When the James Webb Space Telescope launched on 25 December 2021, it carried a list of 344 single points of failure. Each one was a step or a part where a single fault would have crippled the mission, with no second chance and no way to send anyone to fix it. The telescope cleared all of them. It now sits about a million miles from Earth, doing the most sensitive infrared astronomy ever attempted, on roughly the power of a household kettle.

Both halves of that are true, and both are worth taking apart, because the figures are precise and the precision is the point.

344 ways to fail

The number comes from Mike Menzel, Webb’s lead mission systems engineer at NASA, who has said the observatory launched with 344 single-point failures on its books. A single point of failure, in engineering terms, is a place where one thing going wrong takes everything with it. Most spacecraft have a handful. Webb had hundreds.

About 80 per cent of them were tied to the deployment, the slow unfolding of a telescope that had been folded up to fit inside its rocket. That sequence relied on roughly 140 release mechanisms, 70 hinge assemblies, eight motors, some 400 pulleys, and around a quarter of a mile of cable, each of which had to work on command, in order, the first time.

What made the list so unforgiving was the destination. Webb was not going to low orbit, where Hubble could be visited and repaired by astronauts five times. It was going somewhere no crew can reach, which meant the usual safety net, send someone up to fix it, did not exist. Every one of the 344 had to hold on its own.

The fortnight that decided it

The riskiest part was the sunshield, a five-layer screen the size of a tennis court that has to separate and tension without tearing or snagging. It is the single most complex deployment ever flown, and it is the reason so much of the risk was packed into the first two weeks.

The sunshield reached its final, tensioned shape on 4 January 2022, ten days after launch. The project manager at the time, Bill Ochs, told reporters that finishing it retired somewhere between 70 and 75 per cent of the single-point failures on the original list. The rest fell away as the mirror segments locked into place over the following days. By the end of the fortnight, the most dangerous machine NASA had ever unfolded had unfolded.

Less power than a kettle

Here the popular line is right, with one number worth pinning down. The spacecraft and its four instruments run on about one kilowatt. The solar array is built to deliver closer to two kilowatts, but that extra capacity is margin, sized so the telescope still has enough as the panels degrade over its mission.

So the working figure is about a kilowatt, and a lot of household kettles draw more than that, particularly the three-kilowatt kind common outside North America. A telescope unpacking the early universe really does run on less electricity than the appliance that makes your tea.

The reason it can is the sunshield again. Webb has to keep its detectors extraordinarily cold, down to around 7 kelvin on one instrument, and cooling is usually the most power-hungry thing a cold spacecraft does. By parking the sunshield between the telescope and the Sun, Webb does most of that cooling passively, simply by sitting in deep shade, rather than by running power-hungry refrigeration. The shade that protects it also keeps its electricity bill tiny.

A million miles out

That deep shade only works at the right address. Webb orbits the Sun-Earth point known as L2, about 1.5 million kilometres away, near enough a million miles, where it can keep the Sun, Earth, and Moon all behind a single shield.

It also means the telescope is on its own. The same distance that makes the observatory work is the distance that made the 344 single points of failure so tense, because none of them could be reached if they jammed. The achievement was not just building something this delicate. It was building something this delicate that had to survive its own unpacking, unattended, a million miles from the nearest spanner.

It has been returning science since July 2022.

The list of 344 is now history, which is the only acceptable place for a list like that to end up.

The post 344 steps stood between the James Webb Space Telescope and total failure — any one could have ended it — and the telescope that survived them all now runs on less power than a household kettle, a million miles from Earth appeared first on Space Daily.

Relativity Space has reached orbit exactly zero times. Its only rocket flew once, in March 2023, climbed cleanly through the hardest part of the atmosphere, and then a second-stage engine quit and the vehicle fell into the Atlantic a few minutes after liftoff. On June 17, 2026, that same company announced it would build and fly a science orbiter to Mars in 2028 anyway.

The mission is the first under a newly created Interplanetary Sciences Program, run under CEO Eric Schmidt. It would carry a NASA instrument suite, double as a communications relay for whatever is operating on the Martian surface, and be paid for not by the agency but by a philanthropic backer Relativity has declined to name.

