Enzo Costa

🌎🚀 | BR 🇧🇷→PT 🇵🇹 | Pixels, debates, and space games

[NSF - NASASpaceflight.com @NASASpaceflight]

SpaceX demolishes SLC-6, Relativity's public/private Mars mission, Rocket Lab send a suborbital rocket to orbit, a Chinese upper stage breaks up endangering Starlink satellites, and much more: This Week in Spaceflight with @elysiasegal → https://t.co/0xsK7j02aD

[Chronos Intelligence @ChronosIntelX]

🌌 JWST found a planet with titanium oxide clouds that create extreme day night temperature swings of over 1000°C...
The planet flips between scorching hot and freezing cold every day...
📌 Source: JWST exoplanet weather study, June 2026

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography chip production machines are insane 🤯

[Ship 25 @Flight2Starship]

Booster 21’s F2 section has been moved into Megabay 1!!!

📸@LabPadre

[Math Pulse @themathpulse]

NASA simulation of turbulent airflow around an aircraft wing during takeoff and landing (high-lift CRM-HL)

Imagine the nonlinear Navier-Stokes equations and massive computation behind every swirling vortex at the engine junction.

[Ettore Di Giacinto @mudler_it]

Depth Anything 3 now runs as pure C++/ggml (@ggml_org) . No Python, no PyTorch, no CUDA toolkit at inference, just one self-contained GGUF.

It's faster than PyTorch on CPU! and ties speed on GPU. The CPU win came from the last place..I'd have looked.

Quantized GGUF on @huggingface🤗

Shout out to @ggerganov for ggml (we are building a ggml-world!❤️) and to @ByteDanceOSS and Depth Anything 3 authors @bingyikang @jhliew91 @donydchen !

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

Fifty years ago today, humanity got its closest look yet at the Red Planet—and it was full of surprises.On June 19, 1976, the two-part Viking 1 spacecraft slipped into orbit around Mars. Just days later, its cameras beamed back images of the long-planned landing site for America’s first attempt to touch down on another planet. The reaction back on Earth? A mix of pure elation… and outright shock.The Martian landscape Viking 1 revealed looked nothing like the smoother, more muted world seen by Mariner 9 years earlier. Instead, the carefully chosen site—debated and refined for years—sat squarely on the floor of what appeared to be a deeply carved, ancient riverbed. Towering cliffs, jagged channels, and rugged terrain screamed “high risk.” A safe landing on July 4, 1976—timed perfectly for the U.S. Bicentennial—suddenly seemed far too dangerous. Mission controllers made the tough call: delay the landing and hunt for a smoother spot.

This stunning mosaic, stitched together from Viking Orbiter 1 images, captures the breathtaking scale of the Valles Marineris canyon system—the “Grand Canyon” of Mars, stretching across the center of the scene. It’s a dramatic reminder of the wild, geologically active world the Vikings were about to explore.

In the end, Viking 1 touched down safely on July 20 in Chryse Planitia (“Golden Plain”), kicking off an epic mission that transformed our understanding of Mars. Those early images didn’t just change the landing plans—they ignited a new era of planetary exploration, proving the Red Planet was far more dynamic and mysterious than anyone had imagined. What a way to celebrate a half-century of Martian adventure!

[Space Coast Rocket Launches 🚀💫📡🪐 @SpaceNewsFL]

✨Astronomy Picture of The Day ✨ CG4: A Ruptured Cometary Globule: The "claw" of this odd looking "creature" in the above photo is a gas cloud known as a cometary globule. This globule, however, has ruptured. Cometary globules are typically characterized by dusty heads and elongated tails.
📸: Jason Jennings

[Elisar Priel @ENNEPS]

What's better than a Starbase deluge test? A sunrise delugue test! SpaceX continuing to test out the pad sysytems to make sure they will be ready for Booster 20, and the Static Fire testing in the coming weeks ahead of Flight 13
@NASASpaceflight | https://t.co/1bbXAEmS9g

[ApoStructura @ApoStructura]

Apostructura and SpaceAtlas. tech featured on What About It

Thank you @FelixSchlang!

[Nova @NovaXSpace]

Why does Starship’s plasma look different every flight?

The plasma during Starship’s atmospheric re-entry varies from flight to flight due to several key factors:

Atmospheric conditions – Changes in air density, composition (oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor), and altitude alter the color (red, purple, pink) and intensity of the glow.

Vehicle condition – Heat shield tiles, material loss, or experimental metallic tiles can create orange or reddish streaks through oxidation.

Trajectory and speed – Entry angle, velocity, and maneuvers affect plasma flow and hot spots around the vehicle.

Camera and viewing angle – Camera settings and perspective change how the colors appear.

Every flight is a unique mix of physics, engineering, and real-world conditions. SpaceX uses these differences to improve the heat shield. That’s why the spectacular footage always looks a little different!

