Although it’s commonly suspected that migratory birds fly in a ‘V’ formation due to this saving energy for the birds in the slipstream, understanding the exact aerodynamics behind this and how it affects the way that the birds use their wings to maintain this optimal pattern. After all, unlike airplanes and cars, our feathered avian dinosaur friends need to flap their wings if they want to have any chance of staving off plummeting back to Earth. Recent research by Brown University researchers now have provided a simulated model that answers many questions.
The major question was how this would work in the up- and down-wash zones created in this type of formation, with every bird following the lead bird dealing with the vortices created by the flapping of the wings of the bird before them. These wake vortices are quite complex, and thus required careful modelling to make sense of them.
As described in the paper by [Olivia Pomerenk] et al., the model is based on northern bald ibises, taking into account live-bird measurements for validation of the model. The main effect that can be observed is a reduced flapping amplitude, leading to an 11% energy savings for the birds in the leader’s wake.
The main advantage of having such a model is of course that it provides insight into the kinematic and aerodynamic mechanisms, meaning the ability to model virtual flocks of birds, predict the efficiency of specific in-flight configurations, and apply the lessons to swarms of drones, or whatever else we want to put in the air.
Scientists may have found the first moon outside our Solar System – depending on what astronomers ultimately decide counts as one. Either way, the groundbreaking research, published in Nature this week, promises a path to clearer sightings of so-called exomoons. Kevin Hoy, a PhD student affiliated with Universidad Diego Portales and the European Southern Observatory in Chile, has found an object orbiting a brown dwarf, which in turn orbits a host star, which sits about 73 light-years from the Sun in the southern celestial hemisphere. Brown dwarfs present a problem for astronomers. They fill the gap between gas giant planets – like Jupiter or Saturn – and the smallest stars. They are not massive enough to sustain the hydrogen fusion that powers the Sun and other main-sequence stars, although they can fuse deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. That leaves the object found by Hoy and his collaborators in a definitional gray area. "This is the first time, to our knowledge, this technique has produced evidence of satellites around a companion brown dwarf," the paper said. The first confirmed exoplanets were discovered orbiting a pulsar in 1992, but exomoons have so far proved elusive, despite there being hundreds in our own Solar System. The researchers found that the new object, which for now they are calling an exosatellite, is decidedly unmoon-like, being at least as massive as Jupiter. The brown dwarf it orbits is around 30 times the mass of Jupiter. "This system is somewhat hard to define using Solar-System-based words like 'planet' and 'moon,'" Hoy said in a statement. "The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star, though it orbits an object that orbits a star. Being the third wheel in this system makes us want to call it a moon, even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system." The research team employed the radial velocity method used by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz to discover 51 Pegasi b in 1995, the first exoplanet found orbiting a Sun-like star. The technique detects the gravitational "wobble" induced in a host object – usually a star, but in this case a brown dwarf – by something orbiting it. Modeling of the data indicates that there is at least one orbiting satellite. Models for two satellites are possible but highly unstable. Whether a moon or not, the object has a minimum mass about nine-tenths that of Jupiter and completes an orbit every 170 days. "Although it is uncertain whether this exosatellite will fulfil the presently undefined criteria for qualifying as an exomoon, it is a marked step towards that first uncontroversial detection, as advancing technology will allow the same method to be applied to less massive targets," the paper says. At roughly Jupiter's mass, this is no forest moon of Endor. Finding something more like the moons in our own neighborhood will have to wait for sharper instruments. ®
Microsoft is putting $60 million behind the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a push to use artificial intelligence to speed up scientific research across the government’s 17 national labs.
The company’s investment is split into two pieces: $40 million in Azure cloud computing and AI credits over three years, and $20 million for engineering and deployment help to get DOE researchers actually using the tools, Microsoft said in a blog post Wednesday.
Microsoft is also launching a new internal group called SPARK — Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge — to serve as the single point of contact between the company and DOE on Genesis Mission work. It’s meant to combine Microsoft’s program management, engineering, security and research teams into one coordinated effort, instead of leaving individual labs to navigate Microsoft on their own.
