News
Martian dust storms are driving away spacecraft-saving dust devils
Dust devils are pretty common on Mars – the Red Planet is, after all, a very dusty and windy place. What’s a bit more rare is capturing one of the whirling devils on film. That’s because they fade away nearly as quickly as they appear.
But in October 2019, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter managed to snap a photo of a massive dust devil in action, courtesy of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), a powerful camera that’s been snapping photos of the Martian surface since 2006.
NASA’s first glimpse of one of these dust storms came in 1971 when the Mariner 9 spacecraft — the first to orbit another planet — arrived at the red planet. Since then, we’ve seen quite a few of these dusty spectacles global storms: in 1977 (twice), 1982, 1994, 2001, 2007 and 2018.
In 2018, we lost the Opportunity rover to the strongest dust storm ever observed on Mars. It blotted out nearly all of the sun’s light for several weeks, turning day into night and preventing the rover from being able to charge its batteries. (Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, ran on solar power, as opposed to Curiosity and the Mars 2020 rover, which run on nuclear power.)
Martian dust storms are common, especially at specific times in the year, like during the southern hemisphere’s spring and summer. Localized storms tend to last a couple of days and can cover regions of the planet the size of the United States. But planet-encircling ones are a different story.
These massive, global storms are usually unpredictable, and can linger for months at a time. “We still don’t know what drives the variability, but the 2018 storm gives another data point,” says Scott Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who’s a lead in NASA’s dust storm investigation.
Dust devils are rotating columns of air and dust that form when hot air from the surface rises. The current of air created forms a whirlwind, which can be useful for clearing off solar panels on spacecraft as they pass over.
As we move towards potential human missions we need to know how the dust will affect astronauts as well as their equipment. Understanding how often these phenomena occur will be extremely helpful for future missions.
During the dust storm of 2018, Curiosity was able to collect data about the storm, watching as its effects were felt half a world away from where Opportunity sat, hunkered down and hibernating.
Curiosity discovered that dust devils disappear during a dust storm, which happens to be when we need them the most. And they’re gone for several months afterwards as well. This is because the storm interrupts the wind-generating processes that spawn the dust devils.
According to Guzewich, understanding a global storm’s impact on dust devils is a crucial component in planning how to manage equipment during future Mars missions. “You need to be prepared to go a while before your next dust devil passes over and cleans you off,” he said.
Researchers at the University of Arizona recently published details on a newly photographed dust devil, which formed on the volcanic plains of Amazonis Planitia.
According to the HiRISE imaging team, the core of the dust devil is 164 feet (50 meters) wide, and probably about 2,32 feet (650 meters) tall. As massive as it sounds, there are even larger ones whirling around.
In March 2012, HiRISE took a photo of an active dust devil that was a whopping 12 miles (20 kilometers) tall. But was only slightly wider than the most recent one, at just over 229 feet (70 meters) wide.
For the first time, humanity has a fleet of spacecraft orbiting Mars as well as one rover roaming the surface right now (with two more to follow in the coming months). With their help, scientists will be able to better understand this puzzling phenomenon.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
Elon Musk teased a glowing new Boring Company merch idea, complete with a Geiger counter.
Elon Musk teased the next piece of Boring Company merchandise on X Saturday, and it is exactly as unserious as fans of the company’s product history have come to expect. “The next @boringcompany merch will put Uranium in Uranus,” Musk wrote in a thread posted early Saturday morning. He followed up by explaining that the item would glow in the dark, “because otherwise how could you find it,” and that a Geiger counter would be sold separately as “an optional strap-on.”
Musk closed the thread with a line that doubles as a mission statement for the tunneling company’s merchandise arm: “It’s not easy coming up with something that is both outrageously unsellable and yet extremely popular.”
The Boring Company has built a small but consistent side business out of novelty items that start as jokes and end up selling out. The company’s Not-a-Flamethrower raised roughly $10 million in a few days back in 2018, moving all 20,000 units it produced. Its Burnt Hair perfume, priced around $100 a bottle, sold out fast enough that scalpers were flipping units on eBay for ten times the retail price. Boring Bricks, made from tunneling spoil, followed the same playbook of teasing a product on X months before it became real.
Musk has not said what the actual item will be, only that it involves uranium and glows in the dark. Given the pattern, that vagueness is probably intentional. Past merch announcements have started as one-line jokes and taken weeks or months to turn into an actual product listing on the company’s site, and there is no guarantee this one follows through at all.
The timing lines up with a period of real momentum for the Boring Company outside of the joke merchandise. The company said last week it plans to double the number of operational stations on its Vegas Loop by the end of the year, a target tied to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers. Prufrock-5, one of the company’s tunnel boring machines, also just wrapped a test tunnel in Bastrop, Texas, and is expected to relaunch on its next assignment in November.
