NO STORMS TODAY: Solar activity is low. The face of the sun is almost blank (only two tiny sunspots), and no CMEs are heading for Earth. The odds of a geomagnetic storm in the next 48 to 72 hours is very low. Solar flare alerts: SMS Text
ARTEMIS II CREATED A GIANT 'PLASMA CONTRAIL': You've heard of contrails. But plasma contrails? NASA's Artemis II rocket created a giant one after it launched to the Moon on April 1, 2026.
A new paper accepted for publication in the Geophysical Research Letters shows Artemis's ionospheric trail stretching more than 5,000 km across North America:
Above: Red and yellow dots mark places where the ionosphere's electron content was disturbed upward; blue dots, mostly near the start of the trail, mark depletions: movie.
"This is the first report of such elongated disturbances generated during a spacecraft launch," wrote the authors led by Jong-Min Choi of National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan.
The "contrail" appeared in the ionosphere, a layer of Earth's upper atmosphere ionized by solar radiation. The Artemis II upper stage fired its engine for 18 minutes inside the ionosphere. Pressure from the hot exhaust shoved local plasma aside as the rocket raced overhead at 18,300 mph, leaving a disturbed trail along its path.
Choi's team discovered it when they looked at data from 3,500 GPS stations across the Americas. These are public networks built for surveying and earthquake monitoring. The contrail disturbed GPS signals picked up at hundreds of stations.
A day later, it happened again. When the Orion crew capsule fired its own engine to head for the Moon, a second streak, about half as long, appeared over the same region.
No harm done? The plasma contrails faded after about an hour, and the paper reports no problems with GPS. But Artemis II may be just a preview. When SpaceX begins frequent launches of its giant Starship rocket, plasma contrails could become bigger and more common. The experiment is about to begin...
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ALIEN MIND CRYSTAL BALL--BIG THINK EDITION: The brains of octopuses are so different from ours, they're often called "alien minds." That makes the Alien Mind Crystal Ball more than a glass sculpture -- it’s a fascinating conversation piece inspired by one of nature’s strangest and smartest creatures. Bonus: It has been to space:
You can have it for $149.95. On Oct. 14, 2026, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched this sculpture onboard a cosmic ray research balloon. For 3 hours, it floated more than 103,310 feet above the Sierra Nevada mountains of central California while cosmic ray sensors inside the payload gathered data for our radiation monitoring program.
This is a massive item. It weighs more than 2 lb. We had to use an unusually large 2000 gram balloon to launch it. The crystal ball comes with a full-color gift card showing the octopus floating at the top of Earth's atmosphere. The interior of the card tells the story of the flight and where it landed.
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