Sky Observer Anthony Cook

Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) update: the newest updated heliocentric brightness (magnitude) vs. heliocentric distance for inbound Kreutz comets, including MAPS, has been posted by Nicolas Lefaudeux. It is evident that the comet's rate of brightening has been declining, with the comet tracking towards the "Headless" comet and possibly "Pre-perihelion breakup" range. It could be argued that the comet's rate of brightening is similar to that of Ikeya-Seki and far below that of comet Lovejoy. But that does not even take into account the apparent sudden dimming of the comet and decrease in the coma size reported by Jager yesterday. The latest data posted on COBS seems to increasingly hint at the same fading, but the data is highly heterogeneous and it will take more observation over the next few days to be more certain. However, anything other than quite rapid brightening at this point - with the comet well inside Earth's orbit and rapidly approaching the Sun - indicates something is wrong with the comet and makes its survival to perihelion, let alone a fine post-perihelion show, increasingly unlikely.

ELON MUSK: SpaceX will build a mass driver on the moon. "If you want to go beyond a mere terawatt per year, you have to go to the moon. So by having factories on the moon, building AI satellites and having a mass driver, which is the kind of thing you really need to learn about in read about in science fiction, but we're going to make it real. We're actually going to have a mass driver on the moon. And if you do that, you can go several orders of magnitude greater. You can go to 1000 gigawatts or more per year, and ultimately get to maybe a millionth, and then a 1,000th and maybe even a few percent of the sun's energy. I really want to see the mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space just go like just one after the other. I can't imagine anything more epic than a mass driver on the moon and a self sustaining city on the moon, and then going beyond the moon to Mars, going throughout our solar system, and ultimately, being out there among the stars and visiting all these star systems, maybe we'll meet aliens. Maybe we'll meet see some civilizations that lasted for millions of years, and we'll find the remnants of ancient alien civilizations. But the only way we're going to do that, do that, do that is if we go out there and we explore, and this is the path to making it happen."