NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

February 17, 2025

SpaceX Rocket Launch Plume over California

What's happened to the sky? Last Monday, the photogenic launch plume from a SpaceX rocket launch created quite a spectacle over parts of southern California and Arizona. Looking at times like a giant space fish, the impressive rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, California, was so bright because it was backlit by the setting Sun. The Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered to low Earth orbit 23 Starlink communications satellites. The plume from the first stage is seen on the right, while the soaring upper stage rocket is seen at the apex of the plume toward the left. Venus appears at the top of the frame, while a bright streetlight shines on the far right. The featured image was captured toward the west after sunset from near Phoenix, Arizona.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

RFK posts wild pic of him with lizard — flanked by Russell Brand and shirtless Dr. Oz

Feb. 16, 2025, 5:05 p.m. ET

This is wild.

New Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a picture of himself Sunday grinning while holding up a lizard next to scandal-scarred actor Russell Brand and a shirtless 64-year-old Dr. Mehmet Oz.

“Northern Curly Tailed Lizard with Russel Brand & Dr Oz,” Kennedy, 71, wrote next to the image.

The Northern Curly Tailed Lizard is native to Cuba, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas but was later brought to Palm Beach Florida in the 1940s.

Kennedy had just been sworn in as HHS secretary on Thursday.

President Trump also has tapped Oz, who he previously backed in the TV doctor’s unsuccessful 2022 Senate bid, to serve as the administrator for the national Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Brand, 49, a comedian and actor who starred in the flick remake of “Arthur,” has been accused of multiple sex crimes although he has not been charged in any of them and has denied the allegations.

At one point, he had been an activist for many progressive causes and praised Kennedy during his 2024 independent bid for the presidency. Brand later pushed his followers to back Trump.

Kennedy has long cultivated a reputation for his escapades with wildlife.

https://nypost.com/2025/02/16/us-news/rfk-posts-wild-pic-with-lizard-russell-brand-and-dr-oz/

https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1891173187464908901

U-M Department of Astronomy prepares its first NASA mission

February 17, 2025 at 6:38 AM EST

The University of Michigan Department of Astronomy is scheduled to launch its first space mission with a $10 million grant from NASA.

The STarlight Acquisition and Reflection toward Interferometry, or STARI, mission will showcase a new technique for finding and studying exoplanets to search for signs of life.

The mission is expected to be launched in 2029.

Project leader, U-M professor of Astronomy John Monnier, says it should make the study of planets out of our solar system less expensive.

“Interferometry is a method of combining telescopes that are hundreds of meters apart to get the power of a very, very large telescope, which, as you know, larger in astronomy is better you can get much sharper images of the sky.”

Monnier says it’s hoped it can be used to find more Earth-like exoplanets and try to detect oxygen in their atmospheres, which is believed to be a sign life may exist.

https://www.wemu.org/wemu-news/2025-02-17/u-m-department-of-astronomy-prepares-its-first-nasa-mission

William Ray Lucas, ex-director of NASA center that shouldered much of the blame of Challenger explosion, dead at 102

Feb. 15, 2025, 5:54 p.m. ET

William Ray Lucas, who led the NASA facility that shouldered much of the blame for the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, has died. Lucas was 102.

Lucas died Monday at his home in Huntsville, Alabama, according to an obituary published Friday by Laughlin Service Funeral Home in Huntsville.

A funeral service has been set for March 1 on what would have been his 103rd birthday, funeral director Bryan Peek said Saturday.

Lucas was director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville when the Challenger exploded on Jan. 28, 1986, just 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

It was the deadliest US space flight disaster at that time.

The explosion killed all seven crew members, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, who had been tapped to become the first US civilian to travel to space.

Her inclusion on the flight meant thousands of schoolchildren across the country were watching the Challenger’s launch and witnessed the televised disaster in real time.

A presidential commission charged with investigating the cause of the explosion pointed to the shuttle’s solid-fuel booster rockets as the likely culprit and criticized NASA managers for not taking safety concerns surrounding the rockets more seriously.

