One launch loss and three new windows of observation
Against the early loss of a Long March 7A, DESI's sky map, Webb's nebula image and PREFIRE's polar measurements show the varied science products accumulated by mature space systems.
Science··Night
Long March 7A broke apart 85 seconds into flight
The state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation launched a Long March 7A from Wenchang in Hainan on 10 August. Reported to be carrying the Zhongxing-4B communications satellite, it broke apart about 85 seconds into flight, before first-stage separation. The company had issued no statement when Space.com published, and no technical finding about the failure had been identified. This was the eighteenth Long March 7A mission since its 2020 debut. The first mission also exploded; China attributed that loss to an engine malfunction shortly after first-stage separation. This time, the vehicle did not reach that point. The roughly 60 m tall 7A can carry 7 tons to geostationary transfer orbit. The standard Long March 7 shares its core stage and carries cargo to Tiangong. Space.com says the next resupply flight is expected in early 2027 and that its schedule could move depending on the investigation. The current report gives the launch time, flight duration and stage reached; it offers no technical finding about the new failure.[1]
DESI surveys put 75 per cent of the sky in a browser
The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team released a two-dimensional colour map containing 5.6 trillion pixels and nearly 4 billion celestial objects. Mostly stars and galaxies, they cover about 75 per cent of the sky in visible and near-infrared light. The Legacy Survey Sky Viewer makes the product explorable in a browser. The map combines 263,407 exposures from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey at Cerro Tololo, the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey at Kitt Peak and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey at Steward Observatory. Observations from NASA's WISE satellite and public datasets were added. More than 160 researchers collected the data, and published papers citing Legacy Surveys data have passed 1,800. The map supports dark-matter and dark-energy work as well as target selection for DESI spectroscopy. The DESI product presents processed, publicly accessible observations gathered by several observatories and a satellite. The Long March report concerns a vehicle lost during launch; the DESI report concerns an observation product released for use. The developments are independent.[2]
Webb separates structure while PREFIRE follows seasonal heat loss
NASA released a new James Webb Space Telescope image of NGC 2392, the planetary nebula nicknamed the Lion. Infrared data from NIRCam and MIRI separate ionised gas from surrounding comet-shaped dust clumps and provide a sharper view than Hubble's visible-light image from 2000. An oxygen-rich white dwarf sits at the centre. NASA says the gas and dust took several thousand years to reach this shape; astronomers estimate that the nebula will disperse in about 10,000 years. No paper accompanied the image. The two PREFIRE cubesats measure far-infrared radiation leaving the Arctic and Antarctic. This band carries close to 60 per cent of the energy Earth sends back to space and had not been tracked globally. Collecting data since July 2024, the pair now cover two complete seasonal cycles at both poles. Webb offers an infrared image of one nebula, PREFIRE a seasonal series of polar heat loss and DESI a wide-field sky map. They are independent observation products. The Long March report adds a separate event in which launch infrastructure failed to deliver its payload to orbit. The shared relationship is that space activity includes both launch vehicles and data products from operating observation systems.[1], [2], [3], [4]
