Vi vender noget af alt det, der er sket siden vi sidst optog midt på sommeren.
1: Space X - Flight 14
2: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
3: Månen har fået 2 nye kratere:
3.1: Space Debris Impact Event Aug. 5th
3.2: Asteroide impact: McGetchin Crater
4: Hvad hvis vi havde haft en månebase?
5: Pga. 2024 YR4 som IKKE rammer Jorden i 2032
--
Topic 1: Starship Flight 14 – "It Finally Reached Orbit!"
Yesterday, September 28, 2026, SpaceX launched Starship Flight 14 from Starbase, Texas, and achieved its biggest milestone in program history—Starship reached low Earth orbit for the very first time!
The Drama (An Engine Fails): It almost didn't make it. During ascent, one of Starship’s six upper-stage engines shut down prematurely. Mission control briefly panicked, but since everything else was performing perfectly, they pushed through and fired the remaining engines to slip into orbit.
The Payload (20x the Bandwidth): For the first time ever, Starship wasn't just a hollow test tank. It carried and successfully deployed an operational stack of 26 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites. SpaceX noted that deploying these huge new V3 satellites was equivalent to flying 20 Falcon 9 rockets at once in terms of bandwidth capacity.
The Fiery Finish: SpaceX originally planned a 10-hour, 6-orbit flight, but cut it short to 3 hours for safety. Upon re-entry over the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii, Starship completed a landing burn but tipped over and exploded into a massive fireball on the water.
Space X 28.09.26 boiled down to 15min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSQnhKKmC1s
Topic 2: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope – "The Mother of Dark Matter"
Just 4 weeks ago, on August 30, 2026, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launched NASA's next flagship observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It is currently on a 3-month cruise to the Lagrange 2 (L2) point. Just days ago on September 25, NASA confirmed all global ground networks are officially locked in to receive its data.
The Hardware (The T-Rex Analogy): The telescope is roughly the size of a city tour bus and weighs as much as a Tyrannosaurus Rex (about 4.1 metric tons). It uses a 2.4-meter mirror (the same size as Hubble's).
The Superpower (100x Wider View): While it has the resolution of Hubble, its 300-megapixel wide-field infrared camera gives it a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble or JWST.
If Hubble is looking through a narrow straw to examine a single pixel of the sky, Roman is a massive widescreen IMAX theater looking at the entire wall at once. It will map the universe 1,000 times faster than Hubble.
The Mission: Because it can photograph hundreds of millions of galaxies in a fraction of the time, it is designed to track how dark matter clusters together and measure how dark energy is ripping the expansion of the universe apart. It will also down-link a crushing 1.4 terabytes of data every single day
This new Space Telescope has a primary mirror gifted by the National Reconnaissance Office from an unused spy satellite program.
Initial Steps: precise initial trajectory maneuvers have left the spacecraft with sufficient fuel reserves to potentially operate for over two decades rather than the originally budgeted ten years.
Topic 3: To nye Månekrater
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recently captured the dramatic aftermath of two completely distinct impact events on the moon.
Link: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/moon/nasas-moon-orbiter-spots-new-once-in-century-moon-crater/
1. The Human-Made Impact: The SpaceX Falcon 9 Crash
The Event: On August 5, 2026, a spent 4-ton SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage rocket crashed into the moon near Einstein Crater at about 8700 km/h
Backstory: The rocket originally launched in January 2025 to deliver two commercial lunar landers (Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost-1 and iSpace's Hakuto-R). After completing its mission, it was left drifting in an unstable, highly elongated orbit until the combined gravitational pull of the Earth, Moon, and Sun pulled it in for an unavoidable crash. [1, 2]
The Crater: The crash left an unintentional 18-meter wide and 3m deep crater.
Scientific Value: The NASA LRO team had to precisely tilt the orbiter to photograph the spot, knowing that a timing error of just 10 seconds would miss the target by miles. Because scientists knew the exact mass and speed of the rocket, this accidental impact serves as a perfect controlled experiment to study how lunar soil reacts to high-velocity impacts. [Der er altid noget at lære, også selvom det måske ikke var med vilje]
2. The McGetchin Crater
The Scale: The impact excavated a massive pit measuring 222 meters wide and 43 meters deep. This is the length of two football fields and deep enough to stack three city buses vertically.