Whether the uranium joke turns into an actual product remains to be seen. Musk’s post did not include a price, a shipping date, or even a name for the item, which has historically meant a Boring Company website page goes up quietly, password protected, sometime before an announcement.
News
NASA taps SpaceX for more astronaut missions as Boeing Starliner remains grounded
NASA just gave SpaceX a $946 million contract for three more astronaut missions through 2030.
NASA has awarded SpaceX a $946 million contract modification covering three more astronaut missions to the International Space Station, according to an announcement the agency published Friday. The award adds Crew-15, Crew-16, and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s existing Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract, bringing the agreement’s total value to $5.92 billion across 17 flights.
SpaceX confirmed the award on X, writing that it was excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the Space Station from Florida. The new missions cover ground, launch, in orbit, and return operations, along with cargo transport and a lifeboat capability while docked at the station, and the period of performance runs through 2030.
We’re excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch @NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the @Space_Station from Florida https://t.co/Qm16vVK9F3 pic.twitter.com/drg3s7GtuM
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 18, 2026
The award follows a notice of intent NASA issued in May, when the agency first signaled it would purchase up to six additional post certification missions from SpaceX. Teslarati covered that filing at the time, noting NASA cited technical issues and schedule delays encountered by Boeing as a driving factor. Friday’s contract modification locks in three of those six missions, with the remaining three left open for NASA to award later, potentially to Boeing if Starliner clears certification.
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner has still not flown an operational crew rotation mission for NASA. The spacecraft’s most recent crewed test flight in 2024 ended without the astronauts returning aboard Starliner, and the company has spent the time since working through thruster problems. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said this week that SpaceX is not retiring Crew Dragon today, for sure, while stopping short of committing to fly it past 2030.
Crew-12 is currently docked at the space station, and NASA has said Crew-13 is targeting a launch in the coming weeks. The newly awarded Crew-15 through Crew-17 missions extend SpaceX’s role as NASA’s primary way of getting astronauts to and from orbit well into the back half of the decade, regardless of what happens with Starliner or Starship in the meantime.
Investor's Corner
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
New drone footage shows Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory steel frame nearing completion at Giga Texas.
Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory at Gigafactory Texas is closing in on a finished steel frame, according to drone footage posted Thursday afternoon by longtime site observer Joe Tegtmeyer. In the video, Tegtmeyer said structural steel assembly is now about five column grids away from reaching the building’s north perimeter beam, putting the primary skeleton in its final stretch roughly six months after Tesla broke ground on the North Campus site in late March.
The Giga Texas Optimus Factory latest update … construction keeps moving fast!
Steel assembly is now only about 5 column grids from the north perimeter beam. Concrete is going in on the three upper floors, rebar is still being laid for more pours, and footing / grade-beam work… pic.twitter.com/qvFPvwnYzW
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 17, 2026
Tegtmeyer’s footage shows concrete already going in on three upper floors while crews continue laying rebar and pouring grade beam footings at ground level. That kind of parallel work, steel rising at one end of the site while concrete sets at the other, is a scheduling approach Tesla used at the original Giga Texas building and appears to be repeating here to save time before the plant’s targeted 2027 production start.
Teslarati has tracked the building’s progress since Tesla confirmed construction was officially underway in May, when the first steel structure went up on what was then bare, reclaimed land. The facility is part of a more than 5.2 million square foot expansion of Giga Texas’s North Campus that Tesla has said will eventually run nearly the length of the existing vehicle factory, over 4,000 feet, while sitting somewhat narrower. Musk has pegged the long term output target at 10 million Optimus units a year once the line is running at full capacity, a volume that would dwarf the one million unit pilot line Tesla is standing up separately at its Fremont, California factory.
Tesla Giga Texas to feature massive Optimus V4 production line
The Texas facility sits alongside another major buildout on the same campus. Terafab, the joint Tesla and SpaceX chip fabrication plant that will eventually supply the silicon running Optimus units in the field. Housing robot assembly and chip production on the same grounds is a deliberate supply chain decision, cutting down on the shipping and lead time that would otherwise sit between the two.
Tesla has not given an updated timeline beyond its previously stated goal of bringing high volume Optimus production online at the site in the summer of 2027. Fremont’s smaller pilot line began mass producing the current Gen 3 robot in January, with that plant expected to build tens of thousands of units this year primarily to generate the real world data Tesla needs to refine the robot’s software before Giga Texas ramps up. Six months of visible construction progress, tracked almost entirely through Tegtmeyer’s recurring drone flights, gives the clearest outside look yet at how seriously Tesla is treating that 2027 deadline.
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
NASA taps SpaceX for more astronaut missions as Boeing Starliner remains grounded