President Trump created the Genesis Mission through an executive order in November 2025, directing DOE to build a unified computing and data platform — since named the American Science and Security Platform — that connects the national labs’ supercomputers, AI tools and scientific datasets.
The order likened the effort’s urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project, and the White House said it’s expanded into a whole-of-government initiative involving more than 15 federal agencies, backed by more than $5 billion in commitments.
Microsoft named four initial projects taking shape under the partnership, including work with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., to speed up the discovery of new energy storage materials — cutting analysis that used to take years down to weeks — and autonomous lab work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory aimed at detecting biological threats earlier.
“We move faster together,” Chris Barry, president of Microsoft’s U.S. Public Sector business, wrote in the blog post announcing the commitment, framing the investment as both a “national security imperative” and economic opportunity for the U.S.
Microsoft isn’t the only Seattle-area cloud giant courting the Genesis Mission. Amazon Web Services was recognized by DOE as a Genesis Mission supporter in December, highlighting its work with Idaho National Laboratory on AI tools for nuclear reactor design, and the company launched its own Genesis Accelerator Initiative in February, offering up to $50 million in cloud credits for DOE-related research over three years.
Google also announced Wednesday that it was committing $40 million of AI tokens and cloud credits for researchers in support of the Genesis Mission.
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
TThe north polar region of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io was captured by NASA’s Juno during the spacecraft’s 57th close pass of the gas giant on Dec. 30, 2023. Data from that flyby and one on Feb. 3, 2024, is helping scientists understand Io’s interior.
Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Gerald Eichstädt
NASA’s Juno mission has provided the first measurements of the temperature below the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io, revealing significant heating within the shallow subsurface of the most volcanically active world in the solar system. Collected during two close flybys, the data also shows that most of Io’s surface is remarkably smooth and composed of material of very low density.
Published Wednesday in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, these findings break new observational ground for both fiery and icy worlds beyond our planet.
Io’s extreme volcanism is powered by tidal heating. The moon is constantly stretched and squeezed by Jupiter’s immense gravity as it travels its slightly elliptical orbit, generating internal heat output many times greater than Earth’s. Until now, virtually everything known about that heat came from infrared observations, which sense only the temperature of the top surface. The latest findings are derived from data collected by the spacecraft’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument.
“The Juno Microwave Radiometer directly observed Io’s heat output by looking below the surface,” said Scott Bolton, study coauthor and Juno’s principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “The surprising discovery that we could see below a rocky moon’s surface has important implications for studying Earth’s volcanoes. Juno has taught us that if we look with an MWR-type instrument near a volcano on Earth, we might see a similar signature in the subsurface temperature gradient, providing new information on how terrestrial volcanoes work.”
This map represents data captured by the Microwave Radiometer instrument aboard NASA’s Juno, indicating heat rising from just beneath the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io. The colors illustrate a distinct temperature gradient across the moon, with the most extreme, localized heat output in red.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/USGS
Fire, ice
Juno’s Microwave Radiometer was designed by Bolton to peer beneath Jupiter’s cloud tops to investigate the dynamics and composition of the gas giant’s deep atmosphere. The MWR’s six microwave antennas serve as a single instrument, simultaneously detecting microwaves at a wide range of wavelengths, from about half an inch to 20 inches (1.3 to 51 centimeters). During the mission’s extended phase, the MWR instrument has provided the opportunity to observe three of the planet’s Galilean moons: Ganymede, Europa, and Io.
“The technique is novel in that each wavelength explores different depths, providing a new way to characterize the deep atmosphere of giant planets and the subsurface crusts of icy and rocky moons,” said Bolton. “At Ganymede and Europa, we explored tens of miles below the surface, assuming their ice shells were mostly pure water, but the ability to probe into the volcanic rock at Io was an unexpected discovery.”
During flybys on Dec. 30, 2023, and Feb. 3, 2024, the solar-powered Juno spacecraft came within about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the moon’s surface.
