Category: 7. Science

Earth is spinning faster this summer, making the days marginally shorter and attracting the attention of scientists and timekeepers.

July 10 was the shortest day of the year so far, lasting 1.36 milliseconds less than 24 hours, according to data from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and the US Naval Observatory, compiled by timeanddate.com. More exceptionally short days are coming on July 22 and August 5, currently predicted to be 1.34 and 1.25 milliseconds shorter than 24 hours, respectively.

The length of a day is the time it takes for the planet to complete one full rotation on its axis —24 hours or 86,400 seconds on average. But in reality, each rotation is slightly irregular due to a variety of factors, such as the gravitational pull of the moon, seasonal changes in the atmosphere and the influence of Earth’s liquid core. As a result, a full rotation usually takes slightly less or slightly more than 86,400 seconds — a discrepancy of just milliseconds that doesn’t have any obvious effect on everyday life.

However these discrepancies can, in the long run, affect computers, satellites and telecommunications, which is why even the smallest time deviations are tracked using atomic clocks, which were introduced in 1955. Some experts believe this could lead to a scenario similar to the Y2K problem, which threatened to bring modern civilization to a halt.

Atomic clocks count the oscillations of atoms held in a vacuum chamber within the clock itself to calculate 24 hours to the utmost degree of precision. We call the resulting time UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, which is based on around 450 atomic clocks and is the global standard for timekeeping, as well as the time to which all our phones and computers are set.

Astronomers also keep track of Earth’s rotation — using satellites that check the position of the planet relative to fixed stars, for example — and can detect minute differences between the atomic clocks’ time and the amount of time it actually takes Earth to complete a full rotation. Last year, on July 5, 2024, Earth experienced the shortest day ever recorded since the advent of the atomic clock 65 years ago, at 1.66 milliseconds less than 24 hours.

“We’ve been on a trend toward slightly faster days since 1972,” said Duncan Agnew, a professor emeritus of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a research geophysicist at the University of California, San Diego. “But there are fluctuations. It’s like watching the stock market, really. There are long-term trends, and then there are peaks and falls.”

In 1972, after decades of rotating relatively slowly, Earth’s spin had accumulated such a delay relative to atomic time that the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service mandated the addition of a “leap second” to the UTC. This is similar to the leap year, which adds an extra day to February every four years to account for the discrepancy between the Gregorian calendar and the time it takes Earth to complete one orbit around the sun.

Since 1972, a total of 27 leap seconds have been added to the UTC, but the rate of addition has increasingly slowed, due to Earth speeding up; nine leap seconds were added throughout the 1970s while no new leap seconds have been added since 2016.

In 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) voted to retire the leap second by 2035, meaning we may never see another one added to the clocks. But if Earth keeps spinning faster for several more years, according to Agnew, eventually one second might need to be removed from the UTC. “There’s never been a negative leap second,” he said, “but the probability of having one between now and 2035 is about 40%.”

What is causing Earth to spin faster?

The shortest-term changes in Earth’s rotation, Agnew said, come from the moon and the tides, which make it spin slower when the satellite is over the equator and faster when it’s at higher or lower altitudes. This effect compounds with the fact that during the summer Earth naturally spins faster — the result of the atmosphere itself slowing down due to seasonal changes, such as the jet stream moving north or south; the laws of physics dictate that the overall angular momentum of Earth and its atmosphere must remain constant, so the rotation speed lost by the atmosphere is picked up by the planet itself. Similarly, for the past 50 years Earth’s liquid core has also been slowing down, with the solid Earth around it speeding up.

By looking at the combination of these effects, scientists can predict if an upcoming day could be particularly short. “These fluctuations have short-period correlations, which means that if Earth is speeding up on one day, it tends to be speeding up the next day, too,” said Judah Levine, a physicist and a fellow of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the time and frequency division. “But that correlation disappears as you go to longer and longer intervals. And when you get to a year, the prediction becomes quite uncertain. In fact, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service doesn’t predict further in advance than a year.”

While one short day doesn’t make any difference, Levine said, the recent trend of shorter days is increasing the possibility of a negative leap second. “When the leap second system was defined in 1972, nobody ever really thought that the negative second would ever happen,” he noted. “It was just something that was put into the standard because you had to do it for completeness. Everybody assumed that only positive leap seconds would ever be needed, but now the shortening of the days makes (negative leap seconds) in danger of happening, so to speak.”

