EVSN: Escape Velocity Space News

Let's take a fast-paced journey thru all that's new in space and astronomy, including Mars Perseverance Rover fords an ancient river, black holes sometimes form like baby stars, and this week's tales from the launch pad. We also look in detail at how JWST images reveal star formation in never-before-seen details.

Let's take a quick tour of the latest news, including updates on the Hubble Space Telescopes and single gyro operations, EUCLID's image release, an amazing new image of Io by LBT, and new calculations of Pluto's oceans. We also look in detail at plans to return humans to the moon using Starship by SpaceX and Blue Moon by Blue Origin.

In this episode, we bring you stories on how JWST - Not LIGO and Virgo - spotted the most distant Black Hole merge to date, why the search for life on other worlds gets more challenging the more we look, and we take a deep dive into the things we’re doing that cause and relieve climate change.

In this episode, we’re taking a closer look at Sunspot complex 3664 and the beautiful chaos that it’s been creating. And because we’re in a planetary science kind of mood, we’re also looking at stories related to observing weather on alien worlds, the history of Mars Climate, and even how solar storms might affect that particular Red Planet.

In February, on the closest approach, NASA's Juno spacecraft was within 930 miles of the closest moon Io’s surface. Since then, Juno’s orbit has been shrinking, bringing the mission closer to Jupiter and away from the circling Galilean moons. Io and Juno have parted ways, and Juno is now snuggling down into tighter orbits around her Jupiter.

As scientists discover and explore the atmospheres of more and more planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, we are learning that if you can imagine it, it probably exists. In a new paper discussing the planet WASP-76b, researchers describe what appears to be a giant rainbow in the atmosphere of another world... a circular rainbow... and it's not caused by refracted starlight!

This week’s episode is brought to you by last week’s terrible weather. While experiencing hail and thunder IRL, we also saw press release after press release and article after article discussing climate change. This one-two punch of new science and the need for a new roof means we will touch on climate change in our closer look this week. We apologize in advance; it’s not pretty out there -- unless you like storm chasing, then it’s kind of the stuff of dreams at the moment.

One of our recurring topics is “Planet formation is not well understood,” and a trio of new papers is making it clear why planet formation continues to... not be well understood. Put simply: the universe likes to create more diverse solar systems than an entire planet’s worth of sci-fi writers can imagine.

Earlier in March, Congress voted into place the FY2024 budgets for multiple agencies, including NASA. The agency is being asked for an overall 2% cut. Combined with inflation rates over 3%, we are looking at a fairly significant cut to the U.S. budget for space science. Dr. Pamela Gay breaks down what these cuts will affect, including people and missions, as we move forward with this already stressful fiscal year. (This episode was recorded on March 14, 2024)

As you know, our team loves volcanoes, and since we’ve been focused on Iceland for months, we brought in Dr. Melissa Scruggs (aka VolcanoDoc on Twitch) for a chat about Grindavik and all things volcanic in Iceland.