“The instrument measured Io’s thermal emission at depths ranging from a few inches down to tens of feet. Everywhere we looked, we found the temperature rising by more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit just several feet into the surface — a gradient far steeper than solar heating alone can explain,” said Shannon Brown, the paper’s lead author at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The data suggests two possible explanations. First, heat could be rising steadily through a conductive crust. While this background heat flow — measured at 1 to 3 watts per square meter — is relatively gentle on a local scale (roughly equivalent to a small nightlight glowing under every square yard), across the entire moon it represents a release of energy up to 30 times Earth’s average. Alternatively, the signal could be coming from cooling lava flows, capped by roughly 30 to 35 feet (9 to 11 meters) of solidified crust, that cover about 10% of the moon’s surface at any given time.
“Io provides a unique window into learning how tidal heating works throughout the cosmos, a fundamental process that provides energy and heat to worlds that are far from their parent star,” said Bolton. “This process can not only create the most volcanic body in the solar system, in the case of Io, but also fuels the subsurface oceans on the moons of giant planets, such as Europa and Ganymede. Up until this point we could only observe the heat escaping at the surface or through eruptions. Now we can characterize how the heat is moving from the interior toward the surface.”
This graphic illustrates the areas of Io sampled by the Microwave Radiometer instrument aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft during two close flybys of the Jovian moon.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/USGS
Great plains of Io
Another big insight gained from the two flybys is just how smooth Io is. Prior to the recent findings, the moon was known for its tall mountains, but the MWR indicates that apart from this visible topography, the surface features expansive smooth patches that stretch for 60 miles (100 kilometers) or more. Because Juno flew by overlapping regions of Io at different angles, the team was able to map how the surface reflects microwaves, much like an airline passenger might see the ocean flash with sunlight only at specific angles.
“Away from its mountains, the surface is more like the Great Plains of North America, and even though Io is a rocky body, the surface material has a very low density — more like pumice or a fluffy volcanic ash than solid rock,” said Brown.
More about Juno
A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft. More information about Juno is at:
A photon is a single particle of light, and under normal circumstances, it can't be divided. But a photon is also not a particle, in the sense that it does not have a specific location. Instead, it is an extended object.
So if a photon is only partway through the process of reflecting from a perfect mirror and you yank the mirror away, what happens? The answer, from a trio of Norwegian physicists, turns out (arxiv.org link) to be more complex than I expected.
A photon divided?
Let’s first talk briefly about dividing and combining photons. If this were a common experience in our lives, then shining a single color of light through a piece of glass or reflecting it from a surface might cause photons to divide or combine. This would lead to an amazing array of colors: Our universe would be the most fantastic and legal LSD trip you could imagine. But this doesn't generally happen, hence LSD.
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it spewed molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands of people. It's one of the most famous natural disasters in human history, so naturally there have been countless documentaries about Pompeii (and at least one popular song). But only one features actor Tom Hiddleston taking on the role of a "time detective" to bring the people of Pompeii to vivid life. That would be National Geographic's new three-part docuseries, Pompeii: Out of Time.
The Marvel connection made Out of Time happen. Executive producer Kevin Wright was also a producer on the Disney+ series Loki, which included a scene where Hiddleston's Loki travels through time to visit Pompeii. Hiddleston also studied classics at Cambridge University and had visited the Pompeii archaeological site as a teenager, which the Marvel star attributes to indirectly influencing his career path into acting.
"There is just a passion to the way Tom tells stories that's infectious," Wright told Ars. "We knew that if we could capture that and put it into [the series], it might interest people who wouldn't normally want to watch a documentary about Pompeii. "
Naked mole rats are weird. They spend their lives almost entirely underground, are largely insensitive to some kinds of pain, can persist without oxygen for a long time, rarely develop cancer, and can live past 30 years, which is decades longer than similarly sized rodents. They are also eusocial, like ants, bees, or termites—in a colony that can hold more than a hundred animals, only one female, the queen, breeds.
We didn’t know how exactly naked mole-rat queens stop other females from breeding. For a long time, our leading hypothesis was bullying and violence, but that may be a bit impractical, given their kingdoms are vast networks of tunnels that can stretch for up to three kilometers. But now a team of Lewin Lab scientists at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin discovered it’s actually just one part of a sophisticated olfactory signaling program.