The prospect of a negative leap second raises concerns because there are still ongoing problems with positive leap seconds after 50 years, explained Levine. “There are still places that do it wrong or do it at the wrong time, or do it (with) the wrong number, and so on. And that’s with a positive leap second, which has been done over and over. There’s a much greater concern about the negative leap second, because it’s never been tested, never been tried.”

Because so many fundamental technologies systems rely on clocks and time to function, such as telecommunications, financial transactions, electric grids and GPS satellites just to name a few, the advent of the negative leap second is, according to Levine, somewhat akin to the Y2K problem — the moment at the turn of the last century when the world thought a kind of doomsday would ensue because computers might have been unable to negotiate the new date format, going from ’99’ to ’00.’

The role of melting ice

Climate change is also a contributing factor to the issue of the leap second, but in a surprising way. While global warming has had considerable negative impacts on Earth, when it comes to our timekeeping, it has served to counteract the forces that are speeding up Earth’s spin. A study published last year by Agnew in the journal Nature details how ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland is spreading over the oceans, slowing down Earth’s rotation — much like a skater spinning with their arms over their head, but spinning slower if the arms are tucked along the body.

“If that ice had not melted, if we had not had global warming, then we would already be having a leap negative leap second, or we would be very close to having it,” Agnew said. Meltwater from Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets has is responsible for a third of the global sea level rise since 1993, according to NASA.

The mass shift of this melting ice is not only causing changes in Earth’s rotation speed, but also in its rotation axis, according to research led by Benedikt Soja, an assistant professor at the department of civil, environmental and geomatic engineering of The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. If warming continues, its effect might become dominant. “By the end of this century, in a pessimistic scenario (in which humans continue to emit more greenhouse gases) the effect of climate change could surpass the effect of the moon, which has been really driving Earth’s rotation for the past few billions of years,” Soja said.

At the moment, potentially having more time to prepare for action is helpful, given the uncertainty of long-term predictions on Earth’s spinning behavior. “I think the (faster spinning) is still within reasonable boundaries, so it could be natural variability,” Soja said. “Maybe in a few years, we could see again a different situation, and long term, we could see the planet slowing down again. That would be my intuition, but you never know.”

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July 21 (UPI) — SpaceX scrubbed the launch of two O3b mPOWER satellites for Luxembourg-based SES on Monday from Cape Canaveral Space Station.

The Falcon 9 was scheduled to lift off at 5:27 p.m. from Pad 40 but, with 11 seconds on the countdown clock, it was aborted.

During the SpaceX webcast, a launch director said: “T-minus 15 seconds” and was followed by “hold, hold, hold.”

A reason for the scrub wasn’t given. The favorable weather outlook was listed as 50% for a “go for launch,” Florida Today reported.

The next launch opportunity is a two-hour window starting at 5:12 p.m. Tuesday with 25% odds of favorable weather, according to the 45th Weather Squadron.

SpaceX earlier launched eight satellites for the company into medium Earth orbit. They are stationed about 5,000 miles above Earth.

Deployment is roughly two hours after the launch.

The two mPOWER satellites were delivered by Boeing to Florida earlier this month.

“This next-generation satellite network was designed to bring connectivity to the ‘other three billion’ — those who lack consistent, reliable access to communications systems,” SES said on its website. “For the first time, telcos connect entire island nations, remote industries access digital tools and governments conduct vital operations to the harshest terrains.”

The same first-stage booster launched the last two satellites for SES in December 2024. The booster was also involved in the NASA Crew-10 launch and two Statlink missions.

About 8 1/2 minutes after liftoff, the booster is scheduled to land on “Just Read the Instructions” droneship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

There have been 128 landings on the vessel with 478 in Florida and California.

SpaceX is planning the launch of a Falcon 9 at 11:13 a.m. PDT Tuesday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. They are NASA’s Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Satellites, or TRACER, and are intended to study the interaction of the Sun’s solar particles with the Earth’s magnetic field.