The Marshall center had supervised development of the rockets.

Lucas pushed back on the criticism, telling reporters a month after the explosion that it was too soon to pinpoint the cause of the explosion, adding, “I think it was a sound decision to launch.”

But within months he had resigned, just days ahead of the release of a commission report blaming faulty design of the booster rockets.

The explosion and resulting shakeup within NASA overshadowed what was an otherwise stellar career for Lucas, who was born and raised in rural western Tennessee and graduated from high school in 1939 as the class valedictorian.

He earned a bachelor of science degree from Memphis State College, served in the US Navy during World War II and later earned a doctorate in metallurgy from Vanderbilt University.

Lucas began his career in the guided missile development division of the US Army’s Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville.

He became a charter member of the Marshall Space Flight Center when it was established in 1960 before rising through the ranks to become its director in 1974.

https://nypost.com/2025/02/15/us-news/william-ray-lucas-ex-director-of-nasa-center-that-shouldered-much-of-the-blame-of-challenger-explosion-dead-at-102/

Hungary’s 4iG and Axiom Space Explore Collaboration in the Space Industry

17.02.2025

Hungarian space and defence technology company 4iG S&D has entered into a strategic agreement with Axiom Space, Inc, a US-based leader in commercial spaceflight and infrastructure development.

The non-binding letter of intent, announced on Monday, outlines a collaboration to explore joint opportunities in the space industry, with a particular focus on orbital data centre (ODC) services.

According to the official statement, the two companies will establish a joint working group to identify and develop areas of cooperation, leveraging their respective strengths in space technology.

Axiom Space, headquartered in Houston, is at the forefront of commercial spaceflight and infrastructure development.

The company is currently constructing the world’s first private space station, aiming to redefine human access to low Earth orbit.

Axiom Space provides advanced solutions for microgravity research, specializing in space-based data networks, storage, and processing.

The Hungarian astronaut programme, HUNOR, is already partnered with Axiom Space, further reinforcing the growing cooperation between the US space sector and Hungarian enterprises.

As a subsidiary of the 4iG Group, 4iG S&D consolidates the company’s space and defence industry interests, with ambitions to expand into global markets.

Its focus areas include satellite development, manufacturing, and operations, as well as satellite-based services, drone production, drone defence systems, and digital defence solutions.

One of the company’s key initiatives is the HUSAT programme, which represents Central and Eastern Europe’s first private satellite project.

The programme aims to deploy a satellite constellation consisting of one geostationary and eight low Earth orbit Earth observation satellites by 2032.

This initiative underscores Hungary’s growing ambitions in space technology and satellite-based services.

Beyond its advancements in space technology, the 4iG Group has reported record-breaking revenue for the first nine months of 2024.

The company’s consolidated net revenue, based on International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), grew by 20.54 per cent to 507.8 billion forints.

Meanwhile, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) increased by 15.11 per cent, reaching 169.8 billion forints.

The agreement with Axiom Space highlights Hungary’s expanding presence in the international space sector.

With its increasing investments in satellite technology, orbital data services, and space infrastructure, 4iG S&D is positioning itself as a key player in the rapidly evolving space economy.

This collaboration marks an important step for Hungary’s space industry, offering opportunities for technological advancements and strengthening ties with leading space enterprises such as Axiom Space.

https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/4ig-hungary-axiom-space-collaboration/

>>22599230

https://www.biospace.com/drug-development/psychedelics-space-regroups-as-rfk-jr-signals-support

https://psychedelicalpha.com/data/psychedelic-drug-development-tracker

Psychedelics Space Regroups as RFK Jr. Signals Support

February 17, 2025

After the rejection of Lykos Therapeutics’ MDMA-based PTSD treatment tempered excitement for psychedelic therapeutics, a recent approval and positive data are generating new momentum, which experts expect to continue throughout 2025 and 2026.

