We learned today that the slender billed curlew is confirmed extinct 😓. In honour of all curlews, we present the Whimbrel. Closely related to the Eurasian curlew, but smaller and maybe less threatened. These big, beautiful shorebirds roam widely and are long-lived, but disappearing from our world🪶🦉

Wow, our observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS with ExoMars TGO turned out better than expected! I have seen the dot observed with perseverance, and the weak signal in our spectrometer data, but the tracking and coma from CaSSIS are sure to impress! 🔬🧪 #planetsci www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

Years in the making, a new paper details organic molecules in Enceladus' plumes that were collected by Cassini when it flew through them! This keeps the icy moons at the forefront of interest and high priority targets!! Can't wait for Juice! 🔭🧪 #planetsci doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Red eyed dove, anyone? 🪶🦉

As summer ends and I contemplate a cozy morning of coffee, thick wool jumpers, and catching up on some photo editing..... Nothing like getting back into the birds of the Western Cape to remind us of sunshine!! These are blue cranes! Rare and huge, but found in the farmland of the Overberg region. 🪶🦉

Ethiopian beer in Oxford at Lula's #beersky #bskybeer

Lord Huron at the Apollo, London

Welcome, Ctrl Alt Deleaf! www.bbc.com/news/article...

Fun! EPSC press office covered my poster from #EPSCDPS #EPSC2025!! www.europlanet.org/epsc-dps2025...

Fabrizio Oliva. This is my co-author!!!🤘🤘🤘 #EPSCDPS #EPSC2025 !!🤘Neurosphere🤘!!

Colin Wilson, our ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter project scientist at @esa.int showing off Mars Express, TGO, and LightShip updates. First TGO science story was our chlorine work!! Over 11 publications and counting!! #EPSCDPS #EPSC2025 #planetsci #Mars 🔭🧪

Bethan Gregory showing off her hard work getting reactions on dust and ice surfaces for the chemistry of chlorine and ozone into the Planetary Climate Model!! #EPSCDPS #EPSC2025 #planetsci #Mars 🔭🧪

Daniel Mège going over the HCl detections I made in the Martian atmosphere in the non-dusty times with hypotheses about surface seeps from a dormant volcano!!! 🌋 These are strange, found 'em every year, same place! #EPSCDPS #EPSC2025 #planetsci #Mars 🔭🧪

Frank Montmessin giving a big overview of the very long lived and very successful SPICAM instrument on Mars Express. That's over twenty years of data!!! #EPSCDPS #EPSC2025 #planetsci

@mhairireid.bsky.social and I put together an article for @theconversation.com about yesterday's @nature.com paper on the detection of a 600 km radius solid core in the interior of #Mars! 🧪🔭 #planetsci Early InSight results didn't quite have the sensitivity for this! doi.org/10.64628/AB....

The new mission patch for Jeremy Hansen's Artemis II mission that will fly around the moon! 🔭🧪 The animals designed by Anishinaabe artist Henry Guimond represent seven sacred teachings www.supercluster.com/editorial/ca...

At last! The Southern double-collared sunbird from South Africa!!! The male is colourful, while the female is grey (last photo). The yellow pectoral tufts come out for presenting!! 🪶🦉 #bird #birding #SouthAfrica

Another #Oxfordpubreview. A punt up to the Victoria Arms is a dream, no matter the weather. The food is great and they serve Butcombe Breeding ale. The battered sausage is a work of art!

Huge congratulations to Dr Mhairi Reid @mhairireid.bsky.social for passing her viva! Monumental achievement! Special thanks to her examiners Luke Parry and Daniel Ksepka!

@aresluna.org I just read your article about the Gorton engraving fonts and have a historical question. (Absolutely loved it) aresluna.org/the-hardest-... You trace earlier origins to the lens maker Taylor, Taylor & Hobson, 1894. 🧵(Question in reply)

Brilliant history, typography needing, travel story, and photo essay all in one! What a journey!

@bsky.app In the UK, to protect kids from porn, instead of blocking adult content, @bsky.app have disabled chat features entirely! Only problem is that their age verification doesn't work! I do have a real face!

The Canadian Lunar Rover doesn't have a name yet, but it has a ride! Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Mission 4! The rover will carry an instrument called LAFORGE with hardware from the @ox.ac.uk @oxfordphysics.bsky.social Space Instrumentation Lab!! 🧪🔭 #planetsci www.nasa.gov/news-release...

@oxfordcitycouncil.bsky.social The State of things. Can't get home.

@astromeganne.bsky.social teaching us all about the importance of the moon and the Lunar Gateway at @jesusoxford.bsky.social. dropped by the library after to check out Newton's Principia! 🔭🧪 #planetsci

The Space Store's Oxford Summer Space & AI Course wrapped up today with student presentations about a Martian mission plan (with budgets, launches, and instruments!!). @astromeganne.bsky.social and I gave presentations about the Moon and Mars and gave the students feedback. Blown away by them! 🔭🧪

The interstellar comet 3I-Atlas trajectory. We'll take a look with the cameras on ExoMars TGO!! 🧪🔭 #planetsci

Well, it's official, HiRIME is in a phase A study to be the high-res camera on ESA's next mission to Mars: Spotlight. Based on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's very successful HiRISE, it will be led by our colleagues at @openuniversity.bsky.social 🧪🔭 #planetsci www.open.ac.uk/blogs/news/s...