Dust devils are a common sight whirling across the Alvord Desert’s flat expanse. Dry for most of the year, this tract of southeastern Oregon interests scientists seeking to understand the flighty vortices, phenomena that also occur on Mars and potentially elsewhere in our solar system. The playa and its dust stem from the most recent ice age, when a massive pluvial lake covered the area. This lake left the basin covered in bright salt and mineral deposits—and surrounded by evidence of catastrophic flooding.

The images above, acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on June 29, 2025, show the Alvord Desert in false color (left) and natural color (right). The summit of Steens Mountain stands more than a vertical mile above the desert floor to the west, and a steep escarpment borders the playa on the east.

The false-color image (OLI bands 6-5-4) indicates that some water was present in the desert at the time. The basin holds seasonal runoff from Steens Mountain and may also partially fill with rainfall. The last time it was flooded year-round was 1982 through 1985 due to unusually high mountain snowpack, according to the Bureau of Land Management. Alvord Lake, another shallow seasonal lake, is visible farther south.

In recent years, researchers have sought to better understand dust devils by measuring meteorological conditions in the Alvord Desert. The convective vortices are powered by the Sun’s heating of the land surface, but the details of their drivers and inner workings are still somewhat mysterious.

Dust devils are limited to arid areas on Earth but widespread—and sometimes much larger—on Mars. Dust lofted into the Martian atmosphere tends to stay there for a long time and likely plays a significant role in the Martian climate. And while dense atmospheric dust might reduce the available sunlight for powering equipment used to study the planet, forceful dust devil winds can actually play a beneficial role by clearing off solar panels, scientists note.

The Alvord Desert has not always shared these similarities with Mars. During the late Pleistocene epoch, from about 40,000 to 12,000 years ago, Alvord Lake was one of many sprawling lakes filling in basins of the Basin and Range province. Scientists believe the ice-age version of Alvord Lake was over
80 miles (130 kilometers) long and up to 280 feet (85 meters) deep at its highest level.

What’s more, geologists have discovered evidence of at least one catastrophic outburst flood that shaped the landscape for tens of miles downstream. Around 13,000 years ago, the lake breached Big Sand Gap, releasing multiple cubic miles of water into the Coyote Lake basin and ultimately into the Owyhee and Snake Rivers east and north of this scene. Floodwaters carved canyons, scoured bedrock, and deposited boulders up to 100 feet (30 meters) above present-day river channels. Large-scale “fill-and-spill” events such as these shaped the landscape across western North America during this period (for example, in Washington’s Channeled Scablands) due to the presence of many large ice- or debris-dammed lakes.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Bonnie Moreland. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are painting a new picture of Jupiter’s moon Europa and revealing the hidden chemistry of the icy moon’s interior.

For decades, scientists pictured Europa’s frozen surface as a still, silent shell. But the new observations reveal that it’s actually a dynamic world that’s far from frozen in time.

Paleontologists have discovered the skeletal remains of an entirely new, yet-to-be-named species of massopodan sauropodomorph dinosaur in the Klettgau Formation in Canton Aargau, Switzerland.

The newly-discovered fossil dates back to the Norian age of the Late Triassic epoch, some 206 million years ago.

It belongs to a previously unknown member of Massopoda, a large group of sauropodomorph dinosaurs that lived during the Late Triassic to Late Cretaceous epochs.

“Among the Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate groups, Sauropodomorpha represents one of the most successful dinosaurian clades, as it became one of the most abundant and dominant herbivore components of both the Late Triassic and the Jurassic continental paleoecosystems with an almost global distribution, spatially spanning from Antarctica to Greenland,” said Dr. Alessandro Lania from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and his colleagues from Switzerland.

“The origin of sauropodomorphs dates back to the early Late Triassic of Gondwanan continents with the oldest representatives discovered in Brazil, Argentina, southern Africa, and North America.”

“Based on the South American fossil record, which provides one of the most comprehensive understandings of the early evolution of Sauropodomorpha, a rapid radiation and diversification occurred in a timeframe of approximately 30 million years, shifting from a limited number of lineages characterized by a small body size, bipedal locomotion and carnivorous/faunivorous dietary habits to a plethora of new sauropodomorphs during the Norian-Rhaetian accounting for medium-to-large size body plans, onset of quadrupedality and acquisition of herbivorous diet.”

