Update: So far there are no confirmed observations of the rocket stage hitting the Moon, but one possible detection of the impact plume from Paranal Observatory in Chile. 🧪 www.bbc.com/news/live/cr...

SpaceX rocket expected to have crashed into Moon - live updates

The stray upper stage (section) of the Falcon 9 rocket is about the size of a five-storey building, with a mass of at least 4,000kg.

bbc.com

Corey S. Powell@coreyspowell.bsky.social · 16h ago

At 2:35am EDT tonight, a Falcon 9 rocket upper stage will hit the Moon. The impact will occur just over the lunar limb, out of sight from Earth, but there's a chance the debris plume will be visible. We should be able to image the crater later. 🔭🧪 www.projectpluto.com/25010d.htm#v...

On August 5, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is predicted to crash onto the Moon. What has crashed on the Moon before? The very first human object to touch the Moon - Luna 2 in 1959. A probe, 3 bombs, and a rocket body! 🧪 🔭

1959: Luna 2 (USSR)

YouTube video by International Astronautical Federation

m.youtube.com

At 2:35am EDT tonight, a Falcon 9 rocket upper stage will hit the Moon. The impact will occur just over the lunar limb, out of sight from Earth, but there's a chance the debris plume will be visible. We should be able to image the crater later. 🔭🧪 www.projectpluto.com/25010d.htm#v...

When and how did Earth get its oxygen? The answer used to seem simple...but the more we learn, the more complicated it looks. The path to breathable air may have been twisted by shifting continents & runaway glaciers. 🧪🔭 www.science.org/content/arti...

Bluesky seems to be having another growth spurt. Anyone else seeing it?

The inner moons of Neptune look like they were turned inside out, with deep-interior minerals spattered across their surfaces. Probably these moons are the shattered remains of earlier satellites that were shredded when a Pluto-like object came barreling in. 🧪🔭 www.caltech.edu/about/news/n...

Legend has it that the Pythagoreans murdered the man who discovered that the diagonal of a unit square is an irrational number, upsetting their mathematical philosophy.

Thony Christie @rmathematicus.bsky.social · 6d ago

Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 390–c. 340 BCE) and the Method of Exhaustion #histsci thonyc.wordpress.com/2026/07/30/t...

The mission to rescue the Swift Observatory is experiencing technical problems. They may be solvable, but it's a nail-biter. Unclear if the observatory will survive. 🧪🔭 arstechnica.com/space/2026/0...

Corey S. Powell@coreyspowell.bsky.social · last mo.

NASA & Katalyst Space are attempting to rescue the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a powerful gamma-ray telescope that's on a death-spiral toward Earth. A booster spacecraft, called Link, is now on its way. It will attempt to grab Swift & lift it to safety. 🧪🔭 spacenews.com/pegasus-laun...

Africa could make lunar history in 2029. China's Chang'e-8 mission may carry Africa's first Moon mission to the lunar south pole. The Africa2Moon project will deploy three small spherical probes to form a pioneering radio astronomy array. 🌕...🧵

I appreciate the creative use of units here to call attention to a growing problem: The amount of junk in Earth orbit is now equivalent to 13 million adult cane toads. 🧪

Dr Space Junk (Alice Gorman)@drspacejunk.bsky.social · last wk.

Space debris by the numbers: The estimated weight is 13,486 tonnes, the equivalent of 13 million adult cane toads. 🧪 🔭 #SpaceJunk

Not a splashy mission, but a technically significant one: the upcoming CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft pair will test autonomous navigation, rendezvous, and formation flying around the Moon. 🧪🔭 www.nasa.gov/directorates...

I'm absolutely devastated for colleagues at Jodrell Bank who found out this morning that funding for the UK's e-MERLIN radio telescope array will be terminated. This is a short-sighted move, to save a tiny fraction of the overall UK science budget. #SaveJodrellBank 🔭🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands

Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.

bbc.co.uk

Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans@astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 3w ago

“What will the Lovell Telescope discover/enable 20 yrs from now? I can’t tell you, and that’s the point. It will either be something extraordinary that none of us can yet predict, or we will defund it and leave Cheshire with a rusting monument to unfulfilled potential and discoveries never made.” 🔭🧪

Early cartographers depicted Earth as seen from the outside. Then astronomers plotted the solar system as seen from the outside. Now, with data from JWST, we can map the *universe* as seen from the outside, across 30 billion light years (in modern coordinates)! 🧪🔭 news.ucr.edu/articles/202...

