Very humid today. I did a quick bit of gardening before the rain arrives this evening and am very sweaty.

While I was up a ladder trimming the ivy, a little kid came up and told me that his Dad said I was an astronaut. When I said I wasn't, he fired his water pistol at me and ran away.

Also, numerous flies entered the house during my absence outdoors and are now bothering me.

So much of the destruction in the USA is away from the spotlight at grass roots level. But the foundations of a modern society are being smashed. The National Science Foundation has just stopped awarding new grants and funding existing ones. That effectively means that work on all existing NSF grants has to stop immediately. Universities are telling researchers to stop spending on those grants right away. That's jobs and progress and opportunity just being eradicated.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01396-2

A special operations request covering the re-entry this evening of Salsa, officially satellite number 2 in the Cluster constellation.

As a final action, a series of dummy commands were uplinked to Salsa, each containing the name of one of the active mission operations team.

The spacecraft responded to each command, acknowledging receipt.

Minutes later, it was gone, burned up in a blaze of glory in Earth’s atmosphere, 24 years after launch.

#SpaceExploration #SpaceScience