“Additionally, this dramatic increase in the sauropodomorph paleobiodiversity of southern Pangea at Norian times is further attested by the emergence of new main lineages, such as Massopoda and Sauropodiformes, as well as by a notable divergence in the morphological disparity, which is consequently reflected in an expansion of the occupied morphospace given the development of novel anatomical features.”

The partially complete skeleton of the new massopodan sauropodomorph was found in 2013 in the uppermost fossiliferous horizon of the Gruhalde Member (Klettgau Formation) in the Gruhalde Quarry in Frick, Canton Aargau, Switzerland.

“The Klettgau Formation is one of the most extensive stratigraphic successions of the Late Triassic in Europe, consisting of a lithologically heterogenous series deposited over a prolonged timeframe of 26-30 million years, from the Early Carnian to the Late Rhaetian,” the paleontologists said.

“Outcropping in many localities across Switzerland, the Klettgau Formation records a non-continuous sequence of variegated playa sediments with fluvial and marine influence, depicting various lateral paleoenvironmental shifts over the entire stratigraphic section.”

The new specimen represents the first non-Plateosaurus sauropodomorph from the Canton Aargau and the fourth Late Triassic non-sauropodan sauropodomorph of Switzerland.

“The osteological investigation coupled with morphological comparisons unraveled a mosaic craniomandibular anatomy that combines features typical of non-massopodan plateosaurians and massopodan sauropodomorphs, a condition shared with the mid-to-late Norian massospondylid Coloradisaurus brevis from Argentina,” the researchers said.

According to the authors, this dinosaur is the first non-sauropodiform massopodan from Laurasia.

“Remarkably, the resulting macroevolutionary scenario opens up a plausible hypothesis supporting a European origin for the Early Jurassic massopodans from Asia during the Late Triassic, although more evidence is required to corroborate it,” they said.

“Moreover, the fossil increases both the craniodental disparity and the paleobiodiversity of Norian sauropodomorphs from Laurasia, with the latter being comparable to those from Gondwana, especially South America and Africa.”

The team’s paper was published this month in the Swiss Journal of Palaeontology.

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A. Lania et al. 2025. Craniomandibular osteology of a new massopodan sauropodomorph (Dinosauria: Sauropodomorpha) from the Late Triassic (latest Norian) of Canton Aargau, Switzerland. Swiss J Palaeontol 144, 39; doi: 10.1186/s13358-025-00373-6

The New Horizons spacecraft is humanity’s fastest-moving spacecraft and headed to interstellar space. Since its exploration of Pluto 10 years ago and subsequent flyby of Arrokoth in 2019, it’s been traversing and studying the Kuiper Belt while looking for other flyby objects. That’s not all it’s been doing, however. New Horizons also has an extended program of making heliophysics observations. The mission science team has also planned astrophysical studies with the spacecraft’s instruments. Those include measuring the intensity of the cosmic optical background and taking images of stars such as Proxima Centauri. As the spacecraft moves, the apparent positions of its stellar navigation targets have changed, but that hasn’t bothered New Horizons one bit. It knows exactly where it is thanks to 3D observations of those nearby stars.

A recent paper released by the team of scientists connected to the New Horizons mission (see references) presents the startling change in parallax view that the spacecraft provided. New Horizons has achieved a breakthrough: the first time optical stellar astrometry has been performed as a way to get the three-dimensional location of a spacecraft with respect to nearby stars. It’s also the first time any method of interstellar navigation has been demonstrated for a spacecraft on a trajectory out of the Solar System. The paper’s conclusions suggest that future spacecraft heading out into the wider galaxy would do well to use a single pair of nearby stars in an astrometric approach to navigation.

Navigation by the Stars

Using the stars for navigation isn’t a new idea. People have done it on Earth throughout history, getting across the continents, sailing the seas, and more lately, traveling in the Solar System. Still, navigational methods rely on Earth-centered measurements along with star-sighting techniques. For example, the Voyager spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope, and others have star trackers to help keep them in the proper attitude and on course (in the case of Voyager and New Horizons). What happens when you (or your spacecraft) leave the Solar System? In science fiction books, movies, and TV shows, starships fly hither and yon, such as the spacecraft in the Star Trek universe. They use a combination of galactic databases, so-called “subspace sensors”, and other advanced methods to warp their way through the Milky Way (and beyond). The methods might look familiar to us today, even if the technology doesn’t.