NASA's Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex under smoke and flames from the forest fires in Spain. 24 July 2026.

It's a "maxi-moon." It's a "planet-planet." It's an "exosatellite." A newfound Jupiter-size object orbits a brown dwarf (halfway between a planet and a star), which in turn orbits a star. So what do you call this object? It's a remarkable discovery, by any name. 🔭🧪 www.eso.org/public/news/...

It's hard to know yourself from the inside. Astronomers are still figuring out what our home galaxy looks like; a new study reveals updated locations for the Milky Way's spiral arms. This is where we are. 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

The very first image from the surface of Mars, transmitted to Earth from NASA's Viking 1 lander, 50 years ago today. 🧪🔭 www.nasa.gov/image-articl...

Out: Messi In: Messier www.lindahall.org/about/news/s... 🔭🧪

A rich fossil site in China is filling in the little-known transitional details of life before the Cambrian explosion. It documents the emergence of bilateral symmetry & pushes back the origin of the ancestors of all modern vertebrates. 🔭🧪 www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-04...

Large plumes of smoke from wildfires burning across Canada are affecting air quality across large parts of the country & northeastern United States, including New York, which will host the World Cup finals. More from Copernicus: https://bit.ly/4vycdhj

Very exciting! First clear detection of an atmosphere around an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of another star. This is a big step forward in figuring out if "potentially habitable" planets are actually habitable & if red dwarf stars could sustain life. 🧪🔭 www.science.org/content/arti...

It boggles my brain that the coldest place in all of known outer space is sitting in a box on the International Space Station, where temperatures go as low as 1/20,000,000,000th of a degree above absolute zero. And NASA's Cold Atom Lab just got an upgrade. 🧪🔭 www.techtimes.com/articles/318...

For the first time, astronomers have detected sugar molecules (erythrulose, to be precise) in deep space, floating near the center of our galaxy. It adds to the evidence for complex prebiotic carbon chemistry in interstellar clouds, even before planets form. 🧪🔭 cen.acs.org/physical-che...

Five years ago, an experiment at the south pole detected a neutrino 500 trillion times as energetic as visible light. Now we've spotted the likely source: the "Shadow Blaster" galaxy, a staggering 11 billion light years away. 🔭🧪 noirlab.edu/public/news/...

A supernova marks the death of a star. But in the case of supernova AT2025ulz, it seems a star died twice. A massive star exploded. Its dense, spinning remains then clumped into two neutron stars, like newborn planets, which collided & exploded again. Wild! 🧪🔭 keckobservatory.org/superkilonova/

Centaurus A is the quintessential "peculiar" galaxy. It's a powerful source of radio & x-rays. It looks like two galaxies that smashed into each other. I stared at photos of it for years, wondering what was going on. Now observations from JWST are providing answers. 🧪🔭 esawebb.org/news/weic2615/

Asteroid Torifune was just imaged by Japan's Hayabusa 2. This asteroid is a rubble pile. If you could gently place it in the middle of a parking lot, it might look something like this. 🔭 #astro

China's Tianwen-2 also just arrived at near-Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa, a "quasi-satellite" of our planet. The spacecraft will study the asteroid & retrieve samples. We're making great strides in exploring the millions of small objects in our solar system. 🔭🧪 www.xinhuanet.com/20260706/eb8...

Amazing flyby: Japan's Hayabusa2 just made a high-precision flyby of previously unexplored asteroid Torifune. The probe was traveling at 3 miles per second, and skimmed just about half a mile from the asteroid! First images coming in now. 🧪🔭 www.jaxa.jp/press/2026/0...

NASA & Katalyst Space are attempting to rescue the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a powerful gamma-ray telescope that's on a death-spiral toward Earth. A booster spacecraft, called Link, is now on its way. It will attempt to grab Swift & lift it to safety. 🧪🔭 spacenews.com/pegasus-laun...