Ha! It looks like Avi Loeb silently edited his Medium post about the Perseverance Navcam images, after being called out for his wrong interpretation. While he previously claimed the image was of 3I/Atlas, he now says the claim came from "social media". 🔭

It is bonkers that whether or not your mission is still alive is totally dependent on whether a mission PI was able to get to some house member to tell some 20 year old staffer to put a line item, single sentence in a house budget request that will never actually end up passing. This is just insane.

We need to talk about Russell Vought – But Properly Why certain mainstream outlets insist on sanitizing Vought as a devout “small government” conservative – and what actually animates his war against pluralistic democracy. Some thoughts from my new piece: 🧵

I was able to read an embargoed version of this yesterday. It is pretty amazing what this team was able to do. They tracked these dust devils to estimate the background wind and wind shear. Models look to underestimate this. I was quoted in this @cnn.com article about it.

More CaSSIS coolness! The correct link is in the thread, but here it is as well: www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

Standards are low, but despite Sharpiegate and the troubling ways (see UCS blog below) Jacobs contorts himself into not crossing the admin (which is how Isaacman failed his NASA confirmation), Jacobs is the best person we can hope to run NOAA. Perfect is the enemy of the good for the next 3 years.

We made a similar argument in Nature on research funding: "[G]rant-receiving institutions and the communities that they serve need assurance that funds allocated by Congress will be spent." Impoundment subverts the law. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The world's premier space agency isn't exempt from the U.S. government shutdown. "You can't just sit in your lab and think that this doesn't impact you, because it's very clear now that it does,” says one planetary scientist. 🏛️ ❌ Read more in @skyandtelescope.bsky.social: tinyurl.com/26e5h4d2 #nasa

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...

I want to point out another insane thing. He names to his executive board his favorite cuckoo MAGA House Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, the Rep who proposed adding Trump to Mt. Rushmore and said "Congress has seen proof of 'interdimensional beings.'" Great company and judgement there, Avi.

Just going to say that it is hurtful when a systematic study effort by the global small-body community, with many of the campaigns led by women, with results being pushed to free open-source arXiv & data repos for scicomm as quickly as possible, is described as lacking coordination/communication

This is complete and utter pompous bullshit. It's telling that of the people proposing it wants to anoint themselves director general when every one of his claims of having discovered technosignature interstellar objects has been debunked by the planetary community. arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01405

If anyone is wondering why I'm being pissy about Loeb, it's his latest BS on arXiv. He proposed a coordinated study of interstellar objects. Great, actually. But he wants $380M, adopts the classification scale he named after himself (Yes, he calls it the Loeb scale), and control over telescopes.

Did Perseverance see 3I/Atlas? Yes, maybe. Is Avi Loeb using this as an opportunity to falsely impugn actual science in an effort to blow smoke up his own ass? Yes, undoubtedly. Basically nothing Loeb has been in the news for in the last 5 years has proven correct. Stop falling for his grift.

To any (mutual) space journos, I'm happy to answer a few questions about the 3I/Atlas images from Perseverance in the hope we can debunk some of the misinformation that is going around currently.

The effort put into understanding 3I/Atlas has been spectacular, imaginative, professional and well-organized. Planetary scientists don't need Avi Loeb put in charge of an international directorate to tell them how to do their jobs.

No Avi, that Perseverance Navcam picture you posted isn't showing 3I/Atlas, it's just Phobos, the brighter one of Mars' moons. If you were even half the expert you think you are, this possibility should have been quite obvious and worth mentioning.

Today is our Save NASA Science Day of Action! You can take actions online to support the nearly 300 registered participants on the ground with me here in the D.C. planetary.org/dayofaction

Last night, NASA's Perseverance rover looked up at the night sky once more, to capture interstellar #comet 3I/Atlas flying by the red planet. The distance was "only" 0.2 AU or 30 Mio km, far closer than the comet ever got to Earth. 🔭 #3IAtlas Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Simeon Schmauß

As a theoretical cosmologist, I'm frequently asked "what is the benefit of the work you're doing for people's lives?" Nothing I work on makes money or cures disease. There are a few different answers one can give, at various levels of "convincing" / "actually relevant to why the work is done." 1/🧵

Everyone should listen to Chris Murphy's extraordinary warning about Trump on our pod. First, he says the logic must be that the more lawless he gets, the stiffer the resistance. "If I give in and consent to these kinds of tactics then it just normalizes it all." 1/ newrepublic.com/article/2013...

This is why elevating a "Rogan of the left" is asinine. You can't indoctrinate people into self-awareness; it's oxymoronic. We don't need to idolize any one leader. Any individual is never going to be immune to our basest drives as anyone else. Trying to pick some one to follow is a doomed strategy.

It is getting so pedantic applying to these open TT calls that are clearly for a specific subfield, but they're open so they can brag to the Provost about how many applicants they got or they can pat themselves on the back for ostentatious diversity outreach while not actually doing anything.

