Spectrum Rocket Crashes Into Sea After Orbital Launch Attempt, Company Calls Test A 'Success'
A highly anticipated test flight aimed at launching satellites from Europe ended in a fiery explosion just seconds after takeoff from Norway Sunday. The uncrewed Spectrum rocket, developed by German startup Isar Aerospace, was billed as Europe's first attempt at an orbital launch from its own soil. The mission was part of a broader push to expand the continent's commercial space industry.
The rocket lifted off from Andøya Spaceport, located on a remote Norwegian island that sits nearly 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle. Launch occurred at 12:30 p.m. local time before the flight was purposefully terminated roughly 30 seconds later, causing the rocket to plunge into the sea in what the company described as a 'controlled manner.'
Video footage from the launch shows the Spectrum rocket soaring into the sky before suddenly losing altitude and crashing into the water below in a fiery explosion. Andøya Space, the Norwegian agency operating the launch site, confirmed the launch pad was undamaged in the crash, but that 'crisis response' measures were activated following the incident.
Despite the dramatic crash, Isar Aerospace framed the event as a success, stating that the test flight provided 'a substantial amount of flight data and experience to apply on future missions.' The launch had already been delayed several times due to poor weather conditions, including strong winds and rain, before finally taking off on Sunday.
While Europe has long launched rockets from sites in French Guiana and Cape Canaveral, this test was part of a larger effort to establish a homegrown space economy. Despite the perceived setback, Isar Aerospace remains committed to further testing and its longterm goal of making Europe a player in the global satellite launch industry.
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As Rubin captures pictures of millions of cosmic objects, the observatory will also be searching for signs of two completely invisible things: dark matter and dark energy. All of the stars, galaxies, gas—all of the matter we can observe—turns out to be just 5 percent of "the total stuff in the universe," says Alex Drlica-Wagner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. The rest is dark matter, a kind of matter that doesn't emit or absorb light, which accounts for 25 percent of the universe's composition, and dark energy, a phantom entity that makes up 70 percent. While scientists have never directly observed either, they've seen the cosmos behaving in certain ways that suggest they must exist. Rubin won't reveal all of their secrets, but the sheer amount of data will serve as a veritable playground for scientists to test their theories about these phenomena. Astronomers first suspected the existence of dark matter in the 1930s when they noticed that some galaxies remained clustered together even though they were traveling fast enough to fly apart, suggesting that another force was keeping the galactic web intact. In the 1970s, Rubin's namesake astronomer discovered a similar effect at the edges of galaxies, where whizzing stars that should have escaped were instead being held tight. The mark of the unseen material can even be found using starlight itself. Dark matter can bend light as it passes by, making its source—a distant galaxy, for example—appear distorted. Rubin will collect these warped views, allowing astronomers to "map out where the dark matter is by how we see the light bending as it travels to us," Drlica-Wagner says. Those maps can help illuminate the nature of dark-matter particles, including whether they're cold or hot—seemingly small characteristics with the capacity to reshape our understanding of how the universe assembles galaxies. Dark energy is even more mysterious. The idea emerged in the 1990s, when astrophysicists calculated that the universe was expanding faster over time rather than slowing down, which ran counter to laws of physics that governed the rest of the cosmos. Dark energy was determined to be the driving force, although scientists don't know what it actually is, only that it appears to behave differently than anything else in the universe, Drlica-Wagner says. Unlike dark matter, which, like the regular cosmic stuff, is likely made up of some kind of particles, dark energy stretches the very fabric of space, pushing galaxies apart rather than drawing them together. Rubin's massive catalog of exploding stars will come in handy here: Scientists can use certain kinds of supernovas to trace the universe's expansion, and, in turn, dark energy's role in it. Rubin data could confirm or refute new theories that suggest dark energy is changing over time, rather than remaining constant, upending even Einstein's predictions for this perplexing force. In the end, the most exciting discoveries Rubin makes might be the ones astronomers haven't yet anticipated. Such is the nature of really good new telescopes: the thrill of what we don't know we don't know. "If someone says, I have never seen a six-foot-tall-rabbit, you can say, sure, how hard have you looked?" Michael Wood-Vasey, an astronomer at the University of Pittsburgh who has spent years helping to prepare the Rubin observatory for operations, says. Perhaps the new observatory, with its constant, scouring gaze, will turn up some cosmic rabbits.