Running on smell
"It's very clear that mole rats actually have quite big noses and smell a lot," says Gary Lewin, a neurobiologist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and senior author of the study. Naked mole rats have around 1200 olfactory receptor genes, more than mice (which have roughly 1,000 of them) and way more than the few hundred in humans. They're also blind. "They have to be able to navigate and move around without vision, so smell is one of those things that’s enhanced," Lewin said.
Scientists used data from the L-band radar aboard the U.S.-India Earth-orbiting NISAR satellite to produce this image of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja, a mountaintop in East Antarctica, poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The image shows Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja at center-left, surrounded by ice fractured with crevasses, which are shown as sharp, green lines. The magenta portions of the image represent more regular surfaces, such as smooth ice.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Scientists used data from the L-band radar aboard the U.S.-India Earth-orbiting NISAR satellite to produce this image of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja, a mountaintop in East Antarctica, poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The image shows Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja at center-left, surrounded by ice fractured with crevasses, which are shown as sharp, green lines. The magenta portions of the image represent more regular surfaces, such as smooth ice.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Main
Figure A
NISAR’s L-Band Radar Reveals ‘Hummingbird’ in Antarctica
Scientists used data from the L-band radar aboard the U.S.-India Earth-orbiting NISAR satellite to produce this image of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja, a mountaintop in East Antarctica, poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean. The annotations point out the sharp green lines that indicate ice fractured with crevasses. Magenta represents more regular surfaces, such as smooth ice. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
As of July 20, the public can access data from the two powerful radar instruments aboard the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite. Teams in the United States and India will release files processed from the satellite’s L-band and S-band radars on an ongoing basis, helping researchers and other users track the movement of Earth’s land and ice masses, monitor changes in ecosystems like forests and wetlands, and respond to natural hazards such as landslides and earthquakes.
The release comes as NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) prepare to celebrate the first anniversary of NISAR’s July 30, 2025, launch from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre. Since that time, the mission engineering and science teams have been busy calibrating instrumentation, refining algorithms, and monitoring nearly all the planet’s land- and ice-covered surfaces twice every 12 days. Along the way, the team has captured scenes from around the globe — urban street grids, agricultural fields, landslides, earthquakes, and sinking land in Mexico City.
An early image released Tuesday revealed the fractured, barren surface of an Antarctic landscape in stark detail. In a merging of science and serendipity, it also resembles something else entirely: a hummingbird.
Despite its otherworldly quality, the Antarctic image shows a very real geographical feature called Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja, a mountaintop in East Antarctica, poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean. As the moving glacier passes the obstruction, the mountain’s topography causes stresses in the ice, heavily fracturing the surrounding surfaces with deep cracks, called crevasses, which show as sharp green lines in the image.
“First, it’s a beautiful image, with rich details of features that provide insights to how the glacier is moving. Then, because radar can often see through snow and deep into the ice, NISAR can observe fundamentally different properties of Antarctic ice than can be seen in optical imagery,” said Seongsu Jeong, the signal analysis engineer who produced the image at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “With NISAR we’re seeing what’s hidden beneath the surface.”
Story in magenta, green
Generated with measurements that NISAR’s L-band instrument gathered in August 2025, as U.S. and Indian mission teams tested the satellite’s systems, the “hummingbird” exemplifies one of the young mission’s hallmarks: intricately detailed imagery that is both informative and eye-catching.
The colors show differences in the way polarized microwave signals, which vibrate in different directions, interact with and reflect from the ice. Over Antarctica, NISAR transmits radar waves toward Earth with a horizontal polarization. The orientation of the signals that return — either horizontal, vertical, or both — provide clues about the object or surface that reflected them.
Signals that come back with a horizontal polarization likely bounced off a more regular surface, such as smooth ice. Those signals appear magenta in the image. Signals that return with vertical polarization may have refracted as they partially penetrated the snow and ice or scattered at different angles as they reflected off irregular surfaces, such as the faces of crevasses. Called volume scattering, these observations are displayed in green.
The white represents areas in which magenta and green signals scatter back strongly, a possible indication that there is an equal blend of surface and volume scattering.
