RSID: <<2025-10-23T23:31Z MFSK-32 @ 9265000+1500>>
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Welcome to program 325 of Shortwave Radiogram.

I'm Kim Andrew Elliott in Arlington, Virginia USA.

Here is the lineup for today's program, in MFSK modes as noted:
 

  1:42 MFSK32: Program preview (now)
  2:53 MFSK32: US soliciting new bids for Moon mission
  6:39 MFSK64: Storms in the Midwest send smoke into stratosphere
14:21 MFSK64: This week's images
28:09 MFSK32: Closing announcements


Please send reception reports to radiogram@verizon.net

And visit http://swradiogram.net

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And X/Twitter: @SWRadiogram
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From AFP via Phys.org:

US soliciting new bids for Moon mission amid SpaceX delays: NASA
chief

October 20, 2025

NASA is seeking bids for its planned Moon mission to compete
against SpaceX, Elon Musk's company that the US space agency's
chief said Monday is "behind."

"We're going to have a space race in regard to American companies
competing to see who can actually get us back to the Moon first,"
NASA administrator Sean Duffy said on Fox News. "I'm in the
process of opening that contract up. I think we'll see companies
like Blue get involved, and maybe others."

Blue Origin is the Jeff Bezos-founded rival of SpaceX. That
company currently has the contract for the fifth planned mission
of the multibillion-dollar Artemis program.

"I love SpaceX. It's an amazing company. The problem is, they're
behind. They pushed their timelines out and we're in a race
against China," Duffy, who is also the US transportation
secretary, said.

"The president and I want to get to the Moon in this president's
term, so I'm going to open up the contract."

The US space agency's Artemis program hopes to return humans to
the Moon as China forges ahead with a rival effort that is
targeting 2030 at the latest for its first crewed mission.

US President Donald Trump's second term in the White House has
seen the administration pile pressure on NASA to accelerate its
progress.

Duffy later said on X that the US is "in a race against China so
we need the best companies to operate at a speed that gets us to
the Moon FIRST."

SpaceX currently has the contract, he said, but "competition and
innovation are the keys to our dominance in space."

Trump, who announced the Artemis program during his first term,
wants the US space agency to return to the Moon as soon as
possible and also voyage to Mars.

Multiple setbacks have delayed a manned mission to voyage to the
Moon -- but not land -- known as Artemis 2, but NASA said
recently it is scheduled for April 2026 and could come as soon as
February.

"We intend to keep that commitment," said Lakiesha Hawkins, a top
NASA official, at a press briefing last month.

Three US astronauts and one Canadian comprise the Artemis 2 crew,
which is expected to be the first to fly by the Moon in more than
half a century.

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-soliciting-moon-mission-spacex-delays.html


Shortwave Radiogram now changes to MFSK64 ...


 

RSID: <<2025-10-23T23:36Z MFSK-64 @ 9265000+1500>>.
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This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK64

Please send your reception report to radiogram@verizon.net
 

From Purdue University:

Fire in the sky: Strong summer storms in the Midwest send
wildfire smoke into the previously pristine stratosphere

Aerosols and burning biomass may affect heating and energy
absorption in the ozone, leading to faster warming and
unexpected climate effects

Brittany Steff
October 20, 2025

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Gully warsher. Duck drownder. Toad
strangler. Cob floater. Sod soaker.

Whatever their names, summer in the Midwest isn't summer without
strong, sudden storms with towering clouds. While the Indian
subcontinent is famous for its monsoon season, what many people
don't know is that the midwestern United States has its own
monsoon season, very nearly as strong.

And those Midwest monsoons, increasingly, are breaking through
the ceiling of the sky and into the stratosphere, a typically
undisturbed layer of the atmosphere, introducing burning biomass
and aerosols from western wildfires with potentially concerning
consequences for the ozone layer and the climate.

Like a hole in the hull of a boat leaking in dirty seawater,
these storms allow aerosols and particles in from the lower
atmosphere, new research shows.

The research was conducted in partnership with NASA using a
high-altitude research aircraft taking measurements in the remote
reaches of the stratosphere. Dan Cziczo, a professor in the
Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences in
Purdue's College of Science, led the team in conjunction with
research scientist Xiaoli Shen. The paper published in Nature
Geoscience.

"In the summer, here in the Midwest particularly, we get all
these air quality warnings from wildfires because the climate is
getting warmer and the land is getting drier," Cziczo said.
"That's becoming more common, but that's all close to the
planet's surface, where we thought it was staying. We flew this
research aircraft up into the stratosphere, the next layer up of
the atmosphere, which should be separate. Stratosphere means
stratified; it should be separate. But what we found is that
during these big wildfire seasons, the lower part of the
stratosphere is just littered with these biomass particles."

A rent in the vault of heaven

Cziczo and his team study the mechanics of the atmosphere,
especially how, why, when and where clouds and storms form. They
are especially interested in the way that warm, wet air moves up
from the Gulf of Mexico, crashes against the Rocky Mountains and
forms severe summer storms and rain, much like summer monsoon in
India forms when warm, wet winds collide with the Himalayas.

Big storms and clouds typically can't expand beyond the layer of
pressure and wind that marks the change between the troposphere,
the layer of the atmosphere closest to the ground, and the
stratosphere — it's why so many clouds look like buttes or mesas
with flat tops.

But that's not always true. Like a titan punching up through the
cloud layer, the top of the storm can become too powerful to be
contained and erupt into the stratosphere itself in a formation
called an overshooting top. It is a fountain of cloud, a geyser
of storm that erupts into the peaceful protective layer of the
stratosphere. As it gushes up, it brings with it a burst of air,
along with currents of aerosol, and anything in the air below it
— including pollutants, aerosols and burning biomass.