Day at the @sciencemuseum.org.uk 🧪! A Cray-1 supercomputer! Extremely successful and an iconic design, these were sold for a decade starting in 1975! There's a Cray-2 at the @museeartsetmetiers.bsky.social in Paris that blew me away the first time I saw it!

Day the at the @sciencemuseum.org.uk!! This is the W1 or WU engine from the Gloster E.28/39, an experimental British plane (only built 2!) that first flew in 1941. It is the first jet aircraft to fly outside Germany and third overall! 🧪

Lab tours! From the @ox.ac.uk @oxfordphysics.bsky.social Microstructure Detector Facility, building hardware for @cern.bsky.social , or Space Instrumentation Labs, building hardware for @esa.int 🔭🧪

#bskybeer #beersky, Vienna edition 🍻

We did a thing! ESA LightShip AO responses were due today! Let's go BEBOP! #planetsci #Mars 🔭🧪

New from me and the great @hana-kiros.bsky.social reporting on the devastation caused by the USAID cuts Musk championed, Musk’s troubling obsession with “western civilization” and which lives he believes are worth saving (it’s not kids in South Sudan)

Yeah, breaking into a military base was going to have consequences, but this: "the threshold of terrorism will have been lowered from plotting to plant bombs or take hostages to daubing aircraft or chaining oneself to doors" is dangerous for all who voice disent www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I know the feeling, it's so well trained in how to respond when called out on bullshit. It's not just literature, I gave copilot, grok, and chatgtp a labeled triangle and asked to solve a side. All confidently gave completely wrong answers and then told me they were proud of me for calling them out🙄

After the failure of the iscale HAKUTO-R M2 lander yesterday, here is an updated table of lunar landing missions in the 21st century. Of 16 robotic missions, only 6 have succeeded in landing and completing their missions on the moon, 4 of them are from the Chinese Space Agency. #Space #PlanetSci

The next sunbird is the malachite!! Our local resident in Hermanus was pretty young, still molting a little! #birds #wildlife 🪶🦉

New #Mars #climate paper from Gabriella Gilli at @iaacsic.bsky.social about water loss on Mars. Their model shows that millions of years ago when Mars' poles was tilted more towards the Sun, atmosphere was lost to space more easily! In @natastron.nature.com 🧪🔭 #planetsci doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Strong disagree with Brian Owens, @scibri.com, writing for @nature.com There is no silver lining. An "opportunity to attract talented US researchers"? There already aren't enough positions. This terrifies us. The job pressure this creates is the "funeral for our careers"🧪🔭 doi.org/10.1038/d415...

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to throttle the scientific ambitions of #NASA, prematurely ending a host of active missions in orbit studying Earth and other planets, while also ending the agency’s work to develop their successors. scim.ag/4kmAX7n

Well, this makes me nervous: “It is essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda" Isaacman probably criticised the budget he was just shown. 🔭 #NASA #planetsci www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Here's NASA astrophysics, if I read the president's proposed budget correctly. 🔭

The NASA planetary science fleet chart if the president’s budget is enacted.

The Presidents Budget Request for NASA is out. It’s a bloodbath Canceled are DAVINCI, VERITAS, Juno, OSIRIS-APEX, US participation in ExoMars and EnVision… Huge cut to R&A. No funding to begin development of the Uranus Orbiter. If you’ve ever cared about NASA, time to contact congress.

Finally, the moment you've all been waiting for, it's #sunbird time! Colourful, shiny, beautiful, hovering over flowers, perfect examples of convergent evolution! We start with the orange-breasted, shot in the Fernkloof Nature Reserve 🪶🦉 #birds #wildlife #Southafrica

NASA forgot to link the paper 😂 Here it is. Argon densities vs solar electric fields, with a case study from a coronal mass ejection event, and lots is modeling. Very neat stuff!! 🧪🔭 #planetsci doi.org/10.1126/scia...

🔭🧪 Ever wondered what it’s like to study the atmosphere of Mars? Or how we detect molecules that could point to life on other planets? Read on about our upcoming summer course: 🧵 #planetsci

Now back to our big list of South African birds! This is a rock kestrel that came to chill next to the path along the sea that I was strolling along, really not bothered by me! In Hermanus, April! Cropped hard for the detail!!🪶🦉 Falco rupicolos #SouthAfrica #birds #wildlife #birdsofAfrica

Bethan Gregory, @oxfordphysics.bsky.social, presenting the PCM updates she's been working on to the M-MATISSE international workshop. These include new ozone and hydrogen chloride reactions, and heterogeneous reactions on dust and ice surfaces for both! #Mars #ExoMars 🔭 #planetsci