The same scene viewed in optical light is almost entirely white with ice and snow. Slight shadows and rippling indicate the presence of the mountaintop, and textures in the surrounding area suggest the ice is not completely smooth.
An image from the Landsat 9 satellite shows Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja on Nov. 2, 2025. Because microwaves can penetrate frozen surfaces, signals from NISAR’s L-band radar captured more detail of the structure of the surrounding icescape than is visible in this optical image.
USGS
Access to data
The NISAR satellite is the first free-flying space mission to feature two radar instruments: an L-band system and an S-band system. The systems are complementary due to their differing wavelengths. For example, the longer-wave L-band can pass through tree canopies, imaging the ground beneath. Meanwhile, depending on leaf sizes, S-band can collect observations of those canopies.
The Indian science team, based at ISRO’s Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, recently started releasing S-band data via the Bhoonidhi portal.
On July 20, the U.S. side of the mission started releasing calibrated products continuously for all L-band measurements collected since June 17. By the end of the year, the team expects to have released all data acquired earlier during science operations. The NISAR project science team previously had two limited releases of L-band data, the first in January of about 25 sample products and a release in February of thousands of pre-calibrated products.
The NISAR mission’s science data output is vast, on the order of dozens of terabytes a day, due to the satellite’s frequent coverage of nearly all the land and ice surfaces on Earth. It scans from within a few degrees of the South Pole in Antarctica to 77.5 degrees north latitude, above the Arctic Circle.
More about NISAR
Managed by Caltech, JPL leads the U.S. component of the project and provided the satellite’s L-band SAR and antenna reflector. The spacecraft bus and its S-band SAR were provided by ISRO.
The NISAR satellite is the first to carry two SAR instruments at different wavelengths, collecting data using the spacecraft’s giant drum-shaped reflector, which measures 39 feet (12 meters) wide — the largest radar antenna reflector NASA has sent into space.
It has been half a century since NASA landed on Mars with the Viking 1 lander. Viking 1, one of a pair of Viking spacecraft, landed on Mars on July 20, 1976. Launched on August 20, 1975, Viking 1 arrived in orbit around Mars on June 19, 1976. The Viking program is, when adjusted for inflation, one of the most expensive robotic missions ever attempted by NASA. The spacecraft consisted of an orbiter, which was eventually shut down on August 7 as its attitude control gas was depleted, and a lander, which became the longest-lived component of the Viking program (and even then, it was only human error that did it in). The original plan had called for a landing on Mars on July 4, 1976, to coincide with the US Bicentennial, but a look at the potential landing site made managers postpone the descent to July 20 – the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing – and a safer destination. The lander was equipped with an ablative heat shield to withstand atmospheric entry. Parachutes slowed the lander as it descended, and retro-rockets fired just above the surface to ensure the three-legged Viking lander reached Martian soil without incident. Viking 1 landed on Mars' Chryse Planitia. It performed the first sampling of Martian soil using its robotic arm and an onboard biological laboratory. While the official word from NASA is that no definitive signs of life were found, debate has continued over the decades that… perhaps… there was something else in the data from the robots. NASA's take was that the "experiments discovered unexpected and enigmatic chemical activity in the Martian soil, but provided no clear evidence for the presence of living microorganisms in soil near the landing sites." Findings from onboard experiments aside, the lander was also equipped with cameras capable of snapping breathtaking vistas of the surface, as well as antennas for communicating with the Viking 1 orbiter, which acted as a relay, and directly with Earth. Crucially, the lander was also powered by a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG), which uses the heat from the decay of plutonium-238 fuel to generate electricity. This played an important role in keeping the Viking 1 lander running past its 90-day prime mission all the way to when it made its final transmission on November 11, 1982. The mission might have gone on longer if it had not been for a mistake made when engineers were devising ways [PDF] of prolonging the life of the lander's batteries. In January 1982, three of Viking 1's four nickel-cadmium batteries were showing signs of wear. Engineers attempted deep-discharge battery conditioning to bring things closer to where they had been at the start of the mission, but the results were only partially successful (with benefits being very temporary). So, a different approach was tried. Rather than discharge the batteries for a