Last summer’s FDA rejection of Lykos Therapeutics’ MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder was a demoralizing blow for the psychedelics space but the sector is seeing a resurgence in 2025 with promising new data, an adjacent approval and a possible assist from newly confirmed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Last month, Johnson & Johnson’s esketamine nasal spray Spravato secured the first FDA approval as a monotherapy for treatment-resistant depression (TRD).

Although the drug, a derivative of ketamine, is not considered by J&J to be a true psychedelic, it represents the only psychedelics-based drug on the market, having originally been approved in 2019 for TRD in conjunction with an oral antidepressant.

Spravato’s “continued sales acceleration . . . supports the notion psychedelics can become commercially viable for mental health,” Jefferies analysts wrote in a note following the approval.

Adding to this optimism are positive mid-stage results from GH Research and atai Life Sciences in TRD and alcohol use disorder (AUD), respectively, for their 5-MeO-DMT candidates.

With more key readouts on the horizon this year and next, biotech analysts and leaders are eager to see progress for psychedelic therapies in the wake of Lykos’ rejection and other challenges that preceded it.

“I think there’s a lot of pent-up excitement,” Doug Drysdale, CEO of Cybin, told BioSpace.

“Folks that are close to the space and the work are excited about the results we’re seeing, and I don’t think that it’s broadly appreciated yet just how life-changing these things can be.”

FDA Landscape and RFK Support

The psychedelics space has followed a bit of a boom-and-bust cycle, according to Nick Kadysh, CEO of PharmAla Biotech and board chair at Psychedelics Canada.

“I think that there was a huge boom about three, four years ago now where, really and truly, there was probably too much investment, like way too much investment,” he told BioSpace.

This led to a wave of bankruptcies, including MindCure Health, which shut down in 2022, and Field Trip Health, which collapsed the following year.

The failure of these companies “left a sour taste in many investors about the [psychedelics] sector,” Kadysh said.

Hans Eriksson, chief medical officer at HMNC Brain Health, echoed this sentiment. “I think we are in a situation where much of the initial hype around psychedelics has subsided.”

He cited the “Lykos disappointment,” which left some psychedelic drug developers reassessing their pipelines and prioritizing non-MDMA assets.

“I don’t think that the FDA did anybody any favors last year,” Kadysh agreed. The agency helped the company to design its clinical trials, he said, only to then reject the therapy and request an additional Phase III clinical trial.

“To say that you designed the clinical trial improperly when the regulator was sort of riding side saddle with you the whole time, that I think is inappropriate.”

But the sector could be undergoing a bit of a reset, with the number of companies in Phase III having tripled to six since last June, when just two investigational products were at this stage.

“I think we are at sort of a waiting post right now,” Eriksson told BioSpace.

But data readouts are starting to roll out and 2025 is off to a good start already. At the end of January, atai-supported Beckley Psytech reported that 50% of participants treated with BPL-003 abstained from alcohol for at least three months.

Meanwhile, in a Phase IIb trial, patients treated with GH’s asset GH001 saw a significant reduction in depression symptoms.

The treatment elicited a 77.8% remission rate at six months for those who completed the open-label extension segment of the trial.

1/2

>>22599802

“I think there will be a new momentum again,” Eriksson said.

Adding to this optimism, psychedelic drug developers could now have an ally at the FDA in RFK Jr, who was confirmed as Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary last week.

He has previously signaled support for the sector, in the past accusing the FDA of “suppressing” treatments like psychedelic drugs, along with stem cell therapies, Pharmaphorum reported.

“It’s always good to have a bit of a champion,” Drysdale said. “I’m not sure how much influence he’ll have over FDA, but at least he should provide a bit of a tailwind for us.”

‘A New Momentum’

The majority of the psychedelics pipeline consists of drugs targeting neuropsychiatric indications, including depression, anxiety and PTSD.

This has been another lag for the space, Kadysh said, as “people realized that getting regulatory approval for psychiatric disorders is really, really hard.”

Overall, he said, “The Western world does not have a great track record of bringing new psychiatric drugs on the market. The last major sort of revolution in psychiatric pharmacology was Prozac.

