Ship 40 waits for inspection off Christmas Island after a 24-day tow
Starship upper stage Ship 40 reached Christmas Island 24 days after an intact splashdown on 24 July. Inspecting heat tiles on a flown article goes beyond telemetry and debris.
Science··Night
Ship 40 waits for inspection off Christmas Island
SpaceX said on 18 August that Ship 40, the 52 metre upper stage flown on Starship Flight 13, now floats off Christmas Island and that engineers are on their way to inspect it. Ship 40 came down intact in the Indian Ocean on 24 July and was towed for 24 days through worsening seas. Christmas Island lies about 1,900 kilometre northwest of Broome in Western Australia. Earlier upper stages were expected to break up after toppling into the water, and Ship 39 did exactly that on the previous flight, so no vehicle that had flown to space had ever come back whole. SpaceX had said on 7 August that the recovery team faced challenging conditions and that the tow might fail. Inspecting heat tiles, hydraulics and aerodynamic surfaces on a flown article is new information for a programme that has so far learned mostly from telemetry and debris.[1]
The SkyFall fabric antenna survived stress equal to 200 landings
The SkyFall mission plans three helicopters carrying ground-penetrating radar to look for shallow water ice on Mars, and JPL has now finished prototype testing of a flexible fabric antenna that works between 500 and 2,500 megahertz and survived stress equal to 200 landings without losing signal. Adrian Tang and Christine Gebara describe a Vivaldi antenna built from metallised fabric, polyester, the Vectran used in landing airbags, fibreglass tape springs and a magnesium mount; it is about 1.5 times the length of the helicopter's legs and folds to keep 15 centimetres of ground clearance in flight. The radar is meant to read the top 5 metres of soil, where any accessible ice for future crews would sit. Testing so far covers temperature cycling and electromagnetic checks on a prototype; an engineering model still has to face vibration tests and the Mars Yard at JPL, with launch planned for late 2028.[2]
Zooglider photographed phytoplankton chains longer than 10 millimetres
Imaging them in place in the Mediterranean Sea, the Zooglider found phytoplankton chains longer than 10 millimetres, Scripps researchers report in Limnology and Oceanography Letters. Nets and sample bottles tear these colonies apart, so their real size stayed unknown. The glider carries a camera, a sonar and a hydrophone and drifts through the water column rather than being towed, which is what keeps the fragile chains whole long enough to be seen. Mark Ohman's group and Karine Leblanc of the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography argue that colonies this large are probably common in other oceans and were missed because the sampling method destroyed them. Size matters for the carbon budget: bigger particles sink faster, so a systematic underestimate of chain length also biases how much carbon the surface ocean is thought to export downward.[3]