Earth's atmosphere is the sheer bubble that protects of our
planet like a snow globe. The stratosphere is the realm of the
ozone layer, the buffer that absorbs so much of the sun's
radiation and helps keep Earth from turning into a Venusian
hothouse.

Typically, the only particles that make it up into the
stratosphere come from rare, globally notable and dramatic events
— violent volcanoes and massive meteors. The incursions
scientists found in this study aren't necessarily chinks in the
planet's armor — yet. But they might be microfractures. And
scientists aren't sure yet what kind of effects these alterations
might have.

"This could be a really big deal for a number of reasons," Cziczo
said. "For one thing, for so long, we've assumed the stratosphere
is a pristine area. But what this shows is that human impacts
through a changing climate can affect the chemistry and the
radiative ability of the stratosphere.

These particles can interact with sunlight and heat up, warm the
stratosphere. It could affect its stability — which is vital to
the planet."

It's not just the summer storms, either. Sometimes the wildfires
themselves get so large that they create their own weather —
directly generating their own storm clouds, called pyrocumulus,
so strong that they catapult their own burning ash and biomass
directly into the stratosphere above the fire. Cziczo notes that
they observed this in the fires over Australia in the 2019 bush
fire season, but that, as storm season warms, dries and increases
in severity, this effect is becoming more frequent.

"There are actually two ways for this stratosphere puncture to
happen," Cziczo said. "It can be the one severe fire, but it can
also be a bunch of little fires that are just constantly
perturbing the stratosphere in a way that we didn't recognize
before."

Up and away into the wild blue yonder

The stratosphere is a high and lonely place — usually the domain
only of military aircraft, weather and research balloons, the
grounded Concorde, and spacecraft passing through on their way up
or down, as well as a few remarkable weather phenomena including
red sprites and blue jet lightning.

To study it, NASA built a variant of the Lockheed Martin U-2
aircraft — dubbed ER-2 for Earth Resources 2. Equipped to sniff
out aerosols, particles, and shifts in pressure, temperature,
humidity and wind rather than adversarial forces and resources,
the plane can reach altitudes of 70,000 feet — higher than 95% of
the Earth's atmosphere with an effective horizon of 300 miles.
(In comparison, the reduced gravity aircraft — also called "vomit
comets" — which frequently help train astronauts and conduct
low-gravity science experiments, only reach altitudes of about
35,000 feet.)

Those two planes are based in California at the NASA Armstrong
Flight Research Center, and the storms were happening in the
Midwest, prompting one to temporarily transfer to Kansas.

"What's kind of interesting about this, and this is one of these
things that I'm not sure that everybody knows about, is that
North America has a monsoon," Cziczo said. "Most of us have heard
about the Asian monsoon over the Indian subcontinent; these
powerful storms that crash up against the Himalayas and drop all
this rain. The Midwest has something analogous to that, and it is
called the North American monsoon. Warm, wet air from the Gulf of
Mexico comes up and gets hung up on the Rockies. That's what
creates a lot of those powerful thunderstorms over the Midwest
and through the Great Plains area. That's why we wanted to be in
Kansas during the summertime; you can reach all these different
systems from there. We flew up into Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana,
Upper Midwest, Great Plains and all over. I think we even got as
far as Texas."

The ER-2, which has been active since the 1980s, is equipped to
measure minute changes in air quality and chemistry, allowing
Cziczo and his team to track the footprints of the summer storms
and fires through the stratosphere.

"Using these very sophisticated tools, we were able to tell that
it's not that we're just throwing a bunch of tropospheric air and
putting it in the stratosphere," Cziczo said. "Putting this
particulate matter in the stratosphere changes the dynamics; it
changes the chemistry, and it changes the way that part of the
atmosphere works. It changes the way it handles heat — it heats
it up faster. And that's what we're worried about. That's what we
really need to investigate, to understand. We went to all this
trouble to save the ozone layer."

This research was funded by NASA's Earth Science Project Office.

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/2025/Q4/fire-in-the-sky-strong-summer-storms-in-the-midwest-send-wildfire-smoke-into-the-previously-pristine-stratosphere/
 

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Image: ASA built a variant of the Lockheed Martin U-2 aircraft —
dubbed NASA's ER-2 (Earth Resources 2) aircraft, a variant of the
Lockhed Martin U-2 ...

Sending Pic:197x106C;


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This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK64

Please send your reception report to radiogram@verizon.net
 

This week's images ...
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From our recent European travels, Jinling's photo of a tourist
attraction near Amsterdam featuring authentic old windmills ...

Sending Pic:206x144C;

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"More reading, knowledge, ability", GDR era neon sign in Leipzig.
tinyurl.com/258cqfj2 ...

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Northern Lights over the 16th Century built Findlater Doocot
located on the Scottish Moray Firth coast, October 18.
tinyurl.com/2xur237z ...

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Macro-photography of Marasmius sp. fungi in Australia.
tinyurl.com/24akm7f9 ...

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Fishermen silhouetted by the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean at
Isle of Palms, South Carolina. tinyurl.com/2d98vd3a ...

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Autumn at the Dominion Arboretum in Ottawa. tinyurl.com/2de7f6ck
...
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Pumpkins. tinyurl.com/2yapte62 ...

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Our painting of the week is "Ottobre" (1999) by Salvatore
Mangione, known as Salvo (Italian, 1947-2015).
tinyurl.com/28ybqeah ...

Sending Pic:176x208C;

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Shortwave Radiogram returns to MFSK32 ...




RSID: <<2025-10-23T23:58Z MFSK-32 @ 9265000+1500>>


This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK32 ...


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I'm Kim Elliott. Please join us for the next Shortwave
Radiogram.
 

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