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NASA's federally funded R&D center managing robotic space missions, including Mars rovers and Earth-observing satellites like Sentinel-6.
Idaho's Wildhorse grass fire threw up a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a storm type that can lift smoke 15 km and that NASA's INSPYRE jets hunted for six weeks. Its measurements are meant to test weather and climate models that mostly omit these clouds. NASA has not yet reported results.
Reality
Perseverance's SuperCam survey of more than 185 targets shows Jezero's Margin Unit is magma-formed olivine rock that met water at least three times. Groundwater and later hot fluids joined the crater lake in reworking it, so its carbonate is a harder record to read.
Reality
Ten NASA-funded monitors logged three years of black carbon in Ethiopia's capital. The peaks track rush hour and holidays, which is not what an annual average measures.
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The new altimeter has been sending low-latency measurements since July 15, but NOAA's operational ocean heat suite is only targeted to start using its ocean height data by the end of the year, so this El Nino is being forecast on the record that already existed.
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PRIMA, a 1.8-metre far-infrared telescope managed by JPL, moves into preliminary design with a project cost ceiling of $1.2 billion that excludes launch, a 2033 launch target and a confirmation review still ahead.
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Loft Orbital and Marlan Space put 40 more satellites behind a $1bn figure that four outlets describe four different ways. What a customer buys is a slot on a shared satellite running a model picked from an app store.
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The last two international estimates of the annual motion disagreed by seven millimetres, nearly as much as the motion itself, so a JPL-led team rebuilt the measurement by adding GPS and low-orbit satellites to laser ranging.
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Orbiters read the carbonate at Jezero's margin as lake chemistry; Perseverance found volcanic rock that water altered at least three times, in a sequence the team can order but cannot date.
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Planets inherit their direction of travel from the disk that formed them. A planet running backward around a small cool star is therefore a formation problem, and one team's answer is a second disk, tilted from the first.
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Six whales carrying temperature and salinity tags returned profiles from basins where research ships turn back, roughly matching everything previously archived for Scoresby Sound and giving melt models a measured input where they had estimates.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
The fifth antenna of a project begun in 2009 entered service on Aug 3. It leaves 12 mid-size dishes serving more than 40 spacecraft, with part of that capacity already promised to backup duty.
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Before the telescope's Aug. 30 launch, ground software named ROSALIA already helps decide which targets get scheduled and what the darkest pixels are allowed to mean.
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Buckled rail, record-low rivers and disrupted power and water are no longer tail risk. NASA's account of May to August 2026 reads like a description of normal service.
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Reuters reports that Unitree's Go2 descends from openly published, US military-funded locomotion work. Anyone buying legged robots now inherits that dual-use history.
Reality