That’s a very, very long time ago.” Prozac was first approved by the FDA to treat depression in 1987.

In addition to the readouts already put out by atai and GH, upcoming data for Compass Pathways’ psilocybin treatment COMP360 in TRD is one to watch in 2025, Jefferies analysts wrote to investors.

Compass is expecting topline data from a pivotal Phase III trial in TRD in the second quarter of this year, with data from a second Phase III TRD trial in the second half of 2026.

Meanwhile, both Cybin and HMNC Brain Health are also moving forward in the clinic. Cybin is expecting topline efficacy data from a Phase II trial of its deuterated dimethyltryptamine (DMT) treatment for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), CYB004, in the second quarter of this year.

Phase III data from CYB003, a deuterated psilocybin treatment that led to major depressive disorder (MDD) remission rates of 71% after a year of treatment in a Phase II last year, are expected in mid-2026, Drysdale said.

In a Feb. 13 investor note, H.C. Wainwright analysts wrote that they expect a “positive outcome” from the GAD trial, adding that the drug, if approved, has “blockbuster potential.”

For its part, HMNC is currently designing the Phase III program for its ketamine-based drug, KET01, for TRD.

“We hope to be able to bring to the market a ketamine-based medication that has a vastly improved tolerability profile,” compared to current ketamine-based antidepressants like Spravato or intravenous ketamine used off label, Eriksson said.

Elsewhere, MindMed is developing MM120 in Phase III trials for both MDD and GAD, with data expected from both programs in 2026, according to a company spokesperson.

While the results of these trials remain to be seen, Drysdale indicated that the industry may be on the cusp of the next neuropsychiatric revolution.

“[CYB003] is an intervention where we can come in and rapidly remove someone’s depression within a day or so for the majority of patients and then have the majority of them have some benefit a year later,” he said.

“That’s, I think, the biggest breakthrough in psychiatric pharmacology in 40 years.”

2/2

Watch the sun erupt in new images from NOAA's weather satellite

February 17, 2025

A space-based telescope has captured new images of the sun that showcase one of our star's fiery outbursts.

The fresh visuals come courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which recently shared visuals captured by a telescope onboard its GOES-19 weather satellite.

The team captured a coronal mass ejection (CME), which is a massive burst of charged particles and magnetic fields, erupting from the sun's far side, near its north pole.

Sometimes, these storms are directed toward Earth, such as last summer when a remarkable cluster of solar storms hit our planet and sparked stunning auroras across the globe.

Such geomagnetic storms are the costliest type of space weather events, according to NOAA, as they can cause widespread disruption to satellites, navigation systems like GPS and electrical power grids.

Coincidentally, also visible in the new images is the planet Mercury, appearing as a tiny speck of light gliding closer to the sun.

Launched into Earth's orbit last June, GOES-19 is the newest addition to NOAA's fleet, equipped with a sensor called the Compact Coronagraph, or CCOR-1, visible as the dark blue circle blocking the brightest of light from the sun.

It is specifically engineered to monitor solar activity, and chiefly keeps an eye on the sun's corona — the outermost layer of its atmosphere — to help scientists forecast space weather that could affect Earth.

The CCOR-1 instrument began observing the corona in September of last year, and is "the first near real time operational coronagraph that we have access to," Rob Steenburgh, who is a space scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, previously told Space.com.

CCOR-1 images the sun once every 15 minutes, providing uninterrupted coverage of the corona, according to NOAA.

Scientists now don't have to wait for data to be downloaded, meaning they can save up to four to eight hours of time when compared to the efficiency of older instruments.

"That's a huge leap for us because up until now, we've always depended on a research coronagraph instrument on a spacecraft that was launched quite a long time ago," Steenburgh said.

