Despite being Earth’s sister planet in terms of size, Venus is pretty parched compared to our watery world. New computer simulations may hold clues about exactly how our neighbor became so dry. 

Hydrogen atoms in the planet’s atmosphere may fling off into space due to a dissociative recombination–where electrons are removed. Venus may be losing roughly twice as much water every day than previous estimates. The findings are detailed in a study published May 6 in the journal Nature and may help explain what happens to water on other planets in our home galaxy.

“Water is really important for life,” study co-author and University of Colorado Boulder astrophysicist Eryn Cangi said in a statement. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”

The mystery of the missing water

The Earth is roughly 71 percent water. If you took all of that water and spread it across the planet, you’d get a liquid layer about 1.9 miles deep. If you did the same thing on Venus, you would get a layer that is only 1.2 inches deep. 

“Venus has 100,000 times less water than the Earth, even though it’s basically the same size and mass,” study co-author and astrophysicist Michael Chaffin said in a statement. 

[Related: A private company wants to look for life just above Venus.]

However, the planet was not always such a desert. Scientists believe that billions of years ago when Venus was forming, it got about as much water as Earth. At some point, clouds of carbon dioxide in Venus’ atmosphere essentially turned the planet into a greenhouse. The trapping of carbon dioxide raised surface temperatures to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. All of Venus’ water evaporated into steam and most drifted into space. 

That ancient evaporation even still isn’t enough to explain Venus is as dry as it is warm or how it continues to lose water into space. 

“As an analogy, say I dumped out the water in my water bottle. There would still be a few droplets left,” Chaffin said. 

What’s kicking out the hydrogen?

To try to determine why Venus is so dry, the team on this study used computer models to look at the different chemical reactions occuring in the planet’s swirling atmosphere. 

“We’re trying to figure out what little changes occurred on each planet to drive them into these vastly different states,” said Cangi.

They found that a molecule made up of one atom each of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen called HCO+ may be causing the planet to leak water.

[Related: Something is making Venus’s clouds less acidic.]

In a planet’s upper atmosphere, water mixes with carbon dioxide to form these HCO+ molecules. Earlier studies found that HCO+ may also be the reason why Mars lost a large amount of its original water.

On Venus, HCO+ is constantly produced in its atmosphere, but the individual hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen atoms don’t survive very long. The electrons in the atmosphere find the atoms, recombine, and then split them in two. When this happens, the hydrogen atoms zip away and may completely escape into space. It eventually is stealing one of the two components needed for water away from Venus. The team calculated that the only way to explain Venus’ dry state was if the planet had higher than expected volumes of HCO+ in its atmosphere. 

Probing Venus

Scientists have never observed HCO+ around Venus. The team believes that is because they’ve never had instruments that can properly look for the ion. None of the spacecraft that have visited Venus–including NASA’s Mariner 2, the European Space Agency’s Venus Express, or Japan’s Akatsuki and others—have carried instruments that could detect HCO+.

“One of the surprising conclusions of this work is that HCO+ should actually be among the most abundant ions in the Venus atmosphere,” Chaffin said.

[Related: We finally know why Venus is absolutely radiant.]

By the end of this decade, NASA plans to drop a probe through Venus’ atmosphere down to the surface during its DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gasses, Chemistry, and Imaging) mission. While it won’t be able to detect HCO+, the team is hopeful that a future Venus mission might reveal another clue to the mystery of Venus’ missing water.  

“There haven’t been many missions to Venus,” Cangi said. “But newly planned missions will leverage decades of collective experience and a flourishing interest in Venus to explore the extremes of planetary atmospheres, evolution and habitability.”

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China launched its uncrewed Chang’e-6 lunar spacecraft at 5:27 PM local time (5:27 PM EST) on Friday from the southern island province of Hainan, accelerating its ongoing space race with the US. If successful, a lander will detach upon reaching lunar orbit and descend to the surface to scoop up samples from the expansive South Pole-Aitken basin impact crater. Once finished, the lander will launch back up to Chang’e-6, dock, and return to Earth with the first-of-its-kind samples in tow. All told, the mission should take roughly 56 days to complete.

China’s potential return to the moon marks a significant development in international efforts to establish a permanent presence there. As the US moves forward with its Artemis program missions alongside assistance from Japan and commercial partners, China and Russia are also seeking to build their own lunar research station. Whoever does so first could have major ramifications for the future of moon exploration, resource mining, and scientific progress.

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now? ]

The China National Space Administration’s (CNSA) previous Chang’e-5 mission successfully landed a spacecraft at a volcanic plain on the moon’s near side, but Chang’e-6 aims to take things further, both technologically and logistically. To pull off a far side feat, CNSA mission controllers will need to use a satellite already in orbit around the moon to communicate with Chang’e-6 once its direct relay becomes blocked. But if they can manage it, the payoff will be substantial.

As NBC News explained Friday, the moon’s far side is much less volcanically active than its near side. Since all previous lunar samples have come from the near side, experts believe retrieving new samples elsewhere will help increase their understanding of the moon’s history, as well as potential information on the solar system’s origins.

NASA most likely still has an edge when it comes to returning actual humans to the moon, however. Even with recent mission delays, Artemis 3 astronauts are currently scheduled to reach the probable ice-laden lunar south pole by 2026. China does not expect to send its own taikonauts to the moon until at least 2030, and its joint research station with Russia still remains in its conceptual phase.

That same year will also mark the official decommissioning of the International Space Station. After NASA remotely guides it into a fiery re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere, the only remaining orbital station will be China’s three-module Tiangong facility.

In an interview with Yahoo Finance earlier this week, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson didn’t mince words about the potential ramifications of who sets up on the moon first.

“I think it’s not beyond the pale that China would suddenly say, ‘We are here. You stay out,’” Nelson said at the time. “That would be very unfortunate—to take what has gone on on planet Earth for years, grabbing territory, and saying it’s mine and people fighting over it.”

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A newly discovered asteroid is a toddler–in space years. The moonlet circling the small asteroid Dinkinesh named Selam is about 2 to 3 million years old. Scientists arrived at this age estimate using new calculation methods that are described in a study published April 19 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Selam is nicknamed “Lucy’s baby,” after NASA’s Lucy spacecraft discovered it orbiting another asteroid in November 2023. The Lucy mission is the first set to explore the Trojan asteroids. These are a group of about 7,000 primitive space rocks orbiting Jupiter. Lucy is expected to provide the first high-resolution images of these space rocks. Dinkinesh and Selam are located in the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Discovering a tiny moonlet was a surprise. According to study co-author and Cornell University aerospace engineering doctoral student Colby Merrill, Selem turned out to be “an extraordinarily unique and complex body.” Selem is a contact binary that consists of two lobes that are piles of rubble stuck together and is the first of this kind of asteroid ever observed. Scientists believe that Selam was formed from surface material ejected by Dinkinesh’s rapid spinning.

[Related: NASA spacecraft Lucy says hello to ‘Dinky’ asteroid on far-flying mission.]

“Finding the ages of asteroids is important to understanding them, and this one is remarkably young when compared to the age of the solar system, meaning it formed somewhat recently,” Merrill said in a statement. “Obtaining the age of this one body can help us to understand the population as a whole.”

To estimate its age, the team studied how Dinkinesh and Selam moved in space–or its dynamics. Binary asteroids like this pair are engaged in a galactic tug-of-war. Gravity that is acting on the objects is making them physically bulge and results in tides similar to what oceans on Earth have. The tides slowly reduce the system’s energy. At the same time, the sun’s radiation also changes the binary system’s energy. This solar change is known as the Binary Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (BYORP) effect. The system will eventually reach an equilibrium, where tides and BYORP are equally strong.

Assuming that the forces between the two were at equilibrium and plugging in asteroid data from the Lucy mission, the team calculated how long it would have taken for Selam to get to its current state after it formed. The team said that they improved preexisting equations that assumed both bodies in a binary system are equally dense and did not factor in the secondary body’s mass. Their computers simulations ran about 1 million calculations with varying parameters and found a median age of 3 million years old, with 2 million being the most likely result. This calculation also agreed with one made by the Lucy mission based on a more traditional method for dating asteroids based on an analysis of their surface craters. 

According to the team, studying asteroids this way does not require a spacecraft like Lucy to take close-up images, thus saving money. It could be more accurate in cases where an asteroid’s surfaces have undergone recent changes from space travel. Since roughly 15 percent of all near-Earth asteroids are binary systems this method can also be used to study other secondary bodies like the moonlet Dimorphos. NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into Dimorphos to test out planetary defense technology in September 2022.

[Related: NASA’s asteroid blaster turned a space rock into an ‘oblong watermelon.’]

“Used in tandem with crater counting, this method could help better constrain a system’s age,” study co-author and Cornell University astronomy doctoral student Alexia Kubas said in a statement. “If we use two methods and they agree with each other, we can be more confident that we’re getting a meaningful age that describes the current state of the system.”

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NASA has big plans for space farms and there are plenty of ideas from astrobiologists for what the best crops to grow on Mars could be. To best optimize these future extraterrestrial farms, scientists are also exploring what planting methods could boost potential crop yields on the Red Planet. Some new experiments with tomato, carrot, and pea plants found that growing different crops mixed together could boost yields of some plants in certain Martian conditions. The findings could also have implications for life on Earth and are described in a study published May 1 in the journal PLOS One. 

A Martian greenhouse

In order for future humans to survive on Mars for long stretches at a time, nutritious food is going to be essential. While learning how fake astronaut Mark Watney grew potatoes in the sci-fi novel and film The Martian was entertaining and informative, real astronauts should have some helpful resources from planet Earth for growing food in future Mars settlements.

To learn how to best do this, scientists on Earth must simulate the unique conditions on the Red Planet here. Mars’ atmosphere is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s and is mostly made up of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon gasses. Entire Martian colonies in the future will need to be set up in controlled enclosures similar to greenhouses with an Earth-like atmosphere of the right mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.

[Related: Why space lettuce could be the pharmacy astronauts need.]

“The best ‘Martian environment’ is actually simply a greenhouse with controlled conditions including temperature, humidity, and gasses,” Rebeca Gonçalves, a study co-author and astrobiologist at Wageningen University & Research in The Netherlands, tells PopSci. 

For this study, Gonçalves and the team used greenhouses at the university to simulate a growing environment on Mars. They tested how crops fare in a simulated version of Martian regolith–the loose and rocky material covering the planet. Pots of standard potting soil and sand were used as a control group. Bits of organic Earth soil and other nutrients was also added to the sand and Martian regolith samples to improve water retention and root holding. 

Picking plants

For the plants on this fake Martian farm, the team selected peas, carrots, and tomatoes. A 2014 study found that all three are able to grow in Martian regolith. According to Gonçalves, knowing that these plants could grow was key, since they were looking for an answer to a different question. They wanted to know how to use companion plants and intercropping–an ancient planting technique of growing two or more plants in close proximity–to boost crop yields. These three also could have an important nutritional role in the future. 

“They were chosen for their nutritional content, being high in antioxidants, vitamin C, and beta carotene,” says Gonçalves. “This is important because these nutrients are all completely lost in the process of food dehydration, which is the main process we use to send food to space missions. Therefore, the production of fresh food containing these nutrients is a must in a Martian colony.”

These crops are also companion species that share complementary traits. Peas are considered a main contributor to the intercropping system because they are legumes that can “fix” nitrogen. In nitrogen fixing, some plants and bacteria can turn nitrogen from the air into a form of ammonia that plants can use for nutrition. This, in turn, benefits other plants and diminishes the need for fertilizers to be added to the plant system. According to Gonçalves, it optimizes the resources needed for plants to grow on the Red Planet.

“Carrots were used to help aerate the soil, which can improve water and nutrient uptake by the companion plants, and tomatoes were used to provide shade for the temperature sensitive carrot and to give climbing support for the peas,” says Gonçalves.

Red fruit, red planet

All three species grew fairly well in the Martian regolith, producing just over half a pound of produce with only a minimum addition of nutrients. The tomatoes grew better when they were alongside the peas and carrots in an intercropping set up, than the control tomatoes that were grown alone. The tomatoes had a higher biomass and also had more potassium when grown this way. 

However, intercropping in this regolith appeared to decrease yields for the carrots and peas. These plants did better alone. In future experiments, the team hopes that some modifications to how the simulated Martian regolith is treated could help increase yields when intercropping is used, so that the carrots and peas can have similarly bigger harvests.

“The fact that it worked really well for one of the species was a big find, one that we can now build further research on,” says Gonçalves. 

[Related: Watering space plants is hard, but NASA has a plan.]

The team was also surprised by how intercropping showed an advantage in the sandy soil control group. It benefited two of the three plant species and this find could be applied to agricultural systems on Earth. Climate change is making some soils more sandy and this study is part of ongoing efforts to see how intercropping can help tackle this issue.

In future studies, the team hopes to figure out how to reach, “a completely self-sustainable system using 100% of the local resources on Mars.” This would help make these future colonies more financially viable and not as dependent on resupply missions. 

“If we can unlock the secret to regenerating poor soils while developing a high-yielding, self-sustainable food production system—exactly the goal of Martian agriculture research—we will have found a solution for a lot of the issues we are having here on Earth as well,” says Gonçalves.

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If we want to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, we need more detailed maps than the existing options, some of which date back to the Apollo missions of 1960’s and 1970’s. After more than ten years of collaboration between more than 100 researchers working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the newest editions of lunar topography are rolling out for astronomers and space agencies around the world.

As highlighted recently by Nature, the Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe includes 12,341 craters, 81 basins, and 17 different rock types found across the moon’s surface, doubling previous map resolutions to a scale of 1:2,500,000.

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

Although higher accuracy maps have been available for areas near Apollo mission landing sites, the US Geological Survey’s original lunar maps generally managed a 1:5,000,000 scale. Project co-lead and CAS geochemist Jianzhong Liu explained to Nature that “our knowledge of the Moon has advanced greatly, and those maps could no longer meet the needs for future lunar research and exploration.”