[X Freeze @XFreeze]

Even Starlink’s competitors need SpaceX to reach orbit

SpaceX just launched three AST SpaceMobile Block 2 BlueBird satellites from Cape Canaveral.....a direct-to-cell system competing in the same satellite-to-phone market as Starlink Direct-to-Cell

These satellites are designed to connect ordinary smartphones directly to space-based cellular broadband without special hardware

This is not the same market as the main Starlink dish internet service

It is the next massive market: connecting phones directly to satellites

And the irony is perfect

To compete with Starlink from space, AST still had to ride a Falcon 9 to get there

That is the real SpaceX advantage

Only SpaceX has the launch hardware, cadence, reusability, cost structure, and track record to put satellites in orbit reliably at scale

This mission used a Falcon 9 booster flying for the 29th time and it landed again successfully

SpaceX is not just building Starlink

It is building the launch infrastructure the entire satellite industry depends on

[Stellarix @Stellarixorine]

A new step into space exploration 🚀✨ Watching rockets push beyond Earth’s atmosphere is a reminder of how far science and engineering have taken us — turning what once felt impossible into reality. 🌍 Every launch represents years of innovation.

📹 @curiosity.live

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

That jagged scar slicing across the Arizona desert isn’t a crack in the planet—it’s the Grand Canyon, one of Earth’s most jaw-dropping masterpieces, captured from space by astronauts aboard the International Space Station.Carved over roughly 5 to 6 million years by the relentless power of the Colorado River, this colossal chasm stretches 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, and plunges more than one mile deep. From orbit, hundreds of miles above, it still dominates the landscape like a living geological wound—raw, immense, and utterly humbling.

Even at this god-like altitude, the canyon’s intricate layers, towering buttes, and twisting side canyons remain unmistakable. It’s a vivid reminder that what feels overwhelmingly huge on the ground—something that can swallow entire cities and take days to explore—is reduced to a delicate thread when viewed from the edge of space.This natural wonder isn’t just big. It’s a time machine etched into rock, revealing billions of years of Earth’s history in its colorful strata. The next time you stand on its rim and feel small, remember: from up there, we’re all tiny specks on a planet that’s itself a speck in the cosmos.

[Ashlee Vance @ashleevance]

Just incredible stuff

[EasternShoreSpaceflight @EShoreSpaceflt]

NASA Wallops Island update — June 18, 2026. Pegasus media event recap.

Yesterday we attended NASA's media event for the Pegasus XL launch carrying Katalyst Space's LINK servicing spacecraft, which will attempt to rendezvous with the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and boost it back to a stable orbit using LINK's three robotic arms.

We recorded about 33 minutes of the briefing on GoPro, covering the first 15 minutes of speaker intros and mission overview plus part of the Q&A. Rookie mistake: I left it recording in 5K60, and it overheated, cutting things short. Lesson learned.

NASA's event was not video livestreamed, but they ran a live audio stream, available here: https://t.co/yGGczmTvU2

After the briefing, media were bused out to see Pegasus mounted under Stargazer, Northrop Grumman's L-1011 carrier aircraft. As we got off the bus, the Air Force Thunderbirds happened to be taking off from an adjacent runway. Great bonus moment.

Swift's orbit has been decaying faster than expected due to increased solar activity. If LINK succeeds, it will be the first time a commercial robotic mission has captured an uncrewed NASA spacecraft never designed to be serviced in space.

Great day at Wallops.

Video Link: https://t.co/qjT4kOiRyM

@NASASpaceflight
@northropgrumman @katalystspace @NASAWallops

[Rex (Raptor Engine) @Rex_MKR]

Spotting a dinosaur is a great way to start the day!

Raptor 3 Sea Level SN149 paid a visit as I tracked it through our cams at McGregor, arriving at the testing area at the start of the test window 🦖

https://t.co/KOxlfqEDpD - @NASASpaceflight

[Lunar Citizens @LunarCitizens]

No filters, no post-processing, just pure reality.

This is the most beautiful SpaceX Falcon 9 launch I’ve ever seen.
#starship

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

Nineteen spiral galaxies, their planes facing us. The images were obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope in near- and mid-infrared wavelengths.

The Webb Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured millions of stars in these images. The light from older stars appears blue here, concentrated in the galactic nuclei (in visible light, the opposite is usually true—younger stars are blue). Observations from the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) highlight the glowing dust, revealing where it is located around and between the stars—it appears in shades of red and orange. Stars that are not yet fully formed and are shrouded in gas and dust appear bright red.

Another interesting detail: pink-red diffraction spikes can be seen in the centers of some galaxies. These are signs that active supermassive black holes or dense central star clusters may be located at the centers of these galaxies.

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

ESO 593-8 from the Hubble Space Telescope! 🛰

It is 650 million light-years distant. Constellation: Sagittarius.

The object was formed by the merger of three galaxies: two spiral galaxies and one irregular dwarf galaxies.