This pops up EVERY TIME I click on an Elsevier paper and the only thing stopping me from tossing my laptop into the Grand Canyon about this is the knowledge that the Grand Canyon doesn't want my laptop either

the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky

The Planetary Society and members of the Save NASA Science coalition have released a statement congratulating Jared Isaacman on his re-nomination for NASA Administrator: www.planetary.org/press-releas...

The night sky will be really interesting this month. Following unusually high solar flare and aurora activity this week, you can look forward to the Starlink meteor shower. (Did you know that we often name meteor showers after the constellations from which they appear to originate?)

US science is under assault like never before, but in response the scientific community can build an alliance for independent science--that can fill gaps left by the decimation of Federal science and reimagine the role of science in policy and society. 🧵 blog.ucs.org/genna-reed/u...

This is why we need new tools like Science Explorer (SciX) more than ever before. Purpose built. Intentionally curated. And mostly isolated from the forces that drive enshittification. SciX just left beta! Unfortunately, NASA has already cut off its funding before it has a chance to thrive.

Solar beats coal now, purely on physics, without subsidies. People find this hard to believe, including me! It takes 5-10+ years to build a coal or nuclear plant. But just 2-3 years to build a solar plant. We still need a lot of batteries to spread the wealth through the night, but they are coming.

#PPOD: NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera system to shoot video of Phobos, one of Mars’ two moons, eclipsing the Sun. It’s the most zoomed-in, highest-frame-rate observation of a Phobos solar eclipse ever taken from the Martian surface. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI 🧪 🔭

Last week, one of the worst plane crashes in American history occurred a few miles from my home. People died. Debris and ash fell in my neighborhood. It felt like just one more disaster in a blur of disasters. I needed to write down what I experienced so that I don't forget. Might as well share. 🧵

In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes. The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last. The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes. Why? It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.

Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory plans to cut nearly all its research funding and reduce the number of paid science staff to just two positions next year.

Last week, one of the worst plane crashes in American history occurred a few miles from my home. People died. Debris and ash fell in my neighborhood. It felt like just one more disaster in a blur of disasters. I needed to write down what I experienced so that I don't forget. Might as well share. 🧵

Many at NASA and CLPS providers appear to believe that all a scientist cares about is putting a box into orbit or onto the surface of the Moon. The "service" is mere geometry. Few high impact experiments work this way. The bus and science instruments must work as a coordinated, purpose-built system.

Thoughts from Aravind Ravichandran as NASA (again) flirts with moving Earth observation to commercial data buys: “Here is an underappreciated irony: commercial EO companies already depend on NASA's public infrastructure.” newsletter.terrawatchspace.com/why-science-...

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

The Moon is not useful military high ground and never will be.

The agency has already been irreparably damaged, capacity and culture destroyed, decades worth of experience shown the door. "NASA" is the strongest name brand in the world, a metonymy for our highest ideals as humans. It is being bulldozed by people who don't understand (or care) what we're losing.

“Tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded NASA property and laboratories are at risk of either being discarded, mishandled, or out-of-commission for significant time periods.” 🔭🧪 www.gesta-goddard.org/blog/gestas-...

Today in class I bemoaned how humans don't live long enough to properly see how massive stars vary, since the pulsation timescales are so long. ... except the Wonderful star, Mira, which has left us mass loss record over tens of thousands of years, stretched over lightyears. AMAZING🔭🧪U

In 2017, author and programmer Leonard Richardson wrote a zine called "Tool Safety" about what he learned from writing Beautiful Soup, one of the most impactful Python libraries ever. I think often about "the best use of the power we have as computer programmers." www.crummy.com/software/Bea...

I'm very excited to announce `usaspending-orm` a new Python library to ease access to data from the USASpending API. Available now on PyPI and GitHub. Repo link in thread.

This is an ASCII art diagram of the Galileo spacecraft found in the archived data documentation.

Ozempic, MRI machines and flat screen televisions all emerged out of fundamental research decades earlier — the very types of study being slashed by the US government go.nature.com/47hn0n5

We are not required to entertain "data centers in space" as a serious idea, just because the people proposing it have access to a lot of money. It is an unserious idea, with no business case, except as VC hype train Mad Libs. Deserving of no more attention than the ramblings of a stoned undergrad.

Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.

Companies that are developing large AI models are incentivized to pollute the public commons with AI slop. This poisons the available training data for newcomers and biases future models. Their (relatively cleaner) internal training sets are a competitive moat. This is the point of Grokipedia.

It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become aware of his pursuers.

A personal reflection on the destructive erosion of ethics, norms and respect for law at NASA: 🧪🔭 🧵

Unlike SpaceX, I have worked on projects that successfully operated spacecraft on other planets. I think that Starship HLS is a stupid idea, poorly conceived, will never work as promised, unlikely to ever work at all, and very likely to kill astronauts. Nobody is paying me to say this.

When someone in the past has done a calculation like: "X encryption will take Y billion years of wall time to break, which won't happen for 100 years." ... Did they factor in the possibility that humanity would turn itself into a paperclip demon except it's data centers? Asking for everyone.

Post a game you remember playing that no one else remembers.

Interesting #astromethods paper came out recently that looks at whether or not large language models can replicate astrophysics papers. The answer: No. 🔭☄️ They had a ~20% replication score, even with quite a lot of help. And this was just replicating papers - not doing anything new...

The Kentucky Oath of Office is 50% about not participating in duels with deadly weapons.

The U.S. and global economy currently relies critically on Python. E.g., most "AI" would not exist without Python and open source. PSF has just 14 staff and a budget of only $5M. That they were forced to choose between support for supply chain security and the values that got us here is insane.

Any new entrant to provide a human lunar landing system for Artemis would have to pull off a successful development effort within 5 years — a feat last accomplished for crewed spacecraft by project Gemini in 1965:

Yesterday, Duffy referred to "a shared commitment to peaceful [...] exploration [...] when others seek to weaponize [space]." Does Duffy know about Golden Dome? It's the space weapons project with TWICE the TOTAL annual budget of NASA. One project! That could easily cost TRILLIONS of $ by the end.

Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels

Do you ever see a really niche business pop up and you're like "I wonder how that could ever be profitable." Then they close in a year, or you find out it's subsidized by a rich uncle as charity or something, because your gut instinct was correct. This is how I experience much of the space industry.

Nature cannot be fooled.

Good morning. Starlink has now launched more than TEN THOUSAND satellites into orbit. Nearly 1400 have already been burned up in the atmosphere so far. Here's a "lovely" image from my Kuiper Belt discovery program with dozens of satellite streaks in a 3 hour […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Installing the entire calibration pipeline for the most complicated telescope ever built requires typing <20 characters into a command line! The combined effort of thousands makes this possible, including the incredible work of people at @python.org and @mast-news.bsky.social. Fund NASA science!

Planetary Rings xkcd.com/3156/

This sight is far more offensive to me and to America than burning any flag.

I would like to know what it means to be "opening that contract up." I know what it means to open a bid process up. I know what it means to issue new contracts. Does it mean that they will let BO and others compete for the Starship HLS milestones? That doesn't even make sense for most architectures.

The vibe (to me) at NASA and NASA-adjacent events has been that people are extremely worried about Starship HLS. But nobody is willing to state that plainly on the record, because the whole program (and thousands of jobs) hinges on that single point of failure. Destin said a lot of it.

As in this article, I see a lot of variants of "these systems will eventually succeed and transform exploration" with zero justification for that absolutely unqualified optimism.

Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States -- you and me -- have our magnificent Constitution. Here's how that works out in a specific case --

While working on another project, I ran across this time series of radio frequency interference (RFI) detected by NASA's Surface Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) radiometer. What most immediately stands out to me is that you can clearly see wars after ~2020. salinity.oceansciences.org/smap-radiome...

Any spreadsheet-like table should contain data in one and only one orientation. The "column" in one part of the table must never be a "row" in another. If a change in orientation is required, create a new table.

Excellent piece from the Planetary Society highlighting some of the human stories of NASA's workforce losses: www.planetary.org/articles/400...