U.S. funding agency for fundamental research and education in non-medical sciences and engineering
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has begun the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a 10-year program that will image the southern sky every few nights. The telescope has started regular operations from its Chilean mountaintop site and is already returning new detections, including thousands of asteroids and transient views such as Comet 3I/ATLAS.
Scientists have captured the Sun’s surface at unprecedented resolution with the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and other instruments and have identified widespread Kelvin–Helmholtz vortices—500–2,000km spirals of magnetised plasma. The team has linked these instabilities to how magnetic energy cascades to smaller scales and feeds flares and coronal mass ejections that produce space weather.
Airbus A319 Long Range flew from Hobart to McMurdo on July 31 to evacuate an American patient; landing occurred in darkness at -43 C, with a transfer to Christchurch for treatment. The operation highlights civilian capability and international cooperation in Antarctic medicine.