The New Horizons mission teams used optical navigation techniques to guide the spacecraft to Pluto and Arrokoth. These include an onboard camera to take images of the targets (Pluto, Charon, etc.) against a backdrop of reference stars, as well as image processing techniques. Once it leaves the Solar System behind, the spacecraft will rely on interstellar navigation methods using the same optical navigation practices. The team’s paper describes the challenges in doing that. They state, “Besides needing to know what direction we’re headed in, we will also need to know how far we’ve traveled. Our motion will appear to shift the positions of nearby stars with respect to more distant ones—and that will tell us how far we’ve gone. We can demonstrate this with images obtained by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on 2020 April 22-23, when it was then 47 AU distant from the Sun, passing through the Kuiper Belt.”

In other words, the images and measurements of distant stars and their parallaxes will allow spacecraft operators to triangulate mission positions quite accurately. So, in the future, if time, money, fuel, and equipment were in infinite supply, New Horizons could be guided toward stellar targets. Conceivably, if it had the ability to make its own travel plans, it could take itself anywhere it (or its designers) wanted it to go, including to the nearest star in our neck of the Galaxy: Proxima Centauri.

It’s About Parallax

This figure illustrates the phenomenon of stellar parallax. When New Horizons and observers on Earth observe a nearby star at the same time, it appears to be in different places compared to more distant background stars—this is because New Horizons has traveled so far out in space that it has to look in a different direction to see that star. Credit: Pete Marenfeld, NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory

Anyone who’s taken an astronomy class learned about parallax measurements by holding a finger up and looking at something in the distance with one eye at a time. When you do that, the position of the finger changes as you blinked back and forth. Using Earth’s motion throughout the year with respect to distant objects also can approximate parallax on a grander scale. Real parallax measurements require observing a star for a number of years to measure its apparent motion against the backdrop of more distant ones. The end result gives a parallax “view” that looks like a change in the star’s proper motion. Finally, even the nearest stars have tiny parallaxes. Interestingly, Pluto itself was found using this “positional shift” by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. He took images of the sky where Pluto was thought to be and then viewed them through a “blink comparator” to detect its motion against the stars (and as Earth moved in its orbit).

Some 76 years after Tombaugh’s discovery, the New Horizons mission set out for the Pluto system. The spacecraft depended on optical navigation and a Jupiter assist to get it out to the correct spot in the Kuiper Belt. Finding Pluto was a challenge, since its orbit was only tracked for about a third of its time and that induced some uncertainty in its exact location. New Horizons had a general sense of Pluto’s position, and that location was tweaked by feedback from the optical navigation system as the spacecraft approached. As New Horizons’s position changed throughout flight, the positions of its guide stars (and targets) appear to change, as well, in a fine demonstration of parallax shift.

Presently, New Horizons is just over 62 AU from Earth—that’s its Earth-spacecraft (ES) baseline. On April 22-23, 2020, when the spacecraft was about 42 AU away, the New Horizons team used the LORRI (Long-range Reconnaissance Imager) camera to image the star fields containing the nearby stars Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359. At that time, it was the largest such baseline made to that date. These measurements, although not as accurate as those made by Gaia, for example, are still useful to show how parallax works using real objects in space.

For this view of the parallax of Wolf 359, cross your eyes until the pair of images merges into one. It might help to place your finger or a pen just a couple of inches from your eyes, and focus on it. When the background image comes into focus, remove the closer object and concentrate on the image. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/John Spencer/University of Louisville/Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/Mt. Lemmon Observatory

The shifts in position measured with simultaneous Earth and New Horizons observations are a significant fraction of an arcminute for the nearest stars. If you look at the Earth-based images of the spacecraft’s target stars and compare them to the New Horizons images, it’s fairly easy to see the displacement of the targets against the backdrop of more distant stars. This method is actually a pretty good analog to the astronomy class experiment of holding your finger up and looking at it while blinking your eyes.

What’s Next?