To guide lunar mapping into the 21st-century, CAS relied heavily on China’s ongoing lunar exploration programs, including the Chang’e-1 mission. Beginning in 2007, Chang’e-1’s high-powered cameras surveyed the moon’s surface from orbit for two years alongside an interference imaging spectrometer to identify various types of rock types. Additional data compiled by the Chang’e-3 (2013) and Chang’e-4 (2019) lunar landers subsequently helped hone those mapping endeavors. International projects like NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe all provided even more valuable topographical information.

The pivotal topographical milestone wasn’t an entirely altruistic undertaking, however. While CAS geophysicist Ross Mitchell described the maps as “a resource for the whole world,” he added that “contributing to lunar science is a profound way for China to assert its potential role as a scientific powerhouse in the decades to come.” 

[Related: Japan and NASA plan a historic lunar RV road trip together.]

The US is also far from the only ones anxious to set up shop on the moon—both China and Russia hope to arrive there by the mid-2030’s with the construction of an International Lunar Research Station near the moon’s south pole. Despite the two nations’ prior promise to be “open to all interested countries and international partners,” the US is distinctly not among the 10 other governments currently attached to the project.

China plans to launch its Chang’e-6 robotic spacecraft later this week, which will travel to the far side of the moon as the first of three new missions. In an interview on Monday, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson voiced his concerns of a potential real estate war on the moon.

“I think it’s not beyond the pale that China would suddenly say, ‘We are here. You stay out,’” Nelson told Yahoo Finance. “That would be very unfortunate—to take what has gone on on planet Earth for years, grabbing territory, and saying it’s mine and people fighting over it.”

But if nothing else, at least the new maps will soon be available to virtually everyone. The Geologic Atlas is included in a new book from CAS, Map Quadrangles of the Geologic Atlas of the Moon, which also features an additional 30 sector diagrams offering even closer looks at individual lunar regions. The entire map resource will soon also become available to international researchers online through a cloud platform called Digital Moon.

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Earlier this week, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded a rarely seen event—four nearly-simultaneous flare eruptions involving three separate sunspots, as well as the magnetic filament between them. But as impressive as it is, the event could soon pose problems for some satellites and spacecraft orbiting Earth, as well as electronic systems here on the ground.

It may seem like a massive ball of fiery, thermonuclear chaos, but there’s actually a fairly predictable rhythm to the sun. Similar to Earth’s seasonal changes, the yellow dwarf star’s powerful electromagnetic fluctuations follow a roughly 11-year cycle of ebbs and flows. Although astronomers still aren’t quite sure why this happens, it’s certainly observable—and recent activity definitely indicates the sun is heading towards its next “solar maximum” later this year.

As Spaceweather.com notes, early Tuesday morning’s “complex quartet” of solar activity was what’s known as a “super-sympathetic flare,” in which multiple events occur at nearly the same time. This happens thanks to the often hard-to-detect magnetic loops spreading across the sun’s corona, which can create explosive chain reactions in the process. In this case, hundreds of thousands of miles separated the three individual flares, but they still erupted within minutes of each other. All-told, the super-sympathetic flare encompassed about a third of the sun’s total surface facing Earth.

[Related: Why our tumultuous sun was relatively quiet in the late 1600s]

And that “facing Earth” factor could present an issue. BGR explains “at least some” of the electromagnetic “debris” could be en route towards the planet in the form of a coronal mass ejection (CME). If so, those forces could result in colorful auroras around the Earth’s poles—as well as create potential tech woes for satellite arrays and orbiting spacecraft, not to mention blackouts across some radio and GPS systems. The effects, if there are any, are estimated to occur over the next day or so, but at least they’re predicted to only be temporary inconveniences.

Luckily, multi-flare situations like this week’s aren’t a regular occurrence—the last time something similar happened was back in 2010 in what became known as the Great Eruption.

[Related: Hold onto your satellites: The sun is about to get a lot stormier]

Still, these super-sympathetic flares serve as a solid reminder of just how much of our modern, electronically connected society is at the sun’s mercy. As recently as 2022, for example, a solar storm knocked around 40 Starlink satellites out of orbit. The risk of solar-induced problems will continue to rise as the skies grow increasingly crowded.

While many companies continue to construct redundancy programs and backup systems for these potential headaches, astronomers and physicists still can’t predict solar activity very accurately. More research and funding is needed to create early warning and forecasting programs.

This year alone has already seen at least two other solar activity events—and seeing as how we still haven’t passed the solar maximum, more impressive (and maybe damaging) activity is likely on the way.

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It’s ‘spider’ season on the Red Planet. There are no actual spiders on Mars–that we know of–but arachnid-shaped black spots dot some parts of our celestial neighbor every spring.

[Related: Mars’s mascara-like streaks may be caused by slush and landslides.]

The European Space Agency (ESA) released new images of these seasonal eruptions in a formation called Inca City in Mars’ southern polar region.

How do Martian ‘spiders’ form?

Mars has four distinct seasons, similarly to Earth. Each Martian season lasts roughly twice as long as a season here. According to the ESA, these spider-like marks appear in Martian spring when sunlight falls on layers of carbon dioxide that have been deposited over the dark Martian winter. The sunlight causes carbon dioxide ice at the bottom layer to turn into gas. The gas builds up and eventually breaks through slabs overlying ice around Mars’ poles. When they burst free, the dark material is dragged up to the surface as it travels and shatters layers of ice that are up to three feet thick. 

The emerging gas is full of dark dust and shoots up through cracks in the ice similar to a fountain or geyser. The gas then travels back down and settles on the surface. The settling gas creates dark spots which range from 0.3 to 0.6 miles across. This same process creates the spider-shaped patterns that are etched beneath the ice.

The image was captured by the CaSSIS instrument aboard the ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). CaSSIS stands for Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System and it was built at the University of Bern in Germany. It creates high resolution images designed to complement data collected on Mars. It is made up of a telescope and focal plane system that are mounted on a rotation mechanism and has three electronics units that relay images back to the ESA. 

Mars’ mysterious Inca City

Most of the spots in this new image are seen on the outskirts of Angustus Labyrinthus–more commonly called Inca City. NASA’s Mariner 9 probe first spotted Inca City in 1972 and its geometric-looking network of ridges reminded astronomers of Inca ruins. 

Scientists are still not sure exactly how Inca City formed. It may be sand dunes that have turned to stone over millennia. Materials like magma or sand could also be seeping through cracked sheets of Martian rock. The ridges could also be winding structures related to glaciers called eskers. 

Inca City also appears to be part of a large circle–about 53 miles in diameter. Scientists believe that the ‘ formation sits within a large crater that may have taken shape as a rock from space crashed into Mars’ surface. The impact likely caused faults to ripple through the surrounding plain. The faults were then filled with rising lava and have worn away over time. 

Towards the middle section of the image the landscape changes somewhat, with large roundish and oval swirls creating an effect reminiscent of marble. This effect is thought to occur when layered deposits are worn away over time.

[Related: Scientists brought ‘Mars spiders’ to Earth—here’s how.]

A few prominent steep, flat-topped mounds and hills stand almost 5,000 feet above the surrounding terrain. These mounds form as softer material is eroded wind, water, or ice. The harder material left behind forms these hills. Some signs of the ‘spiders’ are scattered across the dust-covered plateaus, lurking amongst various canyons and troughs.

The data for these images was captured on October 4, 2020 during Mars’ most recent spring. The Red Planet is currently in its autumn and its next spring equinox will be on November 12, 2024.

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NASA hitched a ride aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron Launcher in New Zealand yesterday evening, and is preparing to test a new, highly advanced solar sail design. Now in a sun-synchronous orbit roughly 600-miles above Earth, the agency’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) will in the coming weeks deploy and showcase technology that could one day power deep-space missions without the need for any actual rocket fuel, after launch.

The fundamentals behind solar sails aren’t in question. By capturing the pressure emitted by solar energy, thin sheets can propel a spacecraft at immense speeds, similar to a sailboat. Engineers have already demonstrated the principles before, but NASA’s new project will specifically showcase a promising boom design constructed of flexible composite polymer materials reinforced with carbon fiber.

Although delivered in a toaster-sized package, ACS3 will take less than 30 minutes to unfurl into an 860-square-foot sheet of ultrathin plastic anchored by its four accompanying 23-foot-long booms. These poles, once deployed, function as sailboat booms, and will keep the sheet taut enough to capture solar energy.

[Related: How tiny spacecraft could ‘sail’ to Mars surprisingly quickly.]

But what makes the ACS3 booms so special is how they are stored. Any solar sail’s boom system will need to remain stiff enough through harsh temperature fluctuations, as well as durable enough to last through lengthy mission durations. Scaled-up solar sails, however, will be pretty massive—NASA is currently planning future designs as large as 5,400-square-feet, or roughly the size of a basketball court. These sails will need extremely long boom systems that won’t necessarily fit in a rocket’s cargo hold.

To solve for this, NASA rolled up its new composite material booms into a package roughly the size of an envelope. When ready, engineers will utilize an extraction system similar to a tape spool to uncoil the booms meant to minimize potential jamming. Once in place, they’ll anchor the microscopically thin solar sail as onboard cameras record the entire process.

NASA hopes the project will allow them to evaluate their new solar sail design while measuring how its resulting thrust influences the tiny spacecraft’s low-Earth orbit. Meanwhile, engineers will assess the resiliency of their novel composite booms, which are 75-percent lighter and designed to offer 100-times less shape distortion than any previous solar sail boom prototype.

Don’t expect the ACS3 experiment to go soaring off into space, though. After an estimated two-month initial flight and subsystem testing phase, ACS3 will conduct a weeks-long test of its ability to raise and lower the CubeSate’s orbit. It’s a lot of work to harness a solar force NASA says is equivalent to the weight of a paperclip in your palm. Still, if ACS3’s sail and boom system is successful, it could lead towards scaling up the design enough to travel across the solar system.

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For the first time since November 2023, NASA is receiving meaningful communication from its Voyager 1 probe. The agency has spent months troubleshooting a glitch in why the famed probe was sending home messages that looked like garbled up gibberish and not scientific data. The probe is now coherent, but according to NASA, the next step is to enable Voyager 1 to begin to return usable science information again. 

[Related: Voyager 1 is sending back bad data, but NASA is on it.]

Alongside its twin Voyager 2, these probes are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space–or the region between stars beyond the influence of the sun. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes launched in 1977. Their mission initially included detailed observations of Jupiter and Saturn, but it continued on exploring the outer reaches of the solar system. Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space in 2012. Voyager 2 followed Voyager 1 into interstellar space in 2018. 

On November 14, 2023, Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth for the first time. Mission controllers could tell that the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally, so they were not sure why it was sending back such incoherent information. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) confirmed that the issue was related to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS packages science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth so that NASA can use it.

The team pinpointed the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. The glitch was only on one single chip representing around 3 percent of the FDS memory, according to Space. They were unable to repair the chip. On April 18, JPL engineers migrated the code to other portions of the FDS memory. This required splitting the code up into several sections to store them at multiple locations in the FDS. The code was adjusted to work from multiple locations as one cohesive process and references to its new directories were updated. 

“When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft,” NASA wrote in an update on April 22.

[Related: When Voyager 1 goes dark, what comes next?]

As of now, the usable data returned so far relates to how the spacecraft’s engineering systems are working. The team plans more software repair work in the next several weeks so that Voyager 1 can send valuable science data about the outer reaches of the solar system that is readable once again. As of now, Voyager 2 is still operating normally.

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NASA’s Juno mission scientists have used complex data collected during two flybys of Jupiter’s third largest moon Io to create animations that highlight this moon’s most dramatic features. Io is a little bit larger than the planet Earth and is also home to a mountain with a smooth lake of lava. Lava lakes like Io’s Loki Patera have a cooling surface crust that slowly thickens until it becomes denser than the underlying magma. It then sinks and pulls in the nearby crust. 

First launched in 2011, Juno arrived at our solar system’s largest planet in 2016 with a mission to explore the Jovian system. It has 95 known moons and its four largest–Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto–are called the Galilean moons. Io is most volcanically active.

This animation is an artist’s concept of Loki Patera, a lava lake on Jupiter’s moon Io, made using data from the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. With multiple islands in its interior, Loki is a depression filled with magma and rimmed with molten lava. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS.

“Io is simply littered with volcanoes, and we caught a few of them in action,” Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton said in a statement. “We also got some great close-ups and other data on a 200-kilometer-long [127-mile-long] lava lake called Loki Patera. There is amazing detail showing these crazy islands embedded in the middle of a potentially magma lake rimmed with hot lava. The specular reflection our instruments recorded of the lake suggests parts of Io’s surface are as smooth as glass, reminiscent of volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.”

The observations were announced April 16 during the European Geophysical Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria.

[Related: See the most volcanic world in our solar system in new NASA images.]

Juno conducted very close flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024, getting within 930 miles of the surface. The spacecraft obtained first close-up images of Io’s northern latitudes. Maps created with data collected by Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument show that Io has a surface that is more smooth compared to Jupiter’s other Galilean moons, but also has poles that are colder than their middle latitudes.

Created using data collected by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno during flybys in December 2023 and February 2024, this animation is an artist’s concept of a feature on the Jovian moon Io that the mission science team nicknamed “Steeple Mountain.” CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

Mountains and polar cyclones

With every pass, Juno flies closer to the north pole of Jupiter. Changing the spacecraft’s orientation allows the MWR instrument to improve its resolution of Jupiter’s northern polar cyclones. These storms at the top of the gas giant can reach wind speeds of 220 miles per hour and the data collected by Juno reveals that not all polar cyclones are created equal.

“Perhaps [the] most striking example of this disparity can be found with the central cyclone at Jupiter’s north pole,” Steve Levin, Juno’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “It is clearly visible in both infrared and visible light images, but its microwave signature is nowhere near as strong as other nearby storms. This tells us that its subsurface structure must be very different from these other cyclones. The MWR team continues to collect more and better microwave data with every orbit, so we anticipate developing a more detailed 3D map of these intriguing polar storms.”