"Every hour counts when you're dealing with CMEs."

https://www.space.com/the-universe/sun/watch-the-sun-erupt-in-new-images-from-noaas-weather-satellitehttps://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/new-preliminary-coronagraph-images-goes-19

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/new-preliminary-coronagraph-images-goes-19

https://www.spaceweather.com/

Astronomers realize mysterious TV signal in their data bounced off an airplane

February 17, 2025

The sky is awash with radio-frequency interference (RFI), but thanks to two astronomers who tracked down a stray TV broadcast reflected off a passing airplane, there may be a new way to wipe out some of the rogue signals that plague our radio telescopes.

"Astronomy is facing an existential crisis," said Jonathan Pober of Brown University, Rhode Island, USA, in a statement.

Satellites, for instance, crowd the sky. The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs counted 11,330 satellites in Earth orbit as of June 2023, and many more have been launched since then.

Most of these satellites are designed to relay various communications over radio wavelengths. This has presented the astronomy community with a problem.

"There is growing concern — and even some reports — that astronomers may soon be unable to carry out high-quality radio observations as we know it, due to interference from satellite constellations," said Pober.

The issue is especially relevant for telescopes such as the Murchison Wide-field Array (MWA) in western Australia, on which Pober is the U.S. science lead.

The MWA consists of 4,096 antennas designed to detect low-frequency radio waves between 70 and 300 MHz that carry information from the universe's epoch of reionization, when the first stars and galaxies were forming.

Because the MWA observes the entire sky all at once, however, "there's no way to point our telescopes away from satellites," said Pober.

Because of the randomness of RFI and the difficulty in tracking such signals back to their sources, modeling the interference so that it can be filtered out has turned out to be a next-to-impossible task.

Typically, datasets contaminated with RFI are simply thrown out — but that leads to a lot of data being lost.

However, the case of a stray television signal has given astronomers hope that there may be a way to save some of that data.

The MWA sits inside a 186-mile-wide (300-kilometer-wide) radio quiet zone, yet the telescope has consistently been picking up television broadcasts that shouldn't be transmitted in the quiet zone.

The origin of these broadcasts had been a puzzle. "It then hit us," said Pober. "We said, 'I bet the signal is reflecting off an airplane.'"

Teaming up with Ph.D. student Jade Ducharme, also from Brown University, Pober set about proving the airplane hypothesis.

To do so, they combined two techniques for tracking down the origin of RFI — using "near-field corrections" that involves focusing the radio telescope on nearby interference-producing objects, and "beamforming" that essentially allows the telescope to sharpen its focus on a desired object.

Through a combination of these two techniques, Pober and Ducharme were able to track a television signal back to an airplane traveling at 38,400 feet (11.7 kilometers) in altitude and at a velocity of 492 mile per hour (792 kilometers per hour).

They even found that the television signal was on the frequency band used by Australian digital TV channel 7. This signal was being broadcast somewhere outside the radio quiet zone and being reflected off the hull of the airplane.

Identifying the source of the RFI opens the door to the interference being modeled so that its pattern can be recognized and ultimately filtered out, keeping the data usable to astronomers.

"This is a key step toward making it possible to subtract human-made interference from the data," said Pober.

"By accurately identifying and removing only the sources of interference, astronomers can preserve more of their observations, reduce frustrating data loss and increase the chances of making important discoveries."

Tracking the source of the RFI back to a passing airplane was just the first step, however.

The next step is to learn how to remove similar signals from the astronomical data — then, after that, the goal is to expand the technique to not just identify and remove television signals bouncing off airplanes, but also to remove signals from satellites overhead too. However, given the huge numbers of satellites, that is a much heftier task.

Nevertheless, in Pober's view it is a task signal refinement is going to be essential if radio astronomy is to survive.

"We have no choice but to invest in better data analysis techniques to identify and remove human-generated interference," he said.

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/tech/astronomers-realize-mysterious-tv-signal-in-their-data-bounced-off-an-airplane

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/publications-of-the-astronomical-society-of-australia/article/altitude-estimation-of-radio-frequency-interference-sources-via-interferometric-nearfield-corrections/FFBE40FB0C2AB27485F41AA90C7705FA