The Impactor: The culprit was a rogue asteroid or comet fragment estimated to be the size of a 3-to-6-story building (roughly 10 to 20 meters across).
The Energy: It slammed into the eastern limb of the moon at a staggering speed. Scientists estimate it released energy equivalent to a 15-kiloton nuclear explosion—yet because the moon has no atmosphere to carry sound and nobody was looking at that exact spot, it happened in complete silence.
The Invisible Devastation: While the visible crater is 222 meters wide, NASA's LRO Diviner thermal instrument revealed that the impact violently shook and "fluffed up" the lunar dust (regolith) across an area 6.5 kilometers wide. Because this loosened soil is less dense, it loses heat rapidly, creating a massive night-time "cold spot" that drops temperatures by 9°C. Scientists have known about cold spots around young craters for more than a decade; they believe such spots form when an impact loosens the regolith for miles around a new crater, leaving it less dense. That loosely packed soil surrenders its warmth faster than compacted ground does. But by geologic standards, the features are short-lived, and most had already faded considerably by the time anyone saw them. That makes McGetchin a useful data point: It’s the largest fresh cold spot ever observed.
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/rare-new-lunar-crater-how-impacts-remodel-moon-surface &
https://www.astronomy.com/science/scientists-spot-a-new-crater-on-the-moon/
The Discovery: The impact occurred between April 11 and May 22, 2024. However, it wasn't discovered until late 2025 when a scientist named Robert Wagner spotted a massive, anomalous blast pattern sprawling across hundreds of pixels during a routine data check. The peer-reviewed findings were just published in September 2026.
Why It Matters: Statistically, an impact of this magnitude only happens on the moon once every 132 years. It is officially the largest newly formed impact crater humans have ever witnessed anywhere in the solar system since we began monitoring space.
Topic 4: Hvad hvis vi havde en bemandet månebase?
If an impact like the one that created the McGetchin Crater occurred near a manned lunar base, the consequences would be absolutely catastrophic. Because the moon has no atmosphere, it lacks a protective shield to burn up incoming space rocks or slow them down.
The Instant Obliteration Zone: Ground Zero: Anything within the 222-meter blast radius would instantly cease to exist.
The Shockwave: Unlike Earth, where air carries a blast wave, the kinetic energy here would transfer entirely into the ground. It would unleash a massive lunar earthquake (moonquake) that would ripple through the crust, cracking the thick, specialized concrete of habitats kilometers away and compromising their airtight seals.
Shrapnel and the "Jetting" Effect: High-Speed Debris: When an asteroid hits the moon, it triggers a process called jetting—where streams of vaporized rock and razor-sharp dust shoot out from the impact site.
The Angle Danger: While scientists previously modeled that debris shoots out at low angles under 2°, data from the McGetchin crater revealed that material actually launched at angles above 13°. For a base, this means debris wouldn't just skim the ground; it would behave like heavy artillery, raining down on top of habitats, solar panels, and communications towers from kilometers away.
The 6.5-Kilometer "Fluff" Zone:
Ruined Infrastructure: Data from UCLA planetary scientists showed that the McGetchin impact disturbed and completely rearranged the physical texture of the soil across a massive 6.5-kilometer-wide area.
The Sinkhole Effect: The impact violently "puffed up" the loose lunar dust (regolith). If a base's launch pads, roads, or heavy equipment were inside this 6.5 km radius, the ground underneath them would lose its structural density. Roads would cave in, and heavy equipment would unexpectedly sink into the loosened sediment.
The Orbital Shrapnel Threat: Because the moon has no atmosphere to slow debris down, a massive 15-kiloton-equivalent kinetic impact like McGetchin launches a massive cloud of high-velocity fragments which could cause a Global/Orbital Hazard.
Some of this ejecta can exceed lunar escape velocity (2.38 km/s) entering orbit around the Moon or even the Earth-Moon system.
The "Slow" Shrapnel (50 to 200 m/s): Even at the lowest end of the ejection spectrum, fragments are traveling between 180 km/h and 720 km/h. This material falls back down relatively close to the crater but easily retains enough kinetic energy to crack standard surface habitats or puncture spacesuits.
