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In today's signal, we start with Dark Matter Near Black Holes? and also look at Dark Matter Still in Play. Plus the latest in Missions & Launches and Policy & Defense.

A Virginia Tech graduate student has adapted a standard black hole mass measurement technique to probe whether dark matter accumulates near supermassive black holes. The method, called reverberation mapping, tracks light pulses from an accretion disk and their echoes off surrounding gas clouds; the time delay between pulses reveals how mass is distributed at increasing distances from the black hole. Applied to 14 galaxies, the approach found that five showed mass growing with distance in a way visible matter alone cannot explain, suggesting an unseen component. Dark matter cannot be directly imaged because it neither emits nor absorbs light, making indirect mass accounting like this one of the few viable detection strategies in these environments. The results, published in Physical Review D, are preliminary, but they give astronomers a concrete method to test theoretical predictions about dark matter density near galactic cores.

Source: Space.com

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope arrived at Kennedy Space Center on Sunday aboard the agency's Pegasus barge, completing its transit from Massachusetts. The journey required an unplanned stop after both primary and backup cooling units failed to keep the observatory below its required 74°F limit in Florida's heat, prompting an emergency crew to install additional rental units. Roman will now spend roughly 70 days at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility for checkouts, fueling, and encapsulation inside a Falcon Heavy fairing before a no-earlier-than August 30 liftoff from Launch Complex 39A, moved up from the original September target. Once at Lagrange Point 2, about 1.5 million km from Earth, the telescope's 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument will survey the sky 1,000 times faster than Hubble at equivalent resolution, with a coronagraph added for direct exoplanet imaging.

Source: Spaceflight Now

SpaceX is targeting June 23 for the first flight of Starfall, a reentry capsule developed almost entirely without public announcement. Details have emerged only through FAA and FCC filings. Unlike Dragon's cone shape, Starfall is a flat disk roughly 10 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall, capable of returning up to 2,200 pounds from orbit. The disk geometry improves payload volume relative to mass, and the heat shield separates just before splashdown for independent recovery. The intended market is orbital manufacturing: pharmaceuticals, protein crystals, and advanced materials that require microgravity to produce. SpaceX already controls launch access for every competitor in this space; Starfall would let it own the return logistics and capture service revenue directly. A successful pair of demo flights would position the company to begin commercial service, likely starting with pharmaceutical and materials science customers.

Source: Teslarati (SpaceX)

NASA's JPL completed a field campaign in California's Colorado Desert where the four-wheeled ERNEST prototype drove 16 miles over 37 hours with minimal human input, reaching speeds roughly ten times faster than Curiosity or Perseverance can manage. ERNEST uses an active suspension system with powered joints that let it wheel-walk, squirm, and climb obstacles that would stop current Mars rovers, and its autonomy was trained using reinforcement learning in a high-fidelity virtual environment. The tests are aimed at validating hardware and software for a potential long-range lunar rover roughly twice ERNEST's current size. No such mission has been formally approved yet.

Source: Phys.org – Space

Upcoming Launches

A new study using machine learning trained on over a million simulated gamma-ray observations has found that the Galactic Center Excess, a spherical gamma-ray glow extending thousands of light-years from the Milky Way's core, is harder to explain with pulsars than previously thought. Earlier work suggested a few hundred unresolved neutron stars could account for the signal, but this analysis puts the required pulsar count above 35,000, making those sources so faint they become nearly indistinguishable from what self-annihilating dark matter would produce. The researchers, from the University of Vienna and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, are careful to say the result does not confirm dark matter as the cause, only that ruling it out remains premature. The findings were published in Physical Review Letters.

Source: Space.com

The American Society of Civil Engineers' space engineering committee has developed formal lunar infrastructure guidelines addressing a structural problem that Earth-based codes don't cover: on the moon, gravity is one-sixth of Earth's, but seismic inertial forces depend on mass, not weight. That means moonquakes impose nearly the same lateral loads on a structure while providing far less gravitational resistance to sliding or overturning. Worse, standard earthquake engineering intentionally allows buildings to crack and deform to absorb energy, a strategy that would be catastrophic in a pressurized habitat where a distorted hatch seal means depressurization. The guidelines also require site-specific geotechnical surveys, since lunar subsurface conditions remain poorly mapped globally.

Source: Space.com

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