NASA is taking space to NFL games this season. @NASA and the @NFL are teaming up for aircraft flyovers, astronaut appearances and space exhibits at games around the country. Today, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman joined fans at Ravens–Saints in Baltimore

Tesla just built its first Cybercab using cathode material made in-house at Gigafactory Texas. The @robotaxi team says the material came from Tesla’s own cathode plant, which the company calls the first large-scale cathode production facility in North America. It feeds directly into the company’s 4680 battery program. Tesla currently lists 40 GWh of 4680 cell capacity and 10 GWh of cathode-material capacity in Texas. The company is steadily bringing more of the battery supply chain under the same roof as the vehicles that use it.

A single spiral is split in two realities. Across the diagonal, NGC 1566 becomes a study in opposites: Hubble’s ultraviolet and visible light at upper left, Webb’s near- and mid-infrared at lower right. Where Hubble sees darkness, Webb sees fire. Dust that swallows starlight in Hubble’s view glows instead in Webb’s infrared, turning hidden lanes into molten orange and red. The same spiral arms that look veiled and shadowed on one side blaze with structure on the other—an inverse of light and night. Together the telescopes map the full cycle of star birth: the dust that hides it, and the dust that reveals it. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), Rupali Chandar (UToledo), Daniela Calzetti (UMass), PHANGS Team

SpaceX just launched the classified USSF-385 mission for the U.S. Space Force from Vandenberg. The payload hasn’t been publicly disclosed, but launch analysts believe it may be another batch of Starshield-based satellites headed to low Earth orbit.

SpaceXAI could have more than 1.2 million GB200 and GB300 GPUs running inside Colossus 2 by the end of this year. Elon Musk says @xai’s Colossus 2 already has 110,000 GB200s and 440,000 GB300s. Another 220,000 GB300s are expected online next week, another 220,000 in November, and a third 220,000 batch could follow by late December. If all three additions happen, that would bring Colossus 2 from 550,000 to about 1.21 million GB200/GB300 GPUs.

Starlink is starting to connect ordinary 4G phones directly to satellites in more countries. @Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell service just received regulatory approval in Bangladesh, where standard 4G phones will initially get SMS, data messaging and WhatsApp calls beyond terrestrial coverage. Airtel Africa also commercially launched Starlink Mobile in the DRC in August. No satellite phone or dish is needed. The phone connects to a Starlink satellite that acts like a cell tower in space.

NASA’s Swift telescope may only have weeks left to do science. The @NASA spacecraft just brought its third instrument back online and can once again automatically swing toward gamma-ray bursts, but its orbit is falling fast. NASA estimates Swift could drop below the altitude needed for science operations by early to mid-October.

Astronomers have detected radio bursts coming directly from an exoplanet for the first time. Beta Pictoris b is 63 light-years away, and the bursts appear to be auroral radio emission. They imply a magnetic field at least 1.25 kilogauss, roughly 2,500 times stronger than Earth’s. We’re starting to measure the magnetic fields of planets around other stars.

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Tesla’s dedicated Semi factory is much further along than I realized. The 1.8-million-square-foot plant is designed to build up to 50,000 trucks a year, with Standard, Long Range and European-spec Semis all coming off the same production line. @Tesla_Semi says the redesigned truck now uses its in-house 4680 cells, cutting battery mass and kWh without sacrificing range. They’re clearly getting serious about scaling Semi now.

Google is about to put its AI chips in orbit. Project Suncatcher from @Google launches its first test next week on a @SpaceX Falcon 9. The satellite will see whether Google’s TPUs can handle radiation, launch forces and the thermal extremes of space. The long-term goal is much bigger: clusters of solar-powered satellites running AI workloads in space and linking together with lasers.

ESA and JAXA just powered up the Ramses planetary defense spacecraft for the first time. It has to launch by spring 2028 to meet the 375-meter asteroid Apophis before its safe April 2029 flyby, just ~32,000 km above Earth, closer than geostationary satellites. Ramses will watch Earth’s gravity physically change the asteroid as it passes. Artist’s impression: ©ESA-Science Office

Sunrise at Starbase. Opportunistic full stack testing is planned ahead of Flight 14's launch, which is on track for Monday, Sept. 28, pending regulatory approval

AI data centers in orbit are starting to get very real. @SpaceX is partnering with @nvidia to bring Vera Rubin-class compute to its first Starmind AI satellites. The first-generation spacecraft is planned around an optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 system, adapting datacenter-class AI infrastructure for space. This is a pretty wild direction for orbital computing to go.

Starship Flight 14 is now fully stacked at Starbase. If it flies as planned, @SpaceX will send Starship into orbit for the first time, keep it there for nearly 10 hours, and deploy 26 @Starlink V3 satellites intended to remain in orbit. This is the first Starship flight that’s actually meant to leave hardware in orbit.

🚨 EINSTEIN PREDICTED THIS. THEN ASTRONOMERS ACTUALLY SAW IT. There is something very strange about this image. You are looking at a distant galaxy with four bright points around it. They look like four separate objects, but they aren’t. All four points are actually the same quasar, seen four different ways. The object is called QSO 2237+0305, better known as the Einstein Cross. The reason it looks this way goes back to an idea Albert Einstein published in his theory of general relativity in 1915. Einstein showed that gravity isn’t simply a force pulling things around. Massive objects actually curve spacetime, and light passing through that curved space can be bent. A massive galaxy happens to sit between us and this quasar. Its gravity bends the quasar’s light as it travels toward Earth, sending the light along different paths. By the time that light reaches us, we see four images of the same quasar arranged around the galaxy. Einstein had predicted that gravity could bend light, but actually seeing the effect was another matter. The first confirmed gravitational lens was found in 1979. The Einstein Cross itself was discovered in 1985. And that’s what makes this image so interesting. It isn’t just a strange-looking photograph. It’s a real example of an idea that began as mathematics on paper more than a century ago. The quasar didn’t split into four. Space itself changed the path of its light. And after traveling across an enormous part of the universe, that light eventually reached us in four different ways. Einstein wrote the equations. The universe made the picture. Source: NASA / ESA

Here’s your pick-me-up from the universe. 💫 Explore this week's Astronomy Picture of the Day images, each paired with a brief explanation from a professional astronomer: go.nasa.gov/4y2QAaR

Many spacecraft have to wait until they pass over a ground station to send data home. @Starlink’s mini laser terminals change that by relaying data through other satellites in orbit instead. NASA says Artemis III will use two of them on Orion, built on the same Starlink laser network that already has more than 25,000 lasers operating on orbit.

This pulsar wind nebula near the center of the Milky Way may be accelerating electrons up to 2 PeV. That's an enormous amount of energy packed into a single particle.

Pikachu spent 67 days aboard the ISS and made about 1,040 trips around Earth as part of the @esa × @Pokemon collaboration. Seeing it actually floating around up there is great 😂