Just how much water is on Jupiter? An enduring mystery

One of Juno’s primary science goals is to collect data that will help astronomers better understand Jupiter’s water abundance. However, the team isn’t looking for liquid water. Instead, they are studying Jupiterl’s atmosphere to quantify the presence of the molecules that make up water–oxygen and hydrogen. According to NASA, an accurate estimate of oxygen and hydrogen molecules present in Jupiter’s atmosphere is crucial to unlocking some of the underlying mysteries of how our solar system formed.  

Jupiter was likely the first planet to form roughly 4.5 billion years ago. It also contains most of the gas and dust that wasn’t incorporated into the sun when the solar system formed. Water abundance also has important implications for Jupiter’s meteorology and internal structure.

[Related: Juno finally got close enough to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot to measure its depth.]

In 1995, NASA’s Galileo probe provided early data on the amount of water on Jupiter, but the data created more questions than answers. It showed that the gas giant’s atmosphere was unexpectedly hot and actually deprived of water—contrary to what computer models had initially indicated.

“The probe did amazing science, but its data was so far afield from our models of Jupiter’s water abundance that we considered whether the location it sampled could be an outlier. But before Juno, we couldn’t confirm,” said Bolton. “Now, with recent results made with MWR data, we have nailed down that the water abundance near Jupiter’s equator is roughly three to four times the solar abundance when compared to hydrogen. This definitively demonstrates that the Galileo probe’s entry site was an anomalously dry, desert-like region.”

[Related: Jupiter’s icy ocean worlds could be cool travel destinations in the future.]

The new results support the idea that sometime during the formation of our solar-system, water-ice material may have been the source of heavy element enrichment. These are chemical elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium that Jupiter accumulated. The planet’s formation remains puzzling, because Juno’s results on the core of the gas giant suggest that there is very low water abundance. How abundant H₂0 is on the gas giant remains a mystery that the Juno mission could potentially solve.  

What’s next for Juno

Data during the reminder of Juno’s mission could help determine how much water is on Jupiter in two ways. It could enable scientists to compare Jupiter’s water abundance near the polar regions to the equatorial region. It also may shed additional light on the structure of the planet’s dilute liquid core. 

Juno’s most recent flyby of Io was on April 9 and the spacecraft came within about 10,250 miles of the moon’s surface. Its 61st flyby of Jupiter is scheduled for May 12 and it will continue to explore the planet and its moons through September 2025. 

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Robotic engineers are no stranger to turning to nature for inspiration. In recent years, birds, dogs, extinct sea creatures, and even humans themselves have all served as jumping off point for new mechanical designs. Now, researchers from Stanford are citing the Harvestman spider, better known as a daddy long-legs as inspiration for a new robot design they believe could be better equipped at navigating uneven rocky caverns and lava tubes. One day, they hope this spider-like design could even help robots navigate the icy caverns of the moon and Mars. 

How does the spider robot work?

The researchers introduced their new machine called the “ReachBot” in a paper published today in the journal Science Robotics. ReachBot features multiple extendable boom limbs which it can use to reach out for rocks and propel itself forward. Each limb comes attached with a three finger gripper that grabs onto the rocks and uses them as anchor points. The long-legged design means the robot’s limbs can potentially access the floor, ceiling, and walls of a lava tube or cave, which in turn provide increased leverage. This unique positioning, the researchers write, lets the ReachBot “assume a wide variety of possible configurations, bracing stances, and force application options.”

ReachBot attempts to fill in a form-factor gap among existing exploration robots. Small robots, the researchers argue, are useful for navigating through tight corridors but typically have limited reach. Larger robots, by contrast, might be able to reach more area but can get bogged down by their heft mass and mechanical complexity. ReachBot offers a compromise by relying on a small main body with limbs that can expand and reach out if necessary. 

The robot utilizes a set of onboard sensors to scale the area ahead of it and look for concave rocks or other signs suggestive of a graspable area. Like a physical spider. ReachBot doesn’t immediately assume rock surfaces are flat, but instead seeks “rounded features that the gripper can partially enclose.” Researchers say they tested the robot in simulation to help it improve its ability to correctly identify grippable surface areas and aid in footstep planning. Following the simulation, ReachBot was tested in the real-world in an unmanned lava tube near Pisgah crater in Mojave Desert. 

“Results from the field test confirm the predictions of maximum grasp forces and underscore the importance of identifying and steering toward convex rock features that provide a strong grip,” the researchers write. “They also highlight a characteristic of grasp planning with ReachBot, which is that identifying, aiming for, and extending booms involves a higher level of commitment than grasping objects in manufacturing scenarios.”

ReachBot could help researchers explore deep caves and caverns on other planets

Researchers believe ReachBot’s arachnid design could have extraterrestrial applications. Lava tubes like in the Mojave Desert where the robot was tested removes some of the area on the surface of the moon and Mars. In the latter example, researchers say ancient subsurface environments on the Red Planet remain relatively unchanged the time when some believe the planet may have been habitable. These sheltered cavern areas, they write, “could provide sites for future human habitation.” 

In theory, future exploratory space robots could use a design like ReachBot’s to explore deeper into areas contemporary robots could find inaccessible. Elsewhere, researchers are exploring how three-legged jumping machines and four-legged, dog inspired robots could similarly help scientists learn more about undiscovered areas of our solar system neighbors. 

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Even without any known active tectonic movement, the moon can still rumble. Its dramatic thermal changes, miniscule contractions from cooling, and even the influences of Earth’s gravity have all contributed to noticeable seismic activity. And just like on Earth, detecting these potentially powerful moonquakes will be important for the safety of any future equipment, buildings, and people atop the lunar surface. 

But instead of traditional seismometers, NASA hopes Artemis astronauts will be able to deploy laser-powered fiber optic cables.

In a recent study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers at Caltech made the case for the promising capabilities of a new, high-tech seismological tool known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). Unlike traditional seismometers, DAS equipment measures the extremely tiny tremors detected in laser light as it travels through fiber optic cables. According to a separate paper from last year, a roughly 62-mile DAS cable line could hypothetically do the job of 10,000 individual seismometers.

[Related: Researchers unlock fiber optic connection 1.2 million times faster than broadband.]

This is particularly crucial given just how difficult it’s been to measure lunar seismic activity in the past. Apollo astronauts installed multiple seismometers on the lunar surface during the 1970’s, which managed to record quakes as intense as a magnitude 5. But those readings weren’t particularly precise, due to what’s known as scattering—when seismic waves are muddied from passing through layers of extremely fine, powdery regalith dust.

Researchers believe using fiber optic DAS setups could potentially solve this problem by averaging thousands of sensor points, and the data to back it up. According to a recent Caltech profile, the team of geophysicists deployed a similar cable system near Antarctica’s South Pole, the closest environment on Earth to our natural satellite’s surface due to its remote, harsh surroundings. Subsequent tests successfully detected subtle seismic activity such as cracking and shifting ice, while holding up against the harsh surroundings.

Of course, the moon’s brutal surface makes Antarctica look almost pleasant by comparison. Aside from the dust, temperature fluctuations routinely vary between 130 and -334 degrees Fahrenheit, while the lack of atmosphere means regular bombardment by solar radiation. All that said, Caltech researchers believe fiber optic cabling could easily be designed to withstand these factors. With additional work, including further optimizing its energy efficiency, the team believes DAS equipment could arrive alongside Artemis astronauts in the near future, ready to measure any moonquakes that come its way.

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Japan has offered to provide the United States with a pressurized moon rover—in exchange for a reserved seat on the lunar van. Per NASA, the two nations have themselves a deal. 

According to a new signed agreement between NASA and Japan’s government, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will “design, develop, and operate” a sealed vehicle for both crewed and uncrewed moon excursions. NASA will then oversee the launch and delivery, while Japanese astronauts will join two surface exploration missions in the vehicle.

[ Related: SLIM lives! Japan’s upside-down lander is online after a brutal lunar night ]

‘A mobile habitat’

Japan’s pressurized RV will mark a significant step forward for lunar missions. According to Space.com, the nation has spent the past few years working to develop such a vehicle alongside Toyota and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Toyota offered initial specs for the RV last year—at nearly 20-feet-long, 17-feet-wide, and 12.5-feet-tall, the rover will be about as large as two minibusses parked side-by-side. The cabin itself will provide “comfortable accommodation” for two astronauts, although four can apparently cram in, should an emergency arise.

Like an RV cruising across the country, the rover is meant to provide its inhabitants with everything they could need for as long as 30 days at a time. While inside, astronauts will even be able to remove their bulky (and fashionable) getups and move about normally—albeit in about 16.6 percent the gravity as on Earth. Last week, NASA announced it had narrowed the search for its new Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) to three companies, but unlike Japan’s vehicle, that one will be unpressurized.

[Related: It’s on! Three finalists will design a lunar rover for Artemis ] 

“It’s a mobile habitat,” NASA Administrator Nelson said during yesterday’s press conference alongside Minister Moriyama, describing it as “a lunar lab, a lunar home, and a lunar explorer… a place where astronauts can live, work, and navigate the lunar surface.”

Similar to the forthcoming Lunar Terrain Vehicle, the Japanese RV can be remotely controlled if astronauts aren’t around, and will remain in operation for 10 years following its delivery.

“The quest for the stars is led by nations that explore the cosmos openly, in peace, and together… America no longer will walk on the moon alone,” Nelson added.

A total of 12 astronauts—all American men—have walked across the moon’s surface. When the U.S. returns to the moon with NASA’s Artemis missions, it will also be the first time a woman and a person of color will land on the moon.

After some rescheduling, NASA currently intends to send its Artemis II astronauts on a trip around the moon in late 2025. Artemis III will see the first two humans touchdown in over 50 years in either late 2026 or early 2027. The Artemis IV mission is currently intended to occur no earlier than 2030. Meanwhile, China is trying to land its own astronauts on the lunar surface in 2030. 

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New data indicates a once-in-a-generation eclipse is a pretty surefire way to convince people to finally log off the internet—at least for a few minutes. According to estimates from cloud-computing provider Cloudflare, yesterday’s online traffic dropped between 40-60 percent week-to-week within the April 8 eclipse’s path of totality. In aggregate terms for the US, “bytes delivered traffic dropped by 8 percent and request traffic by 12 percent as compared to the previous week” around 2:00pm EST.

According to NASA, yesterday’s path of totality included a roughly 110-mile-wide stretch of land as it passed across Mazatlán, Mexico, through 13 states within the continental US, and finally over Montreal, Canada. In America alone, an estimated 52 million people lived within the eclipse’s path of totality. And it certainly seems like a lot of them put down their phones and laptops to go outside and have a look.

[Related: What a total eclipse looks like from space.]

As The New York Times highlights, Vermont saw the largest mass log-off, with an estimated 60-percent drop in internet usage compared to the week prior. South Carolinians, meanwhile, appeared to be the least compelled to take a computer break, since their traffic only dipped by around four percent.

Interestingly, you can also glean a bit about weather conditions during the eclipse from taking a look at Cloudflare’s internet usage map of the US. While most of the states within the event’s trajectory showcase pretty sizable downturns, Texas only experienced a 15 percent reduction. But given a large part of the Lone Star State endured severe weather conditions, it’s likely many people remained inside—maybe even online to livestream the views of the eclipse elsewhere.

[Related: The full sensory experience of an eclipse totality, from inside a convertible in Texas.]

So what were people doing if they weren’t posting through the eclipse? Well, snapping photos of the moment is always pretty popular, while NASA oversaw multiple volunteer research projects.

Judging from Cloudflare’s data, it didn’t take long for people to log back online once the eclipse ended above them. Usage appeared to spike back to pretty standard levels almost exactly in time with the event’s ending in any given state. No doubt most people rushed to post their reactions, photos, and videos… but maybe yesterday will still serve as a nice reminder that there’s a lot more to see when you take a break and go outside for a bit.

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Today was one for the history books as a total solar eclipse crossed North America. The sky first darkened in Mazatlán, Mexico on the country’s Pacific Coast. Torreón, Mexico saw the longest totality at 4 minutes and 28 seconds. It then entered the United States through Texas and traveled through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. It entered Canada via Southern Ontario, and continued through Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. The eclipse left the continental North America on the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland, Canada, at 5:16 p.m. NDT. 

Here’s how the eclipse looked at various locations, from Mexico to Canada.

And if you’re wondering what the eclipse looked like from space, NASA shared the view from the International Space Station.

If you can, consider recycling or donating any used eclipse glasses. Visit Astronomers Without Borders to learn more about how you can recycle your glasses. If you are located in the path of totality, many libraries will also offer convenient eclipse glasses recycling locations. 

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Today, millions of people will have a chance to watch a total solar eclipse. If you’re one of them, be careful: looking directly at a solar eclipse without eye protection can permanently damage your vision.

It doesn’t matter if our rocky satellite is blocking all or some of our nearest star—the sun is still an incredibly bright source of light. Don’t risk your eyesight for a quick glimpse or even a once-in-a-lifetime event. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to protect your eyes while watching an eclipse.

What happens if you look at a solar eclipse

We are able to see thanks to photoreceptors. These cells, also known as rods and cones, are located at the backs of our eyes, and convert the light reflected by the world around us into electrical impulses that our brain interprets as the image we see. But when strong light, like that from the sun, hits our eyes, a series of chemical reactions occur that damage and often destroy these rods and cones. This is known as solar retinopathy, and can make our eyesight blurry. Sometimes, if the damage is too great in one area, you can lose sight completely.

[Related: Every sunset ends with a green flash. Why is it so hard to see?]

On a typical sunny day, you almost never have to worry about solar retinopathy. That’s because our eyes have natural mechanisms that ensure too much light doesn’t get in. When it’s really bright outside, our pupils get super tiny, reducing the amount of sunlight that can hit your photoreceptors. But when you stare directly at the sun, your pupils’ shrinking power isn’t enough to protect your peepers.

