—❗️🇮🇷/🇮🇷 NEW: The IRGC Navy announces that from now on, any attack against Iranian oil tankers or commercial vessels will be met with a response against U.S. bases / proxies in the region and ships

@Middle_East_Spectator

☄️ 🇺🇸 🚀 NASA’s Psyche Mission to Fly by Mars for Gravity Assist

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft will get a boost from Mars on Friday, May 15, passing just 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) from the planet’s surface at some 12,333 mph (19,848 kph). The spacecraft will harness the planet’s gravitational pull to speed up and adjust its trajectory toward the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, one of the more unusual objects in our solar system.

Launched on Oct. 13, 2023, the Psyche spacecraft relies on a solar-electric propulsion system and the inert gas xenon for propellant, gradually gaining speed over the course of its long journey. Psyche’s mission planners are using the Mars flyby to save propellant, letting the planet’s gravity do some of the work instead of the propulsion system alone. But gravity assists like these also offer opportunities for missions to practice and to calibrate their science instruments.

Psyche’s operations team plans to use the spacecraft’s multispectral imager to capture thousands of observations of Mars. The images will provide valuable data and help the team hone techniques they will need when the spacecraft approaches and begins orbiting the asteroid Psyche in late 2029.

Mars won’t initially look like the illuminated reddish disk seen in so many photos of the planet. “We are approaching Mars at a very high phase angle, which means we are catching up with the planet from its night side with only a sliver of sunlight creating a thin crescent,” said Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University in Tempe. “The thin crescent on approach and the nearly ‘full Mars’ view after we fly past create opportunities for the imaging team for both great calibration observations as well as just plain beautiful photos.”

It’s possible that Mars may possess a faint dusty ring, or torus — the result of micrometeorites striking the surfaces of the planet’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos, and ejecting dust particles into space. The Sun’s alignment with Psyche and Mars may cause dusty material to scatter sunlight, making it visible in the processed observations.

📎 NASA

🇺🇸🇮🇱🇮🇶 — An E-11A Battlefield Airborne Communications Node communications gateway aircraft from Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia is currently conducting a flight at the area of the covert IDF base used in the war against Iran. This E-11A has conducted flights in this area the past four days.

This aircraft is used for ground operations. It is likely this aircraft is assisting in communications aggregation to facilitate an evacuation effort.

@GeoPWatch

🛢 The Iran war is draining global oil inventories at a record pace:

Global oil stockpiles fell by ~4.8 million barrels per day between March 1 and April 25, the largest quarterly drawdown on record.

Crude makes up ~60% of this decline, with refined fuels accounting for the remaining.

Total visible oil inventories are now near the lowest level since 2018.

JPMorgan warns that total visible oil inventories could fall to operational stress levels of 7.6 billion barrels by June and further down to an operational floor of 6.8 billion barrels by September, assuming no resolution to the Strait of Hormuz closure.

This operational floor represents the bare minimum oil needed to keep global pipelines and refinery systems running, meaning the world would have zero remaining buffer against further supply shocks.

With inventories collapsing, the threat of sharper oil price surges and outright shortages is moving closer.

🔗 Global Markets Investor