outage, SpaceX launched a pair of smallsats for NASA’s TRACER’s mission to study space weather along, with other smallsats ● According to the Space Foundation, the global space economy grew nearly 8% to $613B in 2024 ● Colorado- and Ohio-based propulsion startup Ursa Major static-fired their 25 cm solid rocket motor for a second time ● Starlink suffered a 2.5 hour widespread outage—the longest since the service opened to consumers 5 years ago—due to the ‘failure of key internal software services’ ● The Trump administration wants to ‘eliminate or expedite’ environmental reviews for launch licenses per a draft executive order ● Russia launched a Soyuz rocket carrying a pair of Ionosfera-M space weather satellites and 18 cubesats ● Vast unveiled their new headquarters in Long Beach, where they will build their commercial space stations to potentially replace the ISS (Andrew was excited to be in attendance!) ● Earth Fire Alliance released the first wildfire images captured by their FireSat Protoflight satellite that can can detect fires as small as 5x5 meters, orders of magnitude more precise than existing public satellites. |
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 | A small roadside fire in Oregon was detected only by FireSat due to its high-precision instrumentation. Credit: Earth Fire Alliance |
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¶Etc.- We wrote about South Korea’s space ambitions last week, but failed to mention that the country’s long-term exploration vision, shared by JASA on July 17th, also mentions the goal of developing a lunar base by 2045.
- SpaceX appears to have recovered Booster 13 from the ocean floor (for some reason).
- Avi Loeb is back again, this time suggesting that Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS could not only be alien technology, but also hostile. 👽☄️
- NASA announced its 2025 Space Apps Challenge, scheduled to take place in early October.
- Meanwhile, Rubin captured the comet 10 days before its discovery, nicely demonstrating the value of persistent observation. Hubble also got in on the fun.
- The book, Interferometry and Synthesis in Radio Astronomy, considered the “Bible” of radio interferometry, is available for free.
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The first rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, 75 years ago on July 24, 1950. It was a Bumper 8 V-2 / WAC Corporal two-stage rocket. This rocket was born out of America’s questionable program that transferred Nazi rocket development talent to the US military. |  |
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