specific time, engineers would have Viking 1 go for a known voltage. There would be a reduction in the frequency and duration of battery charging. Engineers reckoned the plan would prolong the life of the batteries and, on November 19, 1982, the changes for the battery charging sequence were uploaded… and… silence. The expected downlink from Viking 1 did not appear, and on November 20, a spacecraft emergency was declared. It transpired that the new battery charging sequence had been written to memory locations occupied by the lander's high-gain antenna pointing parameters. As a result, the antenna was no longer pointing at Earth. The next four months were spent trying to contact the lander, but to no avail. In March 1983, the Viking Lander Monitor Mission (VLMM) was terminated. Still, that was all in the future when Viking 1 landed half a century ago. Viking 1 wasn't the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on Mars – that prize goes to the Soviet Union's Mars 3 lander in 1971 (although transmissions ended 20 seconds after landing compared to the years of operation for Viking 1), but it produced spectacular imagery and a trove of science data and, coming just seven years after the first crewed lunar landing, was a triumph for the US space agency. ®
Michigan has been at the epicenter of the wildfire smoke and explosive diarrhea outbreaks. The progressive Democrat talks to WIRED about how he would tackle the forces behind them if he’s elected.
Although life tends to find a way, something first has to kickstart said lifeforms. Exactly how the first biological cells formed on Earth – and potentially on other worlds – remains an enduring mystery. Some theories point to the early Earth’s surface conditions as a viable laboratory for the self-assembly of the first viable membranes, RNA, DNA and associated molecular machinery, while seeding of the Earth’s primitive atmosphere by sugars and other precursors from asteroids and kin is required in other theories.
Recently [Izaskun Jiménez-Serra] et al. added to this debate with the reported detection of four-carbon sugars in the form of erythrulose in the interstellar medium. Using the 40 meter radio telescope at Yebes and the 30 meter radio telescope at Granada the signatures of this sugar was detected in a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way.
These sugars likely form on these interstellar dust grains from more basic two-carbon aldehydes and alcohols, with them providing conceivably a source of energy for early metabolic processes of developing lifeforms. This specific type of sugar is highly prevalent in Earth’s fruits, and thus its prevalence in interstellar space is at the very least an interesting coincidence, if not another puzzle piece in the overarching question of abiogenesis.
It seems as though $5.6 billion wasn't enough. That was the news from the US Space Force on Friday, when military officials announced they were tripling the maximum value of one of the service's National Security Space Launch contracts to $17 billion.
The expansion of the Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 contract comes as the Pentagon signals rising demand for military satellite launches. The NSSL program is set up to allow Space Systems Command, which oversees the Space Force's launch program, to select from a pool of launch providers for individual missions to deliver the military's satellites to orbit.
The NSSL program has two parts. Lane 1 covers the Space Force's more risk-tolerant missions, such as medium-lift launches with experimental payloads or rideshare missions carrying satellites for the Pentagon's surveillance or data relay constellations. Lane 2 includes higher-priority strategic missions, like the government's largest and most expensive spy satellites, or radiation-hardened communications satellites designed to survive a nuclear war.
It seems as though $5.6 billion wasn't enough. That was the news from the US Space Force on Friday, when military officials announced they were tripling the maximum value of one of the service's National Security Space Launch contracts to $17 billion.
The expansion of the Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 contract comes as the Pentagon signals rising demand for military satellite launches. The NSSL program is set up to allow Space Systems Command, which oversees the Space Force's launch program, to select from a pool of launch providers for individual missions to deliver the military's satellites to orbit.
The NSSL program has two parts. Lane 1 covers the Space Force's more risk-tolerant missions, such as medium-lift launches with experimental payloads or rideshare missions carrying satellites for the Pentagon's surveillance or data relay constellations. Lane 2 includes higher-priority strategic missions, like the government's largest and most expensive spy satellites, or radiation-hardened communications satellites designed to survive a nuclear war.
The latest estimates reveal that the majority of greenhouse gas emissions from large-scale events such as the FIFA World Cup stem from spectators traveling to host cities.
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