The rocket that flew once

Relativity flew its 3D-printed Terran 1 a single time, on March 23, 2023. The rocket passed max-q, the point of peak aerodynamic stress, then lost its upper stage and never made orbit. A month later the company retired the small launcher to concentrate on the larger, reusable Terran R.

Terran R is a medium-class rocket roughly in the Falcon 9 weight class, with a first flight Relativity has slated for late 2026 from Cape Canaveral. Industry sources expect that to slip to 2027, a delay consistent with the development pace of nearly every new orbital-class launcher of the past decade.

The Mars orbiter would be Terran R’s interplanetary debut. If the rocket flies close to schedule, the 2028 transfer window to Mars is reachable. If it slips, the mission slips with it. There is no version of this where the orbiter beats the rocket to the pad.

What the orbiter would carry

The science payload comes from NASA’s Ames Research Center, which will design, build, and integrate it. The centerpiece is an atmospheric suite NASA calls Aeolus — four instruments meant to deliver the first integrated, daily, global picture of Martian winds, temperatures, dust, and clouds. A radar instrument would map subsurface ice and geology, the kind of water-resource data future crewed missions would lean on.

NASA says it will operate the instruments for at least one Martian year and build the pipeline that turns raw readings into usable science, under what it describes as its first six-year reimbursable Space Act Agreement. Relativity builds, owns, and flies the spacecraft; NASA supplies the instruments and the data processing.

Then there is the relay. The orbiter is being pitched to carry high-bandwidth laser and radio links back to Earth plus radio communications with surface assets. That matters because NASA’s working Mars relay fleet — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MAVEN, and Odyssey — is aging, with no committed replacement for the data backhaul every Mars rover depends on. A privately built relay arriving in the late 2020s would fill a hole the agency has openly worried about.

Relativity has said all of the mission’s scientific data will be released publicly. The control questions are harder. Who sets the relay schedule when multiple surface assets compete for the same downlink? What happens to a publicly funded rover if a privately owned orbiter becomes the only way to hear from it? Those answers are not in the announcement.

The Schmidt factor

The mission is inseparable from Eric Schmidt. The former Google chief executive took a controlling stake and became CEO of a cash-strained Relativity in March 2025, succeeding co-founder Tim Ellis. He arrived with money and with a network of science philanthropists.

Schmidt has framed the company’s goal as making access to space routine and pushing science beyond Earth, describing the Interplanetary Sciences Program as a step built on the Terran R platform. The orbiter is meant as a proof of concept; Relativity has not detailed the missions that would follow.

It is also not the only Schmidt-adjacent payload on Terran R’s manifest. Schmidt Sciences, the philanthropic vehicle Schmidt founded with his wife Wendy, announced in January 2026 the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System. That suite includes Lazuli, a space telescope with a primary mirror larger than Hubble’s, also targeting a launch as soon as 2028 on Terran R.

Two flagship science missions, one unflown rocket, one fortune behind much of both. Whether Schmidt Sciences is the Mars orbiter’s specific backer is unconfirmed; the company will only say the funder is philanthropic.

A privately funded mission to Mars

Privately backed science is not new in itself. The Breakthrough Initiatives funded ground-based SETI work. Jared Isaacman — now NASA’s administrator — bankrolled human spaceflight before taking the job. What is new in the Relativity model is the scale of capital a Mars orbiter requires, the presence of NASA instruments aboard a privately owned spacecraft, and the folding of commercial communications into what has historically been sovereign infrastructure.

This is also not Relativity’s first private Mars plan. In 2022 the company and Impulse Space announced a Mars lander to fly on Terran R, originally targeting the 2024 window; a 2023 update pushed it to as soon as 2026, and neither company has said much about it since.

The 2028 window is getting crowded regardless. SpaceX continues to pitch Starship cargo flights to Mars in roughly the same period, without firm payload commitments. More privately developed hardware may be pointed at the planet in 2028 than at any prior window. Whether all of it actually flies is a separate question, and Mars schedules are famously elastic.

The credibility test

Relativity’s announcement lands at an awkward point in its own story. It still has to prove Terran R can reach orbit. It has to prove the rocket can be reused on a useful cadence. And it has to show a launch company can build, integrate, and operate a deep-space science platform — a different engineering discipline entirely.