This is where your eyes’ second defense mechanism comes into play. When we look at something bright, we tend to blink. This is known as the corneal or blink reflex, and it  prevents us from staring at anything too damagingly bright. 

Just before a solar eclipse has reached its totality, the moon is partially blocking the sun, making it a lot easier for us to look up at the star without blinking. But that doesn’t mean you should—even that tiny sliver of sunlight is too intense for our sensitive photoreceptors.

[Related: Total eclipses aren’t that rare—and you’ve probably missed a bunch of them]

Unfortunately, if you practice unprotected sun-gazing, you probably won’t know the effects of your actions until the next morning, when the damage to your photoreceptors has kicked in.

And while solar retinopathy is extremely rare, it is by no means unheard of. If you search the term in medical journals, you’ll find case reports after almost every popular solar eclipse. Let’s try really hard to do better this time, eyeball-havers.

How to safely watch a solar eclipse

Watching the eclipse with your own two eyes is easy: just wear legitimate eclipse sunglasses. These are crucial, as they will block the sun’s rays enough for you to safely see the eclipse without burning your eyes out.

And if you don’t have eclipse glasses, you can still enjoy the view, albeit not directly. Try whipping up your own eclipse projector or a DIY pinhole camera so you can enjoy the view without having to book an emergency visit to the eye doctor.

This story has been updated. It was originally published in 2017.

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It’s a well-known fact that staring at the sun is… not the best idea. In the same way that the sun can burn your skin, our home star can overwhelm your peepers with UV rays and literally scorch your retina.

That is a huge bummer, especially because watching a solar eclipse (when the moon covers the sun) is an incredibly cool experience. Thankfully, there are several ways to watch an eclipse without risking your vision, and one of them is building a pinhole camera out of a box, a piece of aluminum foil, and lots of tape. This is an easy and incredibly versatile project, and you can turn it into a permanent camera obscura when you’re done watching the eclipse. 

How to make a pinhole camera

1. Light-proof your box. Leaving one side open, use duct tape or electrical tape to seal the box and prevent any light rays from sneaking in. Pay special attention to the corners and wherever two pieces of cardboard meet. The pinhole will only allow a few rays of light into your box, so the projection of the sun will be dim. That means the darker your camera, the easier it will be to see the image.

As we said, this project is versatile. You can use a wide range of box sizes to make your pinhole camera, but cereal and shoe boxes work exceptionally well. We used the 15-by-7 ½-by-5 ½-inch box that carried our neighbor’s latest online shopping spurt. 

Likewise, duct tape and electrical tape are the best choices to light-proof your box, but you can use any tape that will block light—dark washi tape or masking tape will also do the trick. Just keep in mind that you may have to apply multiple layers to achieve total darkness inside your box. 

• Pro tip: Check your work by holding your box up to a light and looking inside. If you still see some shine coming through, apply another layer of tape. 

2. Determine your pinhole’s location and cover the inside of the opposite face with white paper. Measure one of the smallest sides of the box, cut a piece of white paper to the same size, and tape or glue it to the inside of the corresponding face. It doesn’t have to be perfect—as long as most of the side is covered, you’ll be good to go. Just make sure that the paper doesn’t have any wrinkles or folds, as they may distort the image of the sun. 

3. Measure the openings for the pinhole and the viewer. On the side opposite the one you covered with white paper, use your ruler and a pencil to measure two openings. The pinhole opening will be located in the upper left corner (about half an inch from the edges) and will be 2-by-2 inches (we’ll make it smaller later). 

The viewing opening will be located in the upper right corner of the box, half an inch from the top edge and an inch from the right edge of the box. This opening will be smaller—only 1 inch square.

4. Cut the openings. Using a box cutter or scissors, cut out the openings you drew. 

• Pro tip: If the openings end up being too big, don’t sweat it—you can always adjust their size with tape. 

5. Close and seal the box. Use your newly cut openings to make sure there are no other places where light might be sneaking in. Pay special attention to the corners of the box above and below your openings. Cover all the places where pieces of cardboard meet with tape. 

6. Cover the larger opening with aluminum foil. Cut a smooth 2 ½-by-2 ½-inch piece of aluminum foil. With the dull side facing you, carefully cover the big opening with the metallic sheet and tape it in place. Make sure you secure it tightly so no light can get into the box.  

• Pro tip: To smooth out any creases, softly rub the top of any fingernail over the foil in a small, circular motion. 

7.  Use the thumbtack to poke a hole in the foil. Find the rough center of the 2-by-2-inch square under the aluminum sheet and gently push the tack through before pulling it back out—you want a clean, round hole. If you don’t have a thumbtack, you can use the tip of a toothpick or an embroidery needle. Just make sure that whatever you’re using has a point (it’ll make a neater hole) and that it’s approximately 0.2 millimeters wide. 

• Note: The width of your pinhole will determine how much light gets into the box. Too much light and the image will be blurry. If that’s the case, don’t worry—just replace the foil and try making a smaller pinhole. 

8. Put your pinhole camera to the test. Stand with your back facing the sun and look into the box through the viewport. Use your hands to block out as much light as possible and move around until you find the angle where sunlight enters through the pinhole. When this happens, you should see a small projection of the shape of the sun on the white paper you pasted inside the box. 

[Related: Total eclipses aren’t that rare—and you’ve probably missed a bunch of them]

Keep in mind that the weather is crucial in determining the quality of the image you’ll see inside your pinhole camera, and whether you can see the eclipse at all.

How a pinhole camera works

Images are light. Everything we see we perceive because there’s light bouncing off of it, beaming directly through our pupils and into our eyes. All cameras, including the humble pinhole camera you just made, operate under this basic principle. The better they filter the light, the sharper the resulting image will be. 

The sun, of course, is the ultimate light source. On a sunny day, rays from the star travel to Earth and bounce off of every surface they reach. This is a lot of light coming from all directions, so if we want to see only a small portion of the sun’s rays, we have to focus those rays and filter out the rest. That’s why the pinhole in your camera is so tiny or, in more technical terms, why its aperture is so narrow—it only lets a small amount of light into the box, just enough so you can see only a dim projection of the sun when you point the pinhole directly at it. 

The dimness of the image is not ideal, but it’s the tradeoff we make for sharpness—too much light results in a blurry, out-of-focus picture. This is important during a solar eclipse, as filtering the light will allow you to see the round shape of the sun become a crescent or a ring as the moon moves in and gradually blocks the sunlight. 

When the eclipse is over, use a skewer to widen your camera’s pinhole. When you look inside, you won’t only be able to see the sun, but a slightly brighter and inverted image of your surroundings. A bigger pinhole turns your box into a camera obscura, allowing more light in and projecting an image of the objects around you.  

This story was originally published in 2023 and updated in 2024.

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NASA has announced three finalists to pitch them their best moon car ideas by this time next year to use on upcoming Artemis lunar missions. During a press conference yesterday afternoon, the agency confirmed Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab will all spend the next 12 months developing their Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) concepts as part of the “feasibility task order.”

According to Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the final LTV will “greatly increase our astronauts’ ability to explore and conduct science on the lunar surface while also serving as a science platform between crewed missions.”

While neither Lunar Outpost nor Venturi Astrolab have been on the moon yet, they are planning uncrewed rover missions within the next couple years. In February, Intuitive Machines became the first privately funded company to successfully land on the lunar surface with its NASA-backed Odysseus spacecraft. Although “Odie” officially returned the US to the moon after an over-50 year hiatus, touchdown complications resulted in the craft landing on its side, severely limiting the extent of its mission.

[Related: NASA’s quirky new lunar rover will be the first to cruise the moon’s south pole.]

The last time astronauts zipped around on a moon buggy was back in 1971 during NASA’s Apollo 15 mission. The new LTV, like its Apollo predecessor, will only accommodate two people in an unpressurized cockpit—i.e. exposed to the harsh moon environment.

Once deployed, however, the LTV will differ from the Lunar Roving Vehicle in a few key aspects—most notably, it won’t always need someone at the steering wheel. While astronauts will pilot the LTV during their expeditions, the vehicle will be specifically designed for remote control once the Artemis crew is back home on Earth. In its initial May 2023 proposal call, the agency explained its LRV capabilities will be “similar to NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers.” When NASA isn’t renting the LTV, the winning company will also be free to contract it out to private ventures in the meantime.

But while a promising lunar rover design is great to see on paper, companies will need to demonstrate their vehicle’s capabilities before NASA makes its final selection—and not just on some desert driving course here on Earth.

After reviewing the three proposals, NASA will issue a second task order to at least one of the finalists, requesting to see their prototype in action on the moon. That means the company (or companies) will need to plan and execute an independent lunar mission, deliver a working vehicle to the moon, and “validate its performance and safety.” Only once that little hurdle is cleared does NASA plan to greenlight one of the company’s rovers.

If everything goes smoothly, NASA’s Artemis V astronauts will use the winning LTV when they arrive near the moon’s south pole in 2030.

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What time is it on the moon?

Well, right now, that’s somewhat a matter of interpretation. But humanity is going to need to get a lot more specific if it intends to permanently set up shop there. In preparation, NASA is aligning its clocks in preparation for the upcoming Artemis missions. On Tuesday, the White House issued a memo directing the agency to establish a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC), which will help guide humanity’s potentially permanent presence on the moon. Like the internationally recognized Universal Time Zone (UTC), LTC will lack time zones, as well as a Daylight Savings Time.

It’s not quite a time zone like those on Earth, but an entire frame of time reference for the moon. 

As Einstein famously noted, time is very much relative. Most timekeeping on Earth is tied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which relies on an international array of atomic clocks designed to determine the most precise time possible. This works just fine in relation to our planet’s gravitational forces, but thanks to physics, things are observed differently elsewhere in space, including on the moon.

“Due to general and special relativity, the length of a second defined on Earth will appear distorted to an observer under different gravitational conditions, or to an observer moving at a high relative velocity,” Arati Prabhakar, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTB), explained in yesterday’s official memorandum. 

Because of this, an Earth-based clock seen by a lunar astronaut would appear to lose an average of 58.7 microseconds per Earth day, alongside various other periodic variational influences. This might not seem like much, but it would pose major issues for any future lunar spacecraft and satellites that necessitate extremely precise timekeeping, synchronization, and logistics.

[Related: How to photograph the eclipse, according to NASA.]

“A consistent definition of time among operators in space is critical to successful space situational awareness capabilities, navigation, and communications, all of which are foundational to enable interoperability across the U.S. government and with international partners,” Steve Welby, OTSP Deputy Director for National Security, said in Tuesday’s announcement.

NASA’s new task is about more than just literal timing—it’s symbolic, as well. Although the US aims to send the first humans back to the lunar surface since the 1970’s, it isn’t alone in the goal. As Reuters noted yesterday, China wants to put astronauts on the moon by 2030, while both Japan and India have successfully landed uncrewed spacecraft there in the past year. In moving forward to establish an international LTC, the US is making its lunar leadership plans known to everyone.

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

But it’s going to take a lot of global discussions—and, yes, time—to solidify all the calculations needed to make LTC happen. In its memo, the White House acknowledged putting Coordinated Lunar Time into practice will need international agreements made with the help of “existing [timekeeping] standards bodies,” such as the United Nations International Telecommunications Union. They’ll also need to discuss matters with the 35 other countries who signed the Artemis Accords, a pact concerning international relations in space and on the moon. Things could also get tricky, given that Russia and China never agreed to those accords.

“Think of the atomic clocks at the US Naval Observatory. They’re the heartbeat of the nation, synchronizing everything,” Kevin Coggins, NASA’s space communications and navigation chief, told Reuters on Tuesday. “You’re going to want a heartbeat on the moon.”

NASA has until the end of 2026 to deliver its standardization plan to the White House. If all goes according to plan, there might be actual heartbeats on the moon by that point—the Artemis III crewed lunar mission is scheduled to launch “no earlier than September 2026.”

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Galaxies come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some have buff, spiral arms. Others are necklace-shaped or oblong. They begin their lives rotating in an orderly fashion, but the movement of the stars eventually gets more random and less organized. Astronomers have not been able to pinpoint the reasons behind the changes, but new research poses a somewhat simple explanation–aging. As galaxies age, they tend to be more chaotic. The findings are described in a study published April 3 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

[Related: Listen to three breathtaking NASA images.]

“When we did the analysis, we found that age, consistently, whichever way we slice or dice it, is always the most important parameter,” study co-author and University of Sydney observational astrophysicist Scott Croom said in a statement. “Once you account for age, there is essentially no environmental trend, and it’s similar for mass. If you find a young galaxy it will be rotating, whatever environment it is in, and if you find an old galaxy, it will have more random orbits, whether it’s in a dense environment or a void.”

When galaxies are young, they are star-forming machines. Older ones typically stop forming new stars. Earlier studies suggested that the galaxy’s environment or mass were the more important factors influencing how galaxies behave and move. According to the team, these ideas are not necessarily incorrect.

“We do know that age is affected by [the] environment. If a galaxy falls into a dense environment, it will tend to shut down the star formation. So galaxies in denser environments are, on average, older,” study co-author and University of Sydney astronomer Jesse van de Sande said in a statement. “The point of our analysis is that it’s not living in dense environments that reduces their spin, it’s the fact that they’re older.” For example, our own 13.6 billion year-old Milky Way galaxy still has a thin star forming disk and it is considered a high spin rotational galaxy. Older galaxies also move around more randomly than younger ones, no matter how densely packed with energy their environments are.    

In the new study, an international team of scientists used data from observations from the SAMI Galaxy Survey. SAMI has surveyed 3,000 galaxies across a wide range of cosmic environments, which helped the team compare and contrast different types of galaxies. Having more accurate observations of galactic behavior helped them fine-tune their models of how the universe developed. 

[Related: JWST images show off the swirling arms of 19 spiral galaxies.]

In future studies, the team hopes to create galaxy evolution simulations in better detail using the University of Sydney’s Hector Galaxy Survey.

