The (anticlimactic) first private moon landing 🌝

The ups and downs of the first private moon landing

Late last week, Houston-based Intuitive Machines teamed up with NASA to launch Odysseus, the world’s first commercial moon landing spacecraft. The mission also marked the first U.S. spacecraft to reach the moon in over 50 years 🌝

As you might have heard, things didn’t go according to plan. 

🌚 Although the launch was successful, Odysseus pitched over while touching down on the moon’s south pole. It came in too fast and landed about a mile from its intended target.

🌚 Some of the antennas ended up pointing down, cutting off Odyssesus’s ability to send communications back home. The solar panels were also impacted, shortening the craft’s operation abilities from one week to 20 hours.

🌚 Flight controllers have been using the limited time to gather images and data. 

But there is still some good news: Odysseus has ventured further south than any other vehicle to land on the moon 👏

Intuitive Machines still has a contract with NASA for future moon landings. Homer’s Odysseus wasn’t known for his navigation skills, so fingers crossed they choose a less prophetic name for the next mission 🤞

Meet the brightest object in the universe ✨

The most luminous object on record was observed last week: Quasar J0529-4351, a celestial body so far away, it took over 12 billion years for its light to reach us ⭐

Quasars are centers of active galaxies powered by a supermassive black hole. We’ve come across them before, so what makes Quasar J0529-4351 so special?

✨ With a mass of 17 billion suns, this quasar is also the fastest-growing black hole known to date. 

✨ The quasar consumes more than one sun per day.

✨ The quasar’s light comes from a disc measuring over seven lightyears in diameter. That’s 15,000 times the distance between the Sun and Neptune.

✨ The quasar emits so much energy, it’s over 500 trillion times more luminous than our sun.

✨ Although we only just now noticed it due to its distance, it’s been within our line of sight this whole time. 

Cheers to Quasar J0529-4351 – we’re honored to have you in view 👏

The ‘Russia is trying to put nuclear weapons in space’ elephant in the room

A flurry of headlines hit the news cycle last week about Russia’s potential attempt to launch nuclear weapons into space. Here’s what you should know:

🚀 Remember when some congressmen were warning of a vague ‘national security threat’ earlier this year? This is what they were talking about.

🚀 The US government recently told allies that Russia could launch an ‘anti-satellite nuclear weapon’ sometime this year, confirming the legitimacy of the headlines. 

🚀 However, the Russian government says it doesn’t plan to plan to deploy nuclear weapons in space per se. Instead, the spacecraft would target other countries’ communication satellites with a ‘massive energy wave,’ not people on Earth. 

We’re not sure if that makes us feel any better, but we’ll take what we can get 🤷

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