My take on the nifty PH3 detection in a brown dwarf is quoted here. Still a mystery why we haven't found PH3 in more mainstream brown dwarfs. cen.acs.org/physical-che...

This photo from the Perseverance rover captured in early March, may be my favorite Mars image from this year. It shows Mars' smaller moon Deimos over the hills of the Nili Planum region in the dark skies before dawn. 🔭 Full res: flic.kr/p/2rwUwV7 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Simeon Schmauß

Last night, NASA's Perseverance rover attempted to photograph the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas from the surface of Mars. A first look at the image sequence shows some stars in the constellation Hercules where 3I/Atlas is currently located. 🔭

Shout out to @donmoyn.bsky.social for his part in this article: US government faces brain drain as 154,000 federal workers exit this week - www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

One of the reasons I'm wavering on if I want to run against the unopposed GOP CT rep I have in 2026 is that I take trolls too personally. I don't think I have the stomach for politics. Is the only way to get over this just to expose myself to it more?

👏 stop 👏 requiring 👏 recommendation letters 👏 in 👏 the 👏 first 👏 round 👏 of 👏 academic 👏 job 👏 applications

Our military takes climate change seriously because generals care about factual guidance to ensure troop safety rather than political dogma. It matters to ship safety if storms are stronger or if bases are in danger of flooding. It's good strategy to anticipate future wars due to water scarcity.

Even if you knew that Russ Vought was a bad dude with a very specific plan, and you knew the contents of that plan (which is a pretty high level of policy literacy), don't kid yourself that you knew exactly what was going to happen. *Vought* did not know that. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/u...

🍩 What if climate looked like a donut? 🌍 Here’s a bunch of cities turned into a sweet dataviz experiment. 🟡 → comfy zone 🔴 → hot 🔵 → cold Why a donut? Let me explain 👇

We should shout Fuck Trump to every ICE goon we see. If insulting dear leader is all it takes in their fascist peanut heads to justify trying to run someone down, we have to give them too many targets to go after. This is insane.

ICE attempted and failed to disappear a food delivery guy. It needed to be scored.

Sobering and damning report from Sen. Cantwell on what Vought is doing to NASA by illegally implementing the PBR. "The Destruction of NASA's Mission" Glad that some in Congress are finally listening. Stop the impoundment or shut down the government. There can be no middle ground.

"...we're going to see an astronaut death within a few years." -NASA whistleblower

For 26 but especially 2028 it's time for Democrats to make clear that the current Supreme Court will have to be reformed (expanded in number, reformed in structure) to allow popular govt to continue in the United States. Not so much a litmus test as precondition for any other promise to be credible.

video www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyU5...

listen, pay me 5 figures to give a talk at Heritage, and then we'll talk

Even though I get no money for the service, I organize seminars. At Harvard, we gave $500 for flight, hotel, everything. At Yale, we give Climate speakers...$0. You pay to talk to us. It's a source of contention. Just because a university has money does not mean the little people have money.

Excellent piece on the way Connecticut utilities drove one of the nation's best utility regulators out of office through a campaign of slander, lawfare, & intimidation. If the clean energy world were organized worth a flying fuck, it would have made this a high-profile national fight.

🔭 It's paper day! Today I'm sharing the latest in a series of papers looking at the weather on other worlds, in this case bringing you the weather report from a nearby T-dwarf, SIMP-0136. 🪐 🧵 to follow...

The end result of this faux, above-it-all editorializing is that rather than appearing unbiased all that ends up being conveyed is that the reporters at CNN are too stupid to understand percentages.

I read what you read. And see the growing need for New faces and New voices. In Virginia's 1st Congressional District in '26, let's get science and data back in the House and put it to work To lower costs, simplify healthcare, get our freedoms back, and act on climate. Join us: seanforva.com

However crappy you thought DOGE was/is, it was worse. Excellent reporting by WIRED.

As far as I can tell, the NASA workforce will still be gutted and assets squandered in the event of a CR or shutdown. It is of course hard to know anything for sure right now. But Duffy's last public statement was that the PBR is the budget guidance. Congress didn't act. And Vought wants to RIF.

If @ametsoc.org or @nwas.org ever gave out a "Graphic of the Year" award, it should go to Jay Cordeira, displaying the synoptics behind the Predecessor Rainfall Event before #Helene It's an amazing graphic and displays our double whammy of 'rain and then more rain.'

Just published the **Mission Spending Tracker**, which analyzes and compares *monthly* expenditures for threatened NASA science missions. A great way to check for premature spending impacts on missions proposed for termination: www.planetary.org/mission-spen...

It's amazing how well the oil companies have sold the carbon footprint nonsense. I was talking with one of the EPS faculty back when Yale was refusing to divest its endowment, and they regurgitated fossil fuel company personal responsibility BS as more important than divestment. Yeesh.