“Hector is observing 15,000 galaxies, but with higher spectral resolution, allowing the age and spin of galaxies to be measured even in much lower mass galaxies and with more detailed environmental information,” study co-author and Hector Galaxy Survey lead Julia Bryant said in a statement.

This work ultimately aims to give scientists a better understanding about how the universe has evolved over billions of years and how our solar system came to be.  

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The world’s largest digital camera is officially ready to begin filming “the greatest movie of all time,” according to its makers. This morning, engineers and scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory announced the completion of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera, a roughly 6,610-pound, car-sized tool designed to capture new information about the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Following a two-decade construction process, the 3,200-megapixel LSST Camera will now travel to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory located 8,900-feet atop Chile’s Cerro Pachón. Once attached to the facility’s Simonyi Survey Telescope later this year, its dual five-foot and three-foot-wide lenses will aim skyward for a 10-year-long survey of the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and beyond.

Just how much detail can you get from a focal plane leveled to within a tenth the width of a human hair alongside 10-micron-wide pixels? Aaron Roodman, SLAC professor and Rubin Observatory Deputy Director and Camera Program Lead, likens its ability to capturing the details of a golf ball from 15-miles away “while covering a swath of the sky seven times wider than the full moon.” The resultant images will include billions of stars and galaxies, and with them, new insights into the universe’s structure.

[Related: JWST takes a jab at the mystery of the universe’s expansion rate.]

Among its many duties, the LSST Camera will search for evidence of weak gravitational lensing, which occurs when a gigantic galaxy’s gravitational mass bends light pathways from the galaxies behind it. Analyzing this data can offer researchers a better look at how mass is distributed throughout the universe, as well as how that distribution changed over time. In turn, this could help provide astronomers new ways to explore how dark energy influences the universe’s expansion.

To achieve these impressive goals, the LSST Camera needed to be much more than simply a scaled-up version of a point-and-shoot digital camera. While lenses like those within your smartphone often don’t include physical shutters, they are still usually found within SLR cameras. That said, their shutter speeds aren’t nearly as slow as the LSST Camera. 

“The [LSST] sensors are read out much more slowly and deliberately… ” Andy Rasmussen, SLAC staff physicist and LSST Camera Integration and Testing Scientist, tells PopSci. “… the shutter is open for 15 seconds (for the exposure) followed by 2 seconds to read (with shutter closed).” This snail’s pace allows LSST Camera operators to only deal with lower noise—only around 6 or 7 electrons—resulting in capturing much darker skies.

“We need quiet sensors so that we can tell that the dark sky is actually dark and also so that we can measure very dim objects in the sky,” Rasmussen continues. “During this 2 second readout period, we need to block any more light from entering the Camera, so that’s why we have a shutter (one of several mechanisms inside the Camera).”

To further ensure operators can capture the measurements of dim objects, they also ostensibly slow atomic activity near the LSST Camera’s focal point by lowering surrounding temperatures as low as -100C (173 Kelvin).

Beyond dark matter and dark energy research, cosmologists intend to use the LSST Camera to conduct a new, detailed census of the solar solar system. Researchers estimate new imagery could increase the number of known objects by a factor of 10, and thus provide additional insight into how the solar system formed, as well as keep track of any errant asteroids that may speed by Earth a little too close for comfort.

“More than ever before, expanding our understanding of fundamental physics requires looking farther out into the universe,” Kathy Turner, the Department of Energy’s Cosmic Frontier Program manager, said in today’s announcement. With LSST Camera’s installation, Turner believes researchers will be on the path to “answer some of the hardest, most important questions in physics today.”

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Millions across Canada, the United States, and Mexico are getting ready for this month’s big total solar eclipse. However, this exciting celestial event is not the only thing to get pumped about this Global Astronomy Month. April will bring in another possible chance to see the “Devil Comet” and a meteor shower. 

[ Related: This is the most cosmically perfect time in history ]

April 8-Total Solar Eclipse

In North America, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, completely blocking the face of the sun. According to NASA, the sky will darken as if it were dawn or dusk in the areas where the moon blocks out the sun’s light. Torreón, Mexico will see the longest totality at 4 minutes and 28 seconds, while most places along the path of totality will see it last between 3.5 and four minutes. 

The first location in continental North America that will experience totality is the Pacific Coast of Mexico, at about 11:07 am PDT. The path of the eclipse will then enter the United States in Texas, and travel through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. It will enter Canada via Southern Ontario, and continue through Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. The eclipse will leave continental North America on the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland, Canada, at 5:16 p.m. NDT. 

It is incredibly important to not look directly in the sun without proper eye protection during the eclipse. You can also build your own eclipse glasses and pinhole camera to watch this incredible event without frying your eyeballs. Aspiring astrophotographers are also encouraged to try to photograph the event and you can learn how to do so safely with this NASA-approved guide.

[Related: How to make sure your eclipse glasses actually work.]

April 21- Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks Reaches Perihelion

The “Devil Comet” put on a show in the Northern Hemisphere in March, and could even photobomb this month’s eclipse. On April 21, it will reach its closest point to the sun. During this time, it may be visible to the naked eye if the sky is dark enough. As it moves from the constellation Aries to Taurus, it will also become visible from the Southern Hemisphere. For the best spots to try to catch a glimpse of Pons-Brooks, consult StarWalk. 

After June, Pons-Brooks will take another 71 years for it to complete a full circuit around the sun. It won’t be visible again until summer 2095, so this will likely be the last time most of us get to see it. 

April 21 through 23- Lyrids Meteor Shower Predicted Peak

The annual Lyrids meteor shower officially begins on April 15 and is predicted to peak beginning in the early evening hours of April 21. Unfortunately, this year’s shower will be impacted by a bright waxing gibbous moon, making the night sky a bit brighter. In a dark sky with no moon 10 to 15 meteors per hour can be expected, so this year’s may be a little bit low. However, the Lyrids are known for some rare surges in activity that can sometimes bring them up to 100 per hour. The meteor shower will be visible from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, but is much more active in the north.

[Related: The moon is shrinking (very slowly).]

April 23- Full Pink Moon

The first full moon of spring in the Northern Hemisphere will reach peak illumination at 7:49 pm EDT on April 23. You can use the Farmer’s Almanac to calculate the local moonrise and moonset times near you. For best viewing, watch as the moon rises just above the horizon. 

April’s full moon is often called the pink moon in reference to the early springtime blooms of the wildflower Phlox subulata found in eastern North America, so it will not take on a pink hue. The April full moon is also called the Loon Moon or Maango-giizis in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), the It’s Thundering Moon or Wasakayutese in Oneida, and the Planting Moon or O’nót’ah in Seneca.

The same skygazing rules that apply to pretty much all space-watching activities are key during the nighttime events this month: Go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour. 

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SLIM, Japan’s first successful lunar lander, isn’t going down without a fight. After making history—albeit upside down—in January, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon continues to surprise mission control at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) by surviving not one, but now two brutally frigid lunar nights.

“Last night, we received a response from #SLIM, confirming that the spacecraft made it through the lunar night for the second time!” JAXA posted to X on Wednesday alongside a new image of its likely permanent, inverted vantage point near the Shioli crater. JAXA also noted that, because the sun is currently high above the lunar horizon, SLIM’s equipment is currently extremely hot (212-degrees Fahrenheit or so), so only the navigation camera can be used for the time being.

Last night, we received a response from #SLIM, confirming that the spacecraft made it through the lunar night for the second time! Since the sun was still high and the equipment was still hot, we only took some shots of the usual scenery with the navigation camera. #GoodAfterMoon pic.twitter.com/5BjIr7vxMG

— 小型月着陸実証機SLIM (@SLIM_JAXA) March 28, 2024

Based on their newly acquired data, however, it appears that some of the lander’s temperature sensors and unused battery cells are beginning to malfunction. Even so, JAXA says “the majority of functions that survived the first lunar night” are still going strong after yet another two-week stretch of darkness that sees temperatures drop to -208 Fahrenheit.

It’s been quite the multi-month journey for SLIM. After launching last September, SLIM eventually entered lunar orbit in early October, where it then spent weeks rotating around the moon’s surface. On January 19, JAXA initiated SLIM’s landing procedures, with early indications pointing towards a successful touchdown. After reviewing lander data, JAXA confirmed the spacecraft stuck the landing roughly 180-feet from an already extremely narrow 330-feet-wide target site—thus living up to SLIM’s “Moon Sniper” nickname.

[Related: SLIM lives! Japan’s upside-down lander is online after a brutal lunar night.]

The historic moment wasn’t a flawless mission, however. In the same update, JAXA explained that one of its lander’s main engines malfunctioned as it neared the surface, causing SLIM to tumble over, ostensibly on its head. In doing so, the craft’s solar panels now can’t work at their full potential, thus limiting battery life and making basic functions much more difficult for the lander.

JAXA still managed to make the most of its situation by using SLIM’s sensors to gather a ton of data on the surrounding lunar environment, as well as deploy a pair of tiny autonomous robots to survey the lunar landscape. On January 31, mission control released what it cautioned could very well be SLIM’s last postcard image from the moon ahead of an upcoming lunar night. The lander wasn’t designed for a lengthy life even in the best of circumstances, but its prospects appeared even dimmer given its accidental positioning.

Roughly two weeks later, however, SLIM proved it could endure in spite of the odds by booting back up and offering JAXA another opportunity to gather additional lunar information. A repeat of JAXA’s same warning came a few days later—and yet here things stand, with SLIM still chugging along. From the start, researchers have employed the lander’s multiple tools, including a Multi-Band Camera, to analyze the moon’s chemical composition, particularly the amounts of olivine, ““will help solve the mystery of the origin of the moon,” says JAXA.

At this point, it’s anyone’s guess how much longer the lander has in it. Perhaps it’s taking a cue from NASA’s only-recently-retired Mars Ingenuity rotocopter, which lasted around three years longer than intended.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Heads up: Rachel and Jess are planning a livestream Q&A in the near future, as well as other fun bonus content! Follow Rachel on Patreon and Jess on Twitch to stay up to date. 

FACT: This is the most cosmically perfect time in history

By Clara Moskowitz

At least, in terms of observing cosmic phenomena, it is. We’re about to see a total solar eclipse over North America, which is a pretty rare phenomenon. But if we were living at a different point in cosmic history, it would be more than rare—it’d be impossible. 

See, the fact that the moon is the perfect size to cover up the face of the sun in the sky is a total coincidence. It didn’t have to be that way, and in fact, it didn’t used to be that way. 

The moon started off closer to Earth than it is now, so it would have looked bigger in the sky. It would have been so big that it wouldn’t just block the sun, it would also have covered up the solar corona—the glowing atmosphere around the sun that turns a total solar eclipse into a beautiful spectacle. 

And the moon’s getting farther away all the time—by about 1.5 inches each year. This movement is a consequence of how the moon tugs on Earth to create the tides, which in turn drag Earth’s spin down minutely. To conserve angular momentum, the moon speeds up a teensy tiny amount, and thus moves away from us. In another 620 million years, the moon will be far enough away that its face will appear too small to completely block out the sun like it does now. 

FACT: Eclipses have been freaking humans out for pretty much forever 

By Rachel Feltman

Our oldest visual representation of a solar eclipse could be a fairly innocuous looking mound of stone in County Meath, Ireland called the Loughcrew. This grassy hump dates back to around 3,300 BC, making it a good 1,000 years older than Stonehenge. It features a number of large stones with intricate carvings of abstract shapes like spirals and diamonds. Most importantly for our purposes, one of the cairns shows a large carving of overlapping concentric circles—a common visual representation of the sun being eclipsed and then revealed by the moon. 

In 2002, archaeoastronomer Paul Griffin compared the age of the site to calculations of when solar eclipses should have been visible in the area, and found a good match for November 30 3340 BC, just around sunset. He argued that the other symbols on the cairns might represent stars that became visible due to the darkness of the partial eclipse.

Archaeologists had previously noted the presence of charred human remains from around 50 individuals placed in a basin just in front of the carving, which of course evokes some kind of ceremonial sacrifice. 

Now, some scientists vehemently disagree with this interpretation of the Loughcrew cairns, because there’s no written record to disprove it. But that’s kind of the issue with looking 5,000 years into the past: We can say confidently what was going on in the sky, but we have to make a lot of inferences to piece together what people were doing on the ground. 

That being said, we can be pretty certain that our ancestors had some wild reactions to—and explanations for—total solar eclipses. You can hear about more of them in this week’s episode. 

FACT: A total solar eclipse is a perfect opportunity for scrutinizing the sun’s deeply weird corona

By Lee Billings 

One of the most striking aspects of a full-blown solar eclipse is the totality, the period in which the moon hangs over the sun to almost perfectly blot out its starlight. You might expect the sky to simply be dark around our briefly shadowed star, but you’d be wrong. Instead the dark sun is wreathed by what looks like a wavering silvery crown—hence the name, “corona,” Latin for “wreath” or “crown.” This is a complex, dynamic region of hot, rarefied plasma—ionized gas—swirling and billowing in magnetic fields that emanate from deeper within, and being in the moon’s star-blocking shadow is by far the best time to see it. The corona envelopes our star like a tattered, diaphanous and ever-regenerating shroud, constantly shedding pieces at its edges which flow out along magnetic field lines to make the solar wind, which itself forms a larger bubble around our entire solar system that serves as a semipermeable barrier against the seething background of cosmic radiation. Sometimes the corona unleashes larger clumps of material in what are known as coronal mass ejections, which can strike orbiting planets to raise potent solar storms.

And, for reasons no one fully understands, the corona is quite hot—a few million degrees. Which may not seem so strange until you realize the sun’s apparent “surface,” which lies just beneath, is only some thousands of degrees.