Plenty of launch startups have promised spacecraft alongside their rockets; few delivered both. The ones that came closest — SpaceX with Dragon, Rocket Lab with its Photon bus — got there through years of incremental flight experience Relativity does not yet have. The Mars orbiter would compress that curve dramatically, or expose how steep it still is.

The schedule offers no slack. If the program slips by a single Mars window, 26 months, the orbiter becomes a 2030 or 2031 mission, and the case for it shifts with it.

For now the orbiter is instrument designs at Ames, tank hardware in a Long Beach factory, and a 2028 launch window that, like every Mars window, opens and closes on the planet’s schedule rather than anyone’s. The rocket meant to carry it has still never left the pad. Both have to work, roughly two years apart, and Mars does not hold the window open.

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The oldest solid material ever identified on Earth did not form on Earth, or anywhere near it. It came down inside a meteorite that fell near the town of Murchison, in country Victoria, on a spring morning in 1969. Sealed in that rock were microscopic grains of stardust, and the oldest of them formed roughly 7 billion years ago, well before the Sun.

The claim is accurate, with one detail worth keeping straight: 7 billion years is the age of the oldest grains, not of all of them.

The meteorite

At about 11 in the morning on 28 September 1969, people around Murchison heard a series of booms and saw a fireball trailing smoke across the sky. Fragments came down over several square kilometres, and more than 100 kilograms were eventually collected.

The rock is a carbonaceous chondrite, a primitive type rich in carbon compounds, and because the fall was witnessed and the material gathered quickly, Murchison became one of the most studied meteorites in the world. The grains that matter here are tiny pieces of silicon carbide, far smaller than a grain of sand, recovered by dissolving the surrounding rock in acid until only the most durable specks remain.

How you date a grain older than the Sun

These specks are not dated the way a rock on Earth is. They are dated by how long they drifted through space.

Before they were swept into the cloud that became our solar system, the grains spent a very long time as free-floating interstellar dust. Out there they were exposed to galactic cosmic rays, high-energy particles that strike solid matter and, now and then, transform an atom inside it into a new isotope. One of those products, a form of neon, builds up at a roughly steady rate. Measure how much has accumulated, and you can work out how long the grain was adrift before it was sheltered inside the meteorite.

That is the method a team led by Philipp Heck of the Field Museum and the University of Chicago used in a study published in 2020. They measured cosmic-ray exposure ages for 40 large presolar silicon carbide grains from Murchison, the largest such dating effort of its kind.

Most are old, and the oldest are very old

This is where the precision matters. Most of the grains the team dated formed in the few hundred million years before the Sun, clustering around 4.6 to 4.9 billion years ago. A smaller number were older. The oldest reached about 7 billion years, roughly 2.5 billion years beyond the 4.54-billion-year age of Earth and the solar system.

So the headline figure is the extreme of the range, not the average. Even the youngest of these grains, though, still predates the Sun, which is what makes the whole population presolar. They are older than the star our planet orbits.

What the grains actually are

Each grain is a piece of another star.

Silicon carbide of this kind condenses in the cooling outflows of dying stars, the kind that puff their outer layers into space late in life. Those expelled grains travel the galaxy until some are caught up in the formation of a new system, which is how a fragment of a star that died before the Sun ended up in a paddock in Victoria.

The clustering of ages led Heck’s team to a further suggestion, offered as interpretation rather than settled fact: that many of the grains may have formed during a burst of star formation in the galaxy around 7 billion years ago, a busier-than-usual stretch of stellar birth and death. That reading is debated, and the dating itself does not depend on it.

What is not in question is the simpler thing. A rock that fell on an Australian farming town within living memory carried, intact, solid matter that is older than the Sun, the Earth, and everything else ever measured on this planet. It had been drifting for billions of years before there was a planet here to land on.

The post The oldest solid material ever found on Earth didn’t come from Earth at all — it was locked inside a meteorite that landed near Murchison, Victoria in 1969, and the stardust grains inside formed roughly 7 billion years ago, before the Sun existed. appeared first on Space Daily.