GoKawiil
Tech News
A team led by Agustín Sánchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country has identified a giant ten-sided atmospheric wave encircling Saturn's south pole, mirroring the famous six-sided hexagon long observed at the planet's north pole. The feature was first glimpsed in amateur astronomer images from 2024 and confirmed through further analysis in 2025.
The nonprofit Fermi Explorer Mission, led by Philip Johnston, has spent a year designing a low-cost interstellar spacecraft meant to actually launch toward Alpha Centauri, unlike Yuri Milner's stalled Breakthrough Starshot project. Facing a persistent engineering puzzle over powering a lightweight solar craft without adding excessive weight, the team turned to artificial intelligence tools to help chart a viable trajectory. The mission, backed by private donors and budgeted at $15 million, plans to carry a small payload including art, messages, and a copy of the Golden Record.
Starcloud founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean, and Ezra Feilden, along with program manager Garret Jameson, have unveiled Fermi Explorer, a nonprofit aiming to send a 1-kilogram spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri using existing space technology. The mission, budgeted at roughly $15 million and targeting a 2029 launch, would take about 80,000 years to reach the star and would be the sixth object to leave our solar system after Voyager and its peers.