SpaceX Starship reaches orbit while BepiColombo nears Mercury and astronomers discover unknown X-ray sources in galaxies.
how this picture was made
Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-10-01 00:38Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.
The scene the art director wrote
A massive Starship rocket stands tall in the foreground, illuminated by a bright moon rising behind it, as a group of diverse astronauts and engineers in the middle ground gaze up at the night sky filled with stars and galaxies, with a subtle glow of rocket engines and computer screens in the background.
Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received
Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A massive Starship rocket stands tall in the foreground, illuminated by a bright moon rising behind it, as a group of diverse astronauts and engineers in the middle ground gaze up at the night sky filled with stars and galaxies, with a subtle glow of rocket engines and computer screens in the background. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.
The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)
9b1baa32773d03d6e22d85252ea2a91105e26d504df8d5cf45676749bfad84fc
NASA loosens Mars planetary protection sterilization rules
The internal directive was issued 29 September 2026, and reverts allowed mission contamination risk to 1964 standards.
By Caleb Mbeki · 52mNASA has loosened planetary protection sterilization requirements for Mars-bound spacecraft, per an internal directive issued 29 September 2026 by administrator Jared Isaacman.
The directive resets the maximum acceptable odds of biocontamination from an Earth mission to one in ten thousand, matching the original 1964 COSPAR standard for Mars. Isaacman stated existing rules were drafted for an earlier era, noting advances in sterilization technology.
NASA will conduct a rapid modernization assessment of planetary protection science, with final recommendations due 1 December 2026.
On the same day the NASA directive was issued, the COSPAR Panel on Planetary Protection endorsed its own proposed update to Mars protection policy at its executive meeting. The panel also reviewed ongoing work including an icy worlds planetary protection policy published earlier this year.
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