This temperature difference is the so-called “coronal heating problem,” and one reason it’s so deeply weird is because it requires non-thermal energy transfer. Neither simple radiant heat—infrared light—nor convective heat, like the bubbling churn of hot fluids, can pump enough energy into the corona to explain its high temperature. The situation is a bit like holding a hot incandescent light bulb or a mug of boiling tea and, instead of suffering a burn having your hand flash-vaporize to a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma; that is, the available thermal energy is insufficient to do the deed. So heliophysicists know that more bizarre processes must be at play, such as heating from some combination of turbulence and the crashing reconnection of immense, writhing loops of the sun’s powerful magnetic field. Bizarre processes that, in turn, must somehow contribute to larger-scale corona-connected phenomena such as the solar wind and the giant mass ejections that reach out to shape the entire solar system and beyond. Scientists will be trying to unlock some of these solar secrets during the upcoming eclipse.

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It’s hard to think of anyone as excited about the upcoming North American total solar eclipse as NASA. From citizen research projects to hosted events within the path of totality, the agency is ready to make the most of next month’s cosmic event—and they want to help you enjoy it, too. Earlier this month, NASA offered a series of tips on how to safely and effectively photograph the eclipse come April 8. Certain precautions are a must, but with a little bit of planning, you should be able to capture some great images of the moon’s journey across the sun, as well as its effects on everything beneath it.

First and foremost is protection. Just as you wouldn’t stare directly at the eclipse with your own eyes, NASA recommends you place specialized filters in front of your camera or smartphone’s lens to avoid damage. The easiest way to do this is simply use an extra pair of eclipse viewing glasses, but there also are a number of products specifically designed for cameras. It’s important to also remember to remove the filter while the moon is completely in front of the sun—that way you’ll be able to snap pictures of the impressive coronal effects.

[Related: How to photograph solar eclipse: The only guide you need]

And while you’re welcome to use any super-fancy, standalone camera at your disposal, NASA reminds everyone that it’s not necessary to shell out a bunch of money ahead of time. Given how powerful most smartphone cameras are these days, you should be able to achieve some stunning photographs with what’s already in your pocket. That said, there are still some accessories that could make snapping pictures a bit easier, such as a tripod for stabilization.

Next: practice makes perfect, as they say. Even though you can’t simulate the eclipse ahead of time, you can still test DSLR and smartphone camera settings on the sun whenever it’s out and shining (with the proper vision protection, of course). For DSLR cameras, NASA recommends using a fixed aperture of f/8 to f/16, alongside shutter speeds somewhere between 1/1000 to one-fourth of a second. These variations can be used during the many stages of the partial eclipse as it heads into its totality. Once that happens, the corona’s brightness will vary greatly, “so it’s best to use a fixed aperture and a range of exposures from approximately 1/1000 to 1 second,” according to the agency. Most smartphone cameras offer similar fine-tuning, so experiment with those as needed, too.

[Related: NASA needs your smartphone during April’s solar eclipse.]

A few other things to keep in mind: Make sure you turn off the flash, and opt for a wide-angle or portrait framing. For smartphones during totality, be sure to lock the camera’s focus feature, as well as enable the burst mode to capture a bunch of potentially great images. Shooting in the RAW image format is a favorite for astrophotographers, so that’s an option for those who want to go above and beyond during the eclipse. While Google Pixel cameras can enable RAW files by themselves, most other smartphones will require a third-party app download to do so, such as Yamera and Halide.

But regardless of your camera (and/or app) choice, it’s not just the sun and moon you should be striving to capture. NASA makes a great point that eclipses affect everything beneath them, from the ambient light around you, to the “Wow” factor on the faces of nearby friends and family members. Be sure to grab some shots of what’s happening around you in addition to what’s going on above.
For more detailed info on your best eclipse photographic options, head over to NASA.

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Skygazers have the chance to view more than just a bright planet Mercury or April’s total solar eclipse over the next few days. An unusual “devil comet” or Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks will be visible across the night sky over the next several days and may make an appearance during the big eclipse on April 8th. Since it only makes one orbit around the sun every 71 years, seeing Pons-Brooks is generally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

What is the ‘devil comet’?

Pons-Brooks is a 10.5 mile-wide ball of ice and rock. It has a stretched out or highly elliptical orbit and is currently heading in the direction of our sun. It has a core made up of solid ice, gas, and dust that is surrounded by a frozen shell or nucleus. This nucleus is also covered by a cloud of icy dust called a coma that slowly leaks out of the center of the comet. 

Unlike most other comets, Pons-Brooks is cryovolcanic. It frequently erupts when solar radiation opens up fissures in the nucleus. This causes highly pressurized icy cryomagma to spew into space. When this occurs, the cloud of icy dust that surrounds it expands and appears brighter than usual. 

Pons-Brooks had a major eruption for the first time in 69 years in July 2023, which left it with two distinct trails of gas and ice that resemble a pair of devil horns. It has continued to erupt fairly frequently.

[Related: ‘Oumuamua isn’t an alien probe, but it might be the freakiest comet we’ve ever seen.]

When will it be visible?

Throughout the next few weeks, Pons-Brooks may be visible to the naked eye as it travels through the inner solar system. It will remain so until April 2, as it travels closer to the sun and won’t be visible in the dark night sky. It will be closest to Earth on June 2, when it is headed away from the sun. It does not pose any known threats to Earth and will be about 139.4 million miles away. 

SETI institute postdoctoral fellow Ariel Graykowski told Gizmodo that it is set to become even more active in the coming weeks and will be visible to the naked eye with a maximum brightness magnitude around 4.0. The lower the magnitude, the brighter the appearance.

“The limit for naked eye objects in dark, moonless skies is around 6 magnitudes,” Graykowski said, so “it won’t be super obvious in the sky.”

Where should I look?

In the Northern Hemisphere, it is most visible in the early evening towards the west-northwest horizon. Pons-Brooks is near the Pisces constellation and sits low in the northwestern sky. It should appear like a glowing ball of ice, with its forked horns following behind it.

[Related: Halley’s comet is on its way back towards Earth.]

“The comet will brighten a bit as it gets closer to the sun, and it should be visible to the naked eye low in the west about an hour after sunset,” Paul Chodas and Davide Farnocchia from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told CNN. “You should go to a location away from city lights and with an unobstructed view of the western horizon. It would be advisable to use a pair of binoculars, since the comet may be hard to locate without them.”

Will it appear during the April 8 solar eclipse?

Maybe. The forecast remains uncertain, but Pons-brooks could be visible if it flares significantly. It would only be seen by viewers in the path of totality–the area stretching from Texas northeast towards Maine where the moon will fully block the sun’s light.

According to EarthSky, “when the sky darkens, you’ll see the brightest planet Venus pop into view on one side of the sun. On the other side of the sun, you’ll find the second-brightest planet, Jupiter. And if Comet Pons-Brooks is bright enough, you’ll see it between Jupiter and the sun, but closer to Jupiter.”

It will not make an appearance again until 2097, so now is your chance to get a look. 

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Listening for crickets isn’t the only way you can help NASA conduct research during the total solar eclipse passing across much of North America on April 8—you can also lend your smartphone camera to the cause. The agency is calling on anyone within the upcoming eclipse’s path to totality to participate in its SunSketcher program. The program will amass volunteer researcher data to better understand the star’s shape. To participate, all you need is NASA’s free app, which uses a smartphone’s camera coupled with its GPS coordinates to record the eclipse. But why?

The sun looks simply spherical in many photographs and renderings, and in the sun if you happen to briefly glance at it during the day—an emphasis on “briefly,” of course. But thanks to what’s known as oblateness, this isn’t ever really the case. A rotating spheroid will oblate when its centrifugal force generates enough inertia to slightly flatten it out into a more irregular, elliptical shape. Within the solar system, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn all also display oblateness, but the sun has some unique characteristics affecting how it oblates in particular.

According to NASA, the sun’s oblateness “depends upon the interior structure of the rotation, which we know from sunspot motions to be latitude-dependent at least.” Astronomers also think gas flows accompanying the sun’s magnetic activity and convection can create “transient distortions at a smaller level.” The upcoming total solar eclipse will provide astronomers an opportunity to better understand all this in the sun, but to make that happen, NASA wants you to harness the moon.

Earth’s natural satellite can serve as a valuable research partner in measuring the sun’s oblateness. This is due to a phenomenon known as “Baily’s beads,” which are the tiny flashes of light during an eclipse that occur as solar light passes over the moon’s rugged terrain of craters, hills, and valleys. Since satellite imagery has helped produce extremely detailed mappings of lunar topography, experts can match Baily’s beads to the moon’s features as it passes in front of the sun.

[Related: New evidence suggests dogs may ‘picture’ objects in their minds, similarly to people.]

These flashes will vary depending on where an observer is located within the path of totality. If you could amass data from a vast number of observer locales, however, you could better understand the sun’s surface variations due to its oblateness. And there are potentially millions of individual locales directly underneath the April 8 eclipse. Enter: SunSketcher.

“With your help, we hope to create a massive hour-long database of observations, more than we could ever make on our own,” NASA says.

All volunteers need to do is angle their phones up to capture the big event and let SunSketcher record the rest. Once all those videos are collected, NASA says the solar disk’s size and shape can be calculated to within a few kilometers, “an accuracy that is far better than currently known.” The reliable, detailed information on solar oblateness captured during SunSketcher can also be used to study how solar gravity affects the motions of inner planets, as well as help test various gravitational theories.

It’s worth noting that serving as an official SunSketcher volunteer will sacrifice the ability to use your smartphone to snap videos or pictures for yourself—but that’s arguably a small price to pay for helping conduct valuable scientific research.

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In a “picture perfect” test, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully smashed a car-sized spacecraft into an asteroid in September 2022. The mission showed that a spacecraft could successfully defect a hazardous space rock if it were ever heading for Earth, even though the odds of a cataclysmic event happening are pretty low. DART changed the asteroid’s orbit, and now scientists found that the blistering impact also likely changed the asteroid’s shape. The findings are described in a study published March 19 in the Planetary Science Journal.

DART targeted the 560-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits a larger near-Earth asteroid called Didymos. Before the impact, Dimorphos had a generally symmetrical oblate spheroid shape.

“When DART made impact, things got very interesting,” Shantanu Naidu, a study co-author and navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement. “Dimorphos’ orbit is no longer circular. The entire shape of the asteroid has changed, from a relatively symmetrical object to a ‘triaxial ellipsoid’-–something more like an oblong watermelon.”

Previously, it took Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to complete one loop around Didymos and it had a well-defined, circular orbit about 3,900 feet from it. The space rock’s orbital period–the time it takes to complete one orbit–is now shorter by about 33 minutes and 15 seconds. 

To look into the changes after the impact with DART, Naidu and the team on this study used multiple sources of data in their computer models. The first source was the images that DART captured as it approached the asteroid. These images taken aboard the spacecraft gave close-up measurements of the gap between Didymos and Dimorphos and helped the team gauge the dimensions of both asteroids just before impact.  

The second data source was NASA’s Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Solar System Radar. This rader system is located near Barstow, California. It bounced radio waves off both Didymos and Dimorphos. These radio waves precisely measured the position of Dimorphos relative to Didymos after impact. These radar observations helped NASA conclude that DART exceeded the mission’s expectations. 

[Related: DART left an asteroid crime scene. This mission is on deck to investigate it.]

The most significant source of data came from ground telescopes all over the world that measured both asteroids’ light curve. This is how the sunlight reflecting off the asteroids’ rocky surfaces changed over time. Comparing the light curves before and after impact helped the team learn how DART changed Dimorphos’ motion. As Dimorphos orbits, it periodically passes in front of Didymos and then behind it. During these mutual events, one of the asteroids in the system can cast a shadow on the other, or block our view from Earth. A temporary dimming in the light curve can be recorded by telescopes in both scenarios. 

The team used the timing of this series of light-curve dips to figure out the shape of the orbit. Their models revealed that Dimorphos’ orbit is now slightly elongated, or eccentric. 

“Before impact the times of the events occurred regularly, showing a circular orbit. After impact, there were very slight timing differences, showing something was askew,” study co-author and JPL senior research scientist Steve Chesley said in a statement. “We never expected to get this kind of accuracy.”

[Related: Smashed asteroid surrounded by a ‘cloud’ of boulders.]

According to the team, the models are so precise that they can even show that Dimorphos rocks back and forth as it orbits Didymos. 

The models also calculated how the orbital period evolved. Right after impact, DART reduced the average distance between the two asteroids. It shortened Dimorphos’ orbital period by 32 minutes and 42 seconds, down to 11 hours, 22 minutes, and 37 seconds. 

In the week’s following its collision with DART, the asteroid’s orbital period continued to shorten as it shed more rocky material. It settled in at 11 hours, 22 minutes, and 3 seconds per orbit–or 33 minutes and 15 seconds less time than it took before impact. Dimorphos also now has an average orbital distance of about 3,780 feet–or roughly 120 feet closer to Didymos than it was before colliding with DART.

Another study published in February found that the asteroid is likely a loose rubble pile asteroid–like the recently sampled asteroid Bennu–composition due to its collision with DART. 

“The results of this study agree with others that are being published,” lead scientist for solar system small bodies at NASA Headquarters Tom Statler, said in a statement. “Seeing separate groups analyze the data and independently come to the same conclusions is a hallmark of a solid scientific result. DART is not only showing us the pathway to asteroid-deflection technology, it’s revealing [a] new fundamental understanding of what asteroids are and how they behave.” Statler was not an author on this study. 

To get a closer look at Didymos and Dimorphos, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission is scheduled to launch in October 2024. It will be taking a detailed survey of the asteroid pair and could officially confirm just how much DART reshaped Dimorphos.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

On April 8, 2024, millions across the U.S. will have the once-in-a-lifetime chance to view a total solar eclipse. Cities including Austin, Texas; Buffalo, New York; and Cleveland, Ohio, will have a direct view of this rare cosmic event that lasts for just a few hours.

While you can see many astronomical events, such as comets and meteor showers, from anywhere on Earth, eclipses are different. You need to travel to what’s called the path of totality to experience the full eclipse. Only certain places get an eclipse’s full show, and that’s because of scale.

The relatively small size of the Moon and its shadow make eclipses truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. On average, total solar eclipses are visible somewhere on Earth once every few years. But from any one location on Earth, it is roughly 375 years between solar eclipses.