The New Horizons parallax experiment was a big first step in learning the techniques of stellar navigation. If it’s used to make these measurements again, the team suggests taking a larger number of images to get better measurements of stellar positions. That would make good use of the only asset currently exploring the Kuiper Belt, which is turning out to be way more interesting than expected. New Horizons is expected to exit the Kuiper Belt late in this decade and has enough fuel to power it through the 2030s. Whether or not the mission gets cut off by NASA after it leaves the Kuiper Belt is an open question at this time.

Future spacecraft to visit the outer Solar System and beyond will be designed with autonomous (self-guiding) navigation technology, particularly coupled with improvements in imaging and image processing, along with applications of artificial intelligence. In addition, while using stars is a good baseline, radio and X-ray pulsar measurements could improve navigation. These rely on a known database of such objects and have also been suggested for navigation purposes here on Earth. In space, those measurements will supply much more accurate data, not just about the pulsars, but about the exact position in space of the craft taking them.

For More Information

A Demonstration of Interstellar Navigation Using New Horizons

Optical Navigation Preparations for New Horizons Pluto Flyby

Star Trek Navigation

The next satellites SpaceX helps to deliver to orbit from Southern California won’t be its own, but rather two of NASA’s.

Spaceflight missions to deploy internet-beaming Starlink satellites are by far the most common at the Vandenberg Space Force Base. But up next, the commercial spaceflight company founded by billionaire Elon Musk will instead help launch into orbit twin satellites on a scientific mission for the U.S. space agency.

The probes, which are central to NASA’s TRACERS mission, will then observe how energy from the sun’s atmosphere flows through Earth’s magnetosphere – the region around Earth dominated by our planet’s magnetic field.

California rocket launches: Why not all Californians are happy that SpaceX rocket launches have increased

As with any launch from Vandenberg, plenty of spots around Southern California should offer a decent view of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket climbing into the sky. But for those who want to know a little bit more about the mission the spacecraft is helping reach orbit, here’s everything to know about NASA’s TRACERS mission.

What is NASA’s TRACERS mission? Twin satellites to study solar activity

Earth’s magnetosphere protects our planet from being constantly bombarded by solar wind. Powerful enough to breach the magnetosphere in explosive events known as “magnetic reconnection,” solar wind can disrupt satellites, GPS signals and other technologies, and even trigger some stunning auroras in the northern hemisphere.

To better understand the phenomenon, NASA plans to place twin satellites – built by Boeing subsidiary Millennium Space Systems – into a sun-synchronous orbit, meaning they match Earth’s rotation around the sun. The spacecraft are designed to follow one another in tandem while observing thousands of reconnection events and how the process changes and evolves.

The mission is known as TRACERS, a lengthy acronym that stands for Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites.

The satellites will fly at a trajectory known as low-Earth orbit – an altitude that allows for things like satellites to circle Earth fairly quickly. In this case, the satellites will travel through the funnel-shaped holes in the magnetic field known as polar cusp that open over the north and south poles.

NASA even plans to combine and compare data from other solar-observing missions, including NASA’s PUNCH mission that got off the ground in March.

By observing this process, scientists will be able to learn more about and prepare for technological disruptions on Earth resulting from solar activity, according to NASA.

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to launch NASA TRACERS twin satellites: When is liftoff from California?

SpaceX will serve as the launch service provider for the NASA mission, which will get off the ground from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, California.

The company, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, will use its two-stage 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket, one of the world’s most active, to launch the satellites into orbit.

A Federal Aviation Administration operations plan advisory indicates the launch is being targeted for Tuesday, July 22, with backup opportunities available the following day, if needed. The launch window opens at 11:13 a.m. PT, according to NASA.

What is the Vandenberg Space Force Base?

The Vandenberg Space Force Base is a rocket launch site in Santa Barbara County in Southern California.

Established in 1941, the site was previously known as the Vandenberg Air Force Base. Though it’s a military base, the site also hosts both civil and commercial space launches for entities like NASA and SpaceX.

Space Launch Delta 30, a unit of Space Force, is responsible for managing the launch operations at Vandenberg, as well as the missile tests that take place at the base.

Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: What is NASA’s TRACERS mission? 2 satellites to launch from Vandenberg

A U.K.-led team of scientists is developing a miniature spacecraft that will orbit the moon in an effort to detect faint radio signals from the universe’s infancy.

