SpaceX Starship's 2025 Launches Approved The Sun's Secrets NASA Simulations BioSentinel's V7

On Wednesday (Nov. 20), the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a draft environmental assessment (EA) of Starship operations at Starbase, SpaceX's facility in South Texas.

The 160-page document, which you can read here, approves the company's request to boost the number of annual Starship liftoffs from Starbase by a factor of five, from the currently allowed five to 25 — SpaceX's reported launch target for 2025. The draft EA also approves 25 landings for both Starship elements — its Super Heavy booster and "Ship" upper stage — back at Starbase. These landings would occur at the launch towe

“Right now, we don’t have the computational capabilities to create realistic global models of the entire Sun due to the complexity,” said Kitiashvili. “Therefore, we create models of smaller areas or layers, which can show us structures of the solar surface and atmosphere – like shock waves or tornado-like features measuring only a few miles in size; that’s much finer detail than any one spacecraft can resolve.”
“Our simulations use what we call a realistic approach, which means we include as much as we know to-date about solar plasma to reproduce different phenomena observed with NASA space missions,” said Irina Kitiashvili, a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley who helped lead the study.
Astronauts live in a pretty extreme environment aboard the International Space Station. Orbiting about 250 miles above the Earth in the weightlessness of microgravity, they rely on commercial cargo missions about every two months to deliver new supplies and experiments. And yet, this place is relatively protected in terms of space radiation. The Earth’s magnetic field shields space station crew from much of the radiation that can damage the DNA in our cells and lead to serious health problems.
BioSentinel set out to be the first long-duration biology experiment to take place beyond where the space station orbits near Earth. BioSentinel’s spacecraft is one of 10 CubeSats that launched aboard Artemis I, the first flight of the Artemis program’s Space Launch System, NASA’s powerful new rocket. The cereal box-sized satellite traveled to deep space on the rocket then flew past the Moon in a direction to orbit the Sun.
During the initial phase of the mission, which began in December 2022 and completed in April 2023, the BioSentinel team successfully operated BioSentinel’s BioSensor hardware –a miniature biotechnology laboratory designed to measure how living yeast cells respond to long-term exposure to space radiation – in deep space. The team completed four experiments lasting two-weeks each but did not observe any yeast cell growth. They determined that deep space radiation was not the cause of the inactive yeast cells, but that their lack of growth was likely due to the yeast expiring after extended storage time of the spacecraft ahead of launch. The BioSentinel project builds on Ames’ history of carrying out biology studies in space using CubeSats – small satellites built from individual units each about four inches cubed. BioSentinel is a six-unit spacecraft weighing about 30 pounds. It houses the yeast cells in tiny compartments inside microfluidic cards – custom hardware that allows for the controlled flow of extremely small volumes of liquids that will activate and sustain the yeast. Data about radiation levels and the yeast’s growth and metabolism will be collected and stored aboard the spacecraft and then transmitted to the science team back on Earth.
October 2022: The BioSentinel ISS Control experiment completed ground control science operations at NASA Ames.
Nov. 16, 2022: BioSentinel launched to deep space aboard Artemis I.
Dec. 5, 2022: BioSentinel began science operations in deep space.
Dec. 19, 2022: BioSentinel began ground control science operations at NASA Ames.
Nov. 16, 2024: BioSentinel marks two years of continuous radiation observations in deep space, now more than 30 million miles from Earth.
The view shows a number of the Martian features that surround the Gediz Vallis channel, including Kukenán Butte, Pinnacle Ridge, Texoli Butte and even a distant glimpse of Gale Crater Rim.

Exactly how the channel came to be is currently up for debate among scientists. It's possible water flowed through it some eons ago, or that strong winds are responsible for the formation Or, perhaps landslides cascading down from Mount Sharp's higher elevations created Gediz Vallis, which could explain the boulders and debris Curiosity has found along its trip.
After over a decade of hard travels, Curiosity remains functional, if somewhat beat up from the tough Mars surface. The rover's next destination, a formation of weblike patterns called "the boxwork," lies further along Mount Sharp. First glimpsed in 2006 by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the boxwork spans six to 12 miles and could be the result of minerals carried by water into fractures along the mountain's surface.