I’m an astronomer, but I have never seen a total solar eclipse, so I plan to drive to Erie, Pennsylvania, in the path of totality, for this one. This is one of the few chances I have to see a total eclipse without making a much more expensive trip to someplace more remote. Many people have asked me why nearby eclipses are so rare, and the answer is related to the size of the Moon and its distance from the Sun.

Size and scale

You can observe a solar eclipse when the Moon passes in front of the Sun, blocking some or all of the Sun from view. For people on Earth to be able to see an eclipse, the Moon, while orbiting around the Earth, must lie exactly along the observer’s line of sight with the Sun. Only some observers will see an eclipse, though, because not everyone’s view of the Sun will be blocked by the Moon on the day of an eclipse.

The fact that solar eclipses happen at all is a bit of a numerical coincidence. It just so happens that the Sun is approximately 400 times larger than the Moon and also 400 times more distant from the Earth.

So, even though the Moon is much smaller than the Sun, it is just close enough to Earth to appear the same size as the Sun when seen from Earth.

For example, your pinky finger is much, much smaller than the Sun, but if you hold it up at arm’s length, it appears to your eye to be large enough to block out the Sun. The Moon can do the same thing – it can block out the Sun if it’s lined up perfectly with the Sun from your point of view.

Path of totality

When the Earth, Moon and Sun line up perfectly, the Moon casts a shadow onto the Earth. Since the Moon is round, its shadow is round as it lands on Earth. The only people who see the eclipse are those in the area on Earth where the shadow lands at a given moment.

The Moon is continuously orbiting around the Earth, so as time goes on during the eclipse, the Moon’s shadow moves over the face of the Earth. Its shadow ends up looking like a thick line that can cover hundreds of miles in length. Astronomers call that line the path of totality.

From any given location along the path of totality, an observer can see the Sun completely eclipsed for a few minutes. Then, the shadow moves away from that location and the Sun slowly becomes more and more visible.

A tilted orbit

Solar eclipses don’t happen every single time the Moon passes in between Earth and the Sun. If that were the case, there would be a solar eclipse every month.

If you could float above the Earth’s North Pole and see the Moon’s orbit from above, you would see the Moon line up with the Sun once every time it orbits around the Earth, which is approximately once per month. From this high point of view, it looks like the Moon’s shadow should land on Earth every orbit.

However, if you could shift your perspective to look at the Moon’s orbit from the orbital plane, you would see that the Moon’s orbit is tilted by about 5 degrees compared with Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This tilt means that sometimes the Moon is too high and its shadow passes above the Earth, and sometimes the Moon is too low and its shadow passes below the Earth. An eclipse happens only when the Moon is positioned just right and its shadow lands on the Earth.

As time goes on, the Earth and the Moon continue spinning, and eventually the Moon aligns with Earth’s orbit around the Sun at the same moment the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth.

While only certain cities are in the path of totality for this April’s eclipse, the entire U.S. is still close enough to this path that observers outside of the path of totality will see a partial eclipse. In those locations, the Moon will appear to pass in front of part of the Sun, leaving a crescent shape of the Sun still visible at the moment of maximum eclipse.

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There’s no doubt an extremely bright fireball careened through the atmosphere north of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014. It’s also true that divers recovered materials at the bottom of the ocean last year near where many experts believed the object landed—and that prominent Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb theorized some of these metallic spherules were possibly of “extraterrestrial technological” origin. But as to the ground vibrations recorded at a seismic station on Manus Island during the same atmospheric event? The explanation is likely much more mundane.

“[T]hey have all the characteristics we’d expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we’d expect from a meteor,” Johns Hopkins planetary seismologist Benjamin Fernando said on Thursday.

Fernando and his colleagues will present their findings on March 12 during the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

Although Fernando’s team concedes it’s difficult to prove what something isn’t through signal data, it’s pretty easy to highlight the characteristics it may share with existing, explainable seismic info. 

“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” said Fernando.

[Related: How scientists decide if they’ve actually found signals of alien life.]

To further bolster the much more everyday explanation, researchers also utilized data collected during the 2014 event by facilities in Australia and Palau originally built to measure nuclear test sound waves. After factoring in those recordings, Fernando’s team revised the previous location estimations for a more exact spot of the atmospheric occurrence—an area 100 miles away from the original region.

“The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments,” Fernando said of the 2023 recovery trip. “Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place.”

The team also doesn’t mince words in their new paper, “Probably Not Aliens: Seismic Data Analysis from the 2014 ‘Interstellar Meteor.’” Of the alien theory, the researchers “consider it to be at best highly overstated and at worst entirely erroneous.” And of the material recovered last year, “poor localisation implies that any material recovered is far less likely to be from the meteor, let alone of interstellar or even extraterrestrial origin.”

[Related: How lightning on exoplanets could make it harder to find alien life.]

Given NASA’s estimate that around 50 tons of meteoritic material bombards Earth every day, Fernando’s team says it’s definitely possible some of those fragments retrieved from the ocean floor may indeed be from some other meteorite. Regardless, they “strongly suspect that it wasn’t aliens.”

Disappointing? Perhaps. But there’ll probably be plenty of new UAP sightings to parse in the future—especially if people take up the government’s offer to submit their own inexplicable events.

For more detailed debunking, tune into a livestream of next week’s findings here.

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The countdown to April’s solar eclipse has begun, but there is still a month of fun stargazing opportunities to keep us excited before the big show. Weather folklore says that in the Northern Hemisphere, the third month of the year goes “in like a lion, out like a lamb.” Usually, we can expect fierce wintery weather to kick off March and calm springlike weather to end it. While it is tough to predict exactly what kind of weather that the transitional and temperamental month of March brings, there are some cosmic events to keep your eye on as the days start to get a little bit longer.

[Related: Delta’s solar eclipse flight sold out, but your best bet to see it is still down here.]

March 15 through 31– Look for Mercury

With a radius of only 1,516 miles, Mercury is our solar system’s smallest planet and the closest to our sun. Since it is located so near the sun’s bright rays and is so tiny, it can be more difficult to spot in the night sky. Starting around March 15, Mercury’s apparent distance from the sun will be just far enough away for stargazers to get a look at this planet.

According to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, it’s best to begin looking to the western sky about 40 minutes after sunset. It will be about seven to 10 degrees above the horizon, so try to have a clear sightline without a lot of interference from buildings or trees. It will reach its greatest eastern elongation on March 24, and then get slightly dimmer as the month winds down. 

March 20–Vernal Equinox

The Vernal Equinox is also known as the first day of spring. The season technically arrives in the Northern Hemisphere at 11:06 p.m. EDT on March 19, or March 20 at 3:06 a.m. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This is the standard measurement used to keep time zones organized and is maintained by very precise atomic clocks that are housed at laboratories all over the world. The United States Naval Observatory keeps official time in the United States. 

The equinox occurs twice a year (once in the spring and once in the fall). The March equinox brings earlier sunrises, later sunsets and sprouting plants to the Northern Hemisphere and the opposite effects to the Southern Hemisphere.

March 25– Full Worm Moon

This month’s full moon will reach peak illumination at 3:00 a.m. EDT on Monday, March 25. Beginning on March 24, the bright moon will begin to rise above the horizon. This month’s moon is also the Paschal Full Moon. This is what determines when Easter is celebrated. The holiday is always commemorated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring, so this year Easter will be on Sunday, March 31.

[Related: Why scientists think it’s time to declare a new lunar epoch.]

The origin of the name worm moon has a few different stories. Originally, it was believed to refer to the time of year when earthworms emerge, as snow melts and soil warms. However, recent research from the Farmer’s Almanac found that during the 1760s, Captain Jonathan Carver, a colonial explorer from Massachusetts, visited the Naudowessie (Dakota) and other Native American tribes and wrote that “Worm Moon” refers to beetle larvae which start to emerge from the thawing bark of trees and places they hide out during the winter.

Additional names for March’s full moon include the Snowshoe Breaking Moon or Bebookwedaagime-giizis in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), the Hackberry Month or Niyó’not’à:h in Seneca, and the Spring Moon or Upinagasraq or in the Inupiat language.

March 25– Penumbral Lunar Eclipse

While not quite as dramatic as next month’s solar eclipse, there will be a penumbral lunar eclipse on March 25. This occurs when the moon passes through the Earth’s partial shadow, or penumbra. The moon will darken slightly, but not completely. According to NASA, this month’s eclipse will be visible throughout all North America, Mexico, Central America, and South America. For the best viewing time near you, check out timeanddate.com.

The same skygazing rules that apply to pretty much all star gazing activities are key this month: Go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let your eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour.

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From Earth, the Sun appears comfortingly constant, always just about the same brightness in our blue skies during the day. Up close, however, it’s a lot more tumultuous, dotted with sunspots and roiling with solar flares.

Solar activity varies in fairly predictable 11 year cycles, meaning there are more sunspots and flares at certain intervals. But, there’s also fluctuation between cycles—some periods are more intense, and others, like the three decade Maunder minimum in the late 1600s, are almost entirely devoid of sunspots. Astronomers have been trying to pin down the exact physics behind these phenomena for years, although they have a clue as to the culprit: the Sun’s magnetic field. 

New research, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society last year and recently presented at a symposium of the International Astronomical Union, simulates how the stars’ spin can lead to very different kinds of solar cycles. They explain that spin affects a star’s magnetic field, which is born from hot plasma flowing inside the star’s core, creating the differences seen in nearby stars other than our sun. It turns out that the so-called “grand minima” that our sun experiences—like the long-ago Maunder minimum—may not be uniform across all stars. 

Observations from the past 50 years all point to one trend: that more active stars tend to rotate faster. The new simulations provide a physical explanation for this trend and “confirm the suspected link between a faster rotation and more active stellar cycle,” according to Ryan French, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory not affiliated with the publication.

The newly published simulations use the physics of fluid dynamics to imitate the rotation and flow of hot plasma within a star. This moving plasma is what generates a star’s magnetic field, known as a magnetic dynamo. The researchers tried these simulations with sun-sized stars that rotate at different speeds, from slow (30 days to complete a revolution), to something similar to our sun (about 25 days), to very fast (1 day). They found that the faster a star rotates, the stronger and more chaotic its magnetic field is. This leads to less predictable solar cycles, and fewer periods of inactivity like the Maunder minimum.

“Young stars, rapidly rotating and full of energy, are like children: lively, unpredictable, and active. These stars have magnetic fields that are strong and chaotic, mirroring the boundless energy and sometimes erratic behaviors of kids,” write lead author Vindya Vashishth and her colleague Anu Sreedevi from the Indian Institute of Technology. “Old stars, with their slow rotation, are reminiscent of the elderly: moving at a more measured pace, and embodying a calmer presence. Their magnetic fields are weaker, and their activity cycles are smooth and predictable, with occasional grand minima. These grand minima become more frequent as the star ages, much like how elderly individuals may have more frequent periods of rest or quietude,” they add.

In order to have grand minima—which they call the “hibernation phase of a star”—like the sun, a star must spin slower than once every ten days according to their models. They have good reason to be confident in their results, too. We have observational evidence that the sun has experienced around 27 grand minima in the past 11,000 years, and their study found a similar frequency of those events in a simulation that spans 11,000 years of the sun’s history.

What is happening with our sun right now?

Some astronomers even think our sun might be in a grand minimum right now, or at least just coming out of one. “Whether the last solar cycle was a Maunder Minimum or not is still debatable,” says Jia Huang, a solar scientist at Berkeley not involved with the new work. “This paper provides a new aspect to understanding the relationship between solar rotations and the occurrence of grand minima, thus it is timely and insightful to understand why and how the grand minima happen.”

The previous solar cycle—Solar Cycle 24—spanned December 2008 to December 2019, and was particularly weak, meaning there weren’t as many sunspots, flares, or other activity on the sun’s surface. A lack of solar activity can actually be good for humanity, as large solar storms or Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) can have deleterious effects on our power grids and satellites. On the other hand, extended periods of quiet from the Sun might make Earth a less pleasant place to live; the Maunder minimum seems to coincide with the Little Ice Age, but a causal link has yet to be confirmed.

What’s next for our sun’s solar activity?

We’re now in Solar Cycle 25, which began in December 2019 and will continue until about 2030. Solar scientists are starting to get excited, as the maximum of this particular cycle is set to occur within the next two years. “As we approach the solar maximum of the Sun’s solar cycle, more attention than ever turns to the activity of our local star,” adds French. “Years ago, predictions were made of how this Solar Cycle 25 would play out, and we’re finally close to revealing the truth.”

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claim Cycle 25 will be fairly mild, but will also finally break the trend of weakening solar activity, avoiding a situation that would truly mimic the Maunder minimum. They’ve also predicted that Cycle 25’s maximum might bring some excitement, including “impactful space weather events” in 2024 and possibly extra-radiant aurora. That’s not all for the sun’s time in the spotlight, either — solar activity will be on full display in April 2024, when a total solar eclipse will allow viewers in North America a gorgeous glimpse at the sun’s corona. It’s the last such event expected for this continent until 2045, so don’t miss out!

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Despite landing on its side and struggling to maintain power, Odysseus, the first US spacecraft to land on the moon in over half a century, is still somewhat operational. Built by the Houston-based company, Intuitive Machines, “Odie” marked a historic return to the lunar surface, and became the first privately funded venture ever to successfully reach the moon.

On Tuesday morning, Intuitive predicted that the spacecraft “may continue up to an additional 10-20 hours.” Yet, mission control plans to put the lander to sleep later tonight. Odie “continues to generate solar power,” said Intuitive Machines co-founder and president Steve Altemus during today’s mission update. Altemus also confirmed that engineers will attempt to revive Odysseus in 2-to-3 weeks following the upcoming lunar night’s conclusion.

“We’ve gotten over 15 megabytes of data,” said CLPS project scientist Sue Lederer when discussing the data the team is retrieving from Odysseus on Wednesday. “We went from basically a cocktail straw of data coming back to a boba tea size straw of data coming back.”

Launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on February 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Odysseus spent the next week traveling 230,000-miles towards the moon—and even documented its journey in the process.

[Related: ‘Odie’ makes space history with successful moon landing.]

For a moment, it seemed as though Odysseus might meet a recent predecessor’s similar fate. Less than a week before the Odysseus launch, the Peregrine lunar lander built by Astrobotics experienced a “critical loss of propellant” on its way to the moon, forcing the private company to abandon its mission.

While circling the moon ahead of last week’s descent, Odysseus ground engineers discovered they failed to turn on the spacecraft’s navigating laser system. As luck would have it, Odysseus housed an experimental NASA laser navigation device intended for testing once it reached its final destination. Mission controllers managed to boot up the laser, which allowed the lander to finish its trip. On February 22, Odysseus arrived close to the Malapert A crater within a mile of its target, approximately 185 miles from the moon’s south pole—but not without a debilitating setback.

While landing, a faster-than-intended descent caused one of its six legs to malfunction and tip Odysseus on its side. According to mission representatives, the resulting position blocked a number of Odie’s antennas, and angled solar panels in a way that limited their ability to draw power. A similar issue plagued yet another recent historic lunar landing mission, when Japan’s SLIM spacecraft arrived to the moon last month intact, if upside down.

[ Related: SLIM lives! Japan’s upside-down lander is online after a brutal lunar night ]

But even if it perfectly stuck the landing, Odysseus would still only have had another two-to-three days of life before powering down as the moon entered its next lunar night. Designers did not intend Odie to survive the harsh, 14.5-day phase that sees temperatures plummet as low as -208 Fahrenheit.

During a February 28 mission update, representatives say NASA Adminstrator Bill Nelson considers Odie’s landing a “success” despite setbacks.

Odysseus contained six NASA experiments (including that aforementioned laser nav system) intended to help plan for future Artemis program missions, a camera designed by university students, a lunar telescope prototype, as well as an art project containing 125 steel sculptures by Jeff Koons. According to Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus, Odysseus tipped so that only the Koons cargo faces downward into the lunar dirt.

This story is developing. We will update this article with more details.

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Astronomers are adding three newly discovered moons to our solar system’s growing list of known celestial bodies.  A team of international researchers spotted an additional moon circling Uranus’ for the first time in almost two decades and two new moons orbiting the planet Neptune. The discoveries were announced on February 23 by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, a scientific organization who is responsible for designating our solar system’s comets, planets, and moons.

[Related: Neptune’s faint rings glimmer in new James Webb Space Telescope image.]

“The three newly discovered moons are the faintest ever found around these two ice giant planets using ground-based telescopes,” Scott S. Sheppard, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution for Science who collaborated on the moons’ discovery, said in a statement. “It took special image processing to reveal such faint objects.”

Uranus’ new moon will have a dramatic name

The planet Uranus now has 28 known moons. The new moon is temporarily named S/2023 U1, but it will eventually be named after a character from a Shakespearean play. Uranus moons including Puck, Titania, and Oberon reference A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while the moon Miranda is a reference to The Tempest, both plays written by the English playwright.

At only five miles wide, S/2023 U1 is likely Uranus’ smallest known moon. It takes the tiny satellite 680 days to orbit the planet. Shepherd first spotted S/2023 U1 on November 4, 2023, using the Magellan telescopes at Carnegie Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Followup observations were conducted one month later. Marina Brozovic and Bob Jacobson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory then helped Shepherd determine a possible moon orbit.

New Neptunian moons–one bright, one faint

With this new discovery, the planet Neptune now has 16 known satellites. The brighter of Neptune’s two newly discovered moons is tentatively named S/2002 N5. It is 14 miles wide and appears to be in a 9-year orbit around Neptune. The fainter moon is named S/2021 N1 and it is about 8.6 miles wide. It circles the planet once every 27 years. Both of these moons will eventually be given names based on sea gods and nymphs in Greek mythology.

The two new Neptunian moons were first observed in September 2021. Shepherd worked with David Tholen of the University of Hawaii, Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University, and Patryk Sofia Lykawa of Kindai University, and the Subaru telescope to detect the moons. They confirmed the orbit of the brighter moon (S/2002 N5) over about two years and conducted followup observations with the Magellan telescopes.  

“Once S/2002 N5’s orbit around Neptune was determined using the 2021, 2022, and 2023 observations, it was traced back to an object that was spotted near Neptune in 2003 but lost before it could be confirmed as orbiting the planet,” said Sheppard. 

Detecting the fainter moon (S/2021 N1) required some special observing time under “ultra-pristine conditions” at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and on Gemini Observatory’s 8-meter telescope in order to secure its orbit. 

[Related: Expect NASA to probe Uranus within the next 10 years.]

By using these telescopes, shepherd and colleagues snapped dozens of five-minute exposures over three- or four-hour periods on a series of nights. The short-burst images were then layered so that all three new moons could come into view. 

“Because the moons move in just a few minutes relative to the background stars and galaxies, single long exposures are not ideal for capturing deep images of moving objects,” Sheppard said. “By layering these multiple exposures together, stars and galaxies appear with trails behind them, and objects in motion similar to the host planet will be seen as point sources, bringing the moons out from behind the background noise in the images.” 

More understanding of how these moons were captured can help astronomers learn about the tumultuous early years of our solar system and how the planets at the out edge move. Future missions to Uranus and Neptune are in the preliminary planning stages, and more data on their moons will allow the team to better study these far-flung planets. 

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Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on Monday that its historic Smart Lander for Investigating Moon has defied the odds—after surviving a brutal, two-week lunar night while upside down, SLIM’s solar cells subsequently gathered enough energy to restart the spacecraft over the weekend. In an early morning post to X, JAXA reported it briefly established a communication relay with its lunar lander on Sunday, but the moon’s extremely high surface temperature currently prevents engineers from doing much else at the moment. Once SLIM’s instrument temperatures cool off in a few days’ time, however, JAXA intends to “resume operations” through additional scientific observations as long as possible.

[Related: This may be SLIM’s farewell transmission from the moon.]

SLIM arrived near the moon’s Shioli crater on January 19, making Japan the fifth nation to ever reach the lunar surface. Although JAXA’s lander successfully pulled off an extremely precise touchdown, it did so upside down after its main engines malfunctioned about 162-feet above the ground. The resulting nose-down angle meant SLIM’s solar cell arrays now face westward, thereby severely hindering its ability to gather power. Despite these problems, the craft’s two tiny robots still deployed and carried out their reconnaissance duties as hoped and snapped some images of the inverted lander. Meanwhile, SLIM transmitted its own geological survey data back to Earth for a few precious hours before shutting down.

Although JAXA officials cautioned that might be it for their lander, SLIM defied the odds and rebooted 10 days later with enough juice to continue surveying its lunar surroundings, such as identifying and measuring nearby rock formations.

“Based on the large amount of data obtained, analysis is now underway to identify rocks and estimate the chemical composition of minerals, which will help to solve the mysteries surrounding the origin of the Moon. The scientific results will be announced as soon as they are obtained,” JAXA said at the time.

But by February 1, the moon’s roughly 14.5-day lunar night was setting in, plunging temperatures down to a potentially SLIM-killing -208 Fahrenheit. Once again, JAXA bid a preemptive farewell to their plucky, inverted technological achievement—only to be surprised yet again over the weekend.

In the few days since the most recent lunar evening’s conclusion, SLIM apparently recharged its solar cells enough to come back online. But as frigid as the moon’s night phases are, its daytime temperatures can be just as brutal. According to JAXA, some of the lander’s equipment initially warmed up to over 212-degrees Fahrenheit. To play it safe, mission control is giving things a little time to cool off before tasking SLIM with additional scans, such as using its Multi-Band Camera to assess nearby regolith formations’ chemical compositions.

JAXA has a few more days before the moon enters another two-week night, during which SLIM will go into yet another hibernation. While it could easily succumb to the lunar elements this next time, it’s already proven far more resilient than its designers thought possible. It may not surpass expectations as dramatically as NASA’s Mars Ingenuity rotocopter (RIP), but the fact that SLIM made it this long is cause enough for celebration.

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American scientist William Wheeler not only looked to the sky during a total solar eclipse; he also made sure to pay attention to everything around him. On August 31, 1932, Wheeler and fellow collaborators located throughout the northeastern regions of US and Canada took part in one of the earliest eclipse-related participatory studies to document the celestial event’s effects on wildlife. Volunteers made nearly 500 records of animal and insect reactions that day—nearly a century later, NASA hopes to honor those contributions, as well as exponentially expand on them.

On April 8, the agency is calling for citizen scientist volunteers along the upcoming total solar eclipse’s path to help in its ongoing Eclipse Soundscapes Project. Through a combination of visual, audio, and written recordings, NASA aims to help further researchers’ understanding of the occurrence’s influence on various ecosystems across the country.

As the moon passes in front of the sun, ambient light dims, temperatures fall, and even some stars begin to appear. These sudden environmental shifts have been known to fool animals into behaving as they would at dusk or dawn. According to NASA, the agency is specifically interested in better understanding the behavior of crickets, as well as observing the differences between how nocturnal and diurnal animals may respond.

“The more audio data and observations we have, the better we can answer these questions,” Kelsey Perrett, Communications Coordinator with the Eclipse Soundscapes Project, said in an announcement earlier this month. “Contributions from participatory scientists will allow us to drill down into specific ecosystems and determine how the eclipse may have impacted each of them.”

[Related: Delta’s solar eclipse flight sold out, but your best bet to see it is still down here.]

There are multiple ways any of the roughly 30 million people within the eclipse’s path can participate on April 8. People on or close to the path of totality can act as designated “Data Collectors” by purchasing a relatively low-cost audio recorder called an AudioMoth alongside a micro-SD card to capture surrounding sounds. Meanwhile, “Observers” can write down what they see and hear, then submit them through the project’s website, while “Apprentices” and “Data Analysts” can take quick, free online courses to help assess the incoming data. There are also plenty of options for anyone with sensory accessibility issues, and NASA made sure to include resources for facilitating large groups of volunteers through local schools, libraries, parks, and community centers.

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After a few tense minutes troubleshooting some communications issues, Odysseus has officially become the first privately constructed spacecraft to land on the moon. Mission Director Tim Crain announced that “Odysseus has a new home.” The uncrewed lunar lander likely touched down near at an impact crater by the moon’s south pole called Malapert A at 6:24 p.m. EST on February 22, 2024. Built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, “Odie” is the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. 

“I know this was a nail-biter, but we are on the surface, and we are transmitting,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus announced on the webcast. “Welcome to the moon.” While the company has confirmed that it has made contact with the lander, the state of the spacecraft is not yet clear.

It landed in a region that is about 3.5 billion years old. This landing site is near some craters and cliffs, on the side of the moon that is visible from the Earth and could be prime future landing spot for astronauts. Scientists believe that the permanently shadowed craters hold frozen water, which could be used for drinking water during the crewed Artemis missions scheduled later this decade. 

[Related: ‘Odie’ snaps its first images of Earth on its way to the moon.]

During the livestream, NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced that today begins “a new adventure in science, innovation, and American leadership in space. Today is a day that shows the power and promise of NASA’s commercial partnerships. Congratulations to everyone involved in this great endearing quest at Intuitive Machines, Space X, and right here at NASA.”

On Wednesday February 21, Intuitive Machines announced that Odysseus had fired its engine for six minutes and 48 seconds. This slowed it down enough to be pulled into the moon’s orbit about 57 miles above the lunar surface. 

Odysseus successfully launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 15 at 1:05 a.m. EST. The uncrewed lander completed a 230,000-mile journey towards the moon, sending back some images of the Earth along the way. Only government-funded programs from Russia, China, India, the United States, and most recently Japan have performed a successful lunar landing. 

The spacecraft is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing legs and stands at roughly 14 feet tall and five feet wide. Intuitive Machines calls the spacecraft design Nova-C and notes that it’s about the size of red London telephone booths. When completely loaded with fuel, it weighs about 4,200 pounds. 

NASA is the main sponsor of the mission, paying Intuitive Machines about $118 million to deliver its payload to the moon. NASA hopes that this mission will jumpstart the lunar economy ahead of future crewed Artemis missions. The six NASA navigation and tech experiments in the lander’s payload will collect data critical for the planned missions. Odysseus is also carrying a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, a prototype for a future moon telescope, and an art project by Jeff Koons. Koons told The New York Times that the project was inspired by his son, Sean Koons. It includes 125 stainless steel sculptures of the moon that are named after inspiring historical figures, including Ada Lovelace, Plato, and Leonardo da Vinci. 

[Related: This private lander could be the first US machine on the moon this century.]

Odysseus’s success comes one month after Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander failed to complete its mission. The spacecraft burned in the Earth’s atmosphere about 10 days after a broken fuel tank and massive leak caused the mission to fail. Other attempts to get a privately-built lunar lander on the moon include Israel’s Beresheet lander in 2019 and Japan’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander in 2023. 

This is a developing story, please check back for more details.

UPDATE, February 22, 2024, 8:53 p.m. EST: Two hours after successfully landing on the moon, Intuitive Machines confirmed on X that “Odysseus is upright and starting to send data.”

UPDATE, February 23, 2024 8:19 a.m. EST: This story has been update with images taken by Odysseus while in orbit and an artist’s rendition of what the lander could look like on the lunar surface.

UPDATE, February 26, 2024 8:23 a.m. EST:  According to Intuitive Machines, the moon lander tripped and fell during its touchdown and is lying on its side. However, it is still functioning. During landing maneuvers, one of its legs got stuck in the lunar surface, causing it to fall over a rock.

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Earlier this week, Delta Air Lines announced an extra flight for its April 8 schedule, timed specifically to provide passengers an aerial view of the total solar eclipse. But if you were still hoping to snag a ticket for the afternoon jaunt alongside the path of totality, you’re already out of luck—seats aboard the Airbus A220-300 sold out within 24