Big week in science. Let’s run through it.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is finally working. Located in Chile, it has the world’s largest digital camera — 3,200 megapixels. It started its 10-year survey on June 30. For the next decade, it’ll snap an image roughly every 40 seconds, covering the entire southern sky every few nights. The NSF called it “the greatest cosmic movie ever made.” It’ll revisit each point in the sky about 800 times, capturing changes and events. Roughly a thousand images per night, about ten terabytes of data daily.
Cyborg cockroaches can swim now. Researchers from NTU Singapore and Waseda University built a tiny diving suit for Madagascar hissing cockroaches fitted with electronic controllers. The suit includes an oxygen-generation tank, a flexible shell, and silicone tubes attached to the roaches’ spiracles. Results: the cyborg roaches can swim underwater for up to three hours. The tubes come off painlessly afterward. Why? Search and rescue. Cyborg roaches were already deployed after the Myanmar earthquake this spring. Flooded environments were a problem — now they’re not.
NASA picked three companies for Moon Base deliveries. Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines got contracts worth nearly $600 million to deliver science payloads to the lunar surface in late 2028. Each will carry the same three instruments: a landing camera, a laser reflector array, and a radiation spectrometer. Redundant on purpose — multiple landers, same gear, better data. Think weather stations on Earth, just on the Moon.
Also this week: Rocket Lab bought Iridium, Amazon’s Leo satellite service is ready to deploy, the Space Shuttle Endeavour goes on public display later this year, and NASA launched a mission to rescue the falling Swift observatory.