The Intermediate Shrapnel (500 to 2000 m/s): This debris poses the largest infrastructure risk. Material ejected at, 1.5 km/s ( altså 5400 km/h) doesn't stay local. It enters highly lofted, ballistic trajectories. Because it is traveling just under escape velocity, it can cross entire lunar hemispheres before falling back down. A colony on the exact opposite side of the moon could experience an unexpected artillery bombardment of razor-sharp glass and rock fragments hours after an impact occurred over the horizon.
The debris that stays just below escape velocity travels on ballistic trajectories, raining down on the entire opposite side of the moon hours later.
En tennis bold (57g) ville kunne flyve ~8400 km før den ville falde ned. Det ville tage 43min. (Månens omkreds er 10921 km (1/4 af Jordens)). En pistol skyder kugler ud med ~1000 km/h og en Assault rifle ~ 3400km/h.
Summary:
The Real Danger to Colonies: A habitat located 100 kilometers away is completely safe from the 6.5 km "fluff" zone, but it could still be bombarded by secondary impacts from ballistic shrapnel hours later. Furthermore, any orbital infrastructure—like communication satellites or a space station in Low Lunar Orbit—would suddenly face a cloud of hyper-velocity space junk generated instantly by the impact.
By building a base on the Moon to utilize its low gravity for easy space travel, we are also setting up camp on a world where the physics of that same low gravity ensures that every local asteroid strike becomes a global threat to the colony.
Topic 5: We know this because
Kan du huske dommedags asteroiden 2024-YR4?
Timeline:
1. The Earth Scare (Early 2025)
The Discovery: Discovered on December 27, 2024, by the ATLAS telescope in Chile. It slipped past our networks because it approached Earth from the "day side," hidden in the blinding glare of the Sun.
The Threat: It is a dense, rocky, potato-shaped asteroid roughly 53 to 67 meters wide (the size of a 15-story building).
By February 2025, tracking math showed a terrifying 3.1% chance it would slam into Earth on December 22, 2032. It became the first asteroid in history to shoot up to a Level 3 on the Torino Scale (the hazard matrix astronomers use). If it hit, it would function as a "city-killer," unleashing an explosion like the 1908 Tunguska event and flattening an area the size of a major metropolitan city.
The Resolution: By late February 2025, extra ground-based observations pinned its orbit down enough to completely rule out an Earth impact.
2. The Moon Scare (Late 2025 – Early 2026)
The asteroid still had a 4.3% chance it would hit the Moon instead (stadigvæk 22. Dec. 2032).
The Nightmare Scenario: Scientists calculated that if a 60-meter rock hit the Moon, it would create a massive 1-kilometer-wide crater—the largest lunar impact witnessed in human history.
The Global Ejecta Risk (Your Shrapnel Connection!): Scientists published a paper modeling the impact. It would have blasted 100 million kilograms of debris into space. Because of the Moon's low escape velocity, 10% of that shrapnel would leave the Moon and eventually rain down into Earth's orbit, risking a Kessler Syndrome event that could shred communication satellites.
3. The JWST Hero Moment (March 2026)
The Problem: The asteroid was too faint and too far away for any telescope on Earth to see it again until 2028. Astronomers couldn't sit around for years wondering if the Moon was going to get blasted.
The Solution: In February 2026, the international planetary defense team used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for a hyper-precise tracking attempt. Even though JWST was built to look at galaxies billions of light-years away, scientists pointed its tiny field of view at this near-invisible speck millions of kilometers away.
The Final Verdict: On March 5, 2026, using the ultra-precise JWST tracking data, the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA officially announced the risk to the Moon is 0%. The asteroid will safely fly past the Moon at a distance of about 21,000 kilometers.
Men da vi troede at den måske ville ramme månen, så kørte forskere simulationer for at kunne forudsige hvad der ville ske. Det er derfor vi nu ved alt det, som vi talte om før.
The fresh McGetchin Crater, give us precise metrics on how this hyper-velocity shrapnel threatens the future of lunar industrialization and orbital architecture.
Internet Rabbit holes to explore :
1. http://eyes.nasa.gov — Explore the solar system in 3D
2. http://stellarium-web.org — Real sky map in your browser
3. http://apod.nasa.gov — NASA's astronomy picture of the day
4. http://images.nasa.gov — NASA's entire visual archive, free