The proposed mission, called CosmoCube, aims to “listen” for these ancient signals from the far side of the moon. It will target the “cosmic dark ages” — a critical-but-mysterious era roughly 50 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, when the first stars, galaxies and black holes in the universe formed.

Submarine canyons are deep, large-scale incisions found on most of the world’s continental margins. In Antarctica, they are widespread features driving oceanographic processes with significant implications for global climate and circulation. The understanding of their oceanographic, climatic, geological and ecological significance is limited by the detail, accuracy and extent of canyon inventory. In a new study, scientists from University College Cork and the Universitat de Barcelona aimed to create the best possible catalog of Antarctic submarine canyons and gullies. They identified 332 drainage networks with 3,291 stream segments, nearly 5 times the number of canyons identified in previous studies.

Submarine canyons are common geomorphic features that occur on all continental margins.

They are steep-sided, generally V-shaped valleys with fairly narrow, and sinuous morphologies, rugged slopes, beginning at the edge of the continental shelf or on the continental slope, and ending at the continental rise or abyssal plain.

Confined channels less than 10 km long, generally on the order of tens of meters deep and linear in plan view, are known as submarine gullies, and are commonly found alongside or within canyon systems on the continental slope.

Submarine canyons transport sediments and nutrients from the coast to deeper areas, they connect shallow and deep waters and they create habitats rich in biodiversity.

Scientists have identified some 10,000 submarine canyons worldwide, but because only 27% of the Earth’s seafloor has been mapped in high resolution the real total is likely to be higher.

And despite their ecological, oceanographic, and geological value, submarine canyons remain underexplored, especially in polar regions.

“Like those in the Arctic, Antarctic submarine canyons resemble canyons in other parts of the world,” said Dr. David Amblàs, a researcher at the Universitat de Barcelona.

“But they tend to be larger and deeper because of the prolonged action of polar ice and the immense volumes of sediment transported by glaciers to the continental shelf.”

For their study, the authors used Version 2 of the International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO v2), the most complete and detailed map of the seafloor in this region.

It uses new high-resolution bathymetric data and a semi-automated method for identifying and analyzing canyons that was developed by the authors.

In total, it describes 15 morphometric parameters that reveal striking differences between canyons in East and West Antarctica.

“Some of the submarine canyons we analyzed reach depths of over 4,000 m,” Dr. Amblàs said.

“The most spectacular of these are in East Antarctica, which is characterized by complex, branching canyon systems.”

“The systems often begin with multiple canyon heads near the edge of the continental shelf and converge into a single main channel that descends into the deep ocean, crossing the sharp, steep gradients of the continental slope.”

“It was particularly interesting to see the differences between canyons in the two major Antarctic regions, as this hadn’t been described before,” said Dr. Riccardo Arosio, a researcher at University College Cork.

“East Antarctic canyons are more complex and branched, often forming extensive canyon-channel systems with typical U-shaped cross sections.”

“This suggests prolonged development under sustained glacial activity and a greater influence of both erosional and depositional sedimentary processes.”

“In contrast, West Antarctic canyons are shorter and steeper, characterized by V-shaped cross sections.”

“This morphological difference supports the idea that the East Antarctica Ice Sheet originated earlier and has experienced a more prolonged development,” Dr. Amblàs said.

“This had been suggested by sedimentary record studies, but it hadn’t yet been described in large-scale seafloor geomorphology.”

“Thanks to the high resolution of the new bathymetric database — 500 m per pixel compared to the 1-2 km per pixel of previous maps — we could apply semi-automated techniques more reliably to identify, profile and analyze submarine canyons,” Dr. Arosio said.

“The strength of the study lies in its combination of various techniques that were already used in previous work but that are now integrated into a robust and systematic protocol.”

“We also developed a GIS software script that allows us to calculate a wide range of canyon-specific morphometric parameters in just a few clicks.”

The team’s work appears in the journal Marine Geology.

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Riccardo Arosio & David Amblas. 2025. The geomorphometry of Antarctic submarine canyons. Marine Geology 488: 107608; doi: 10.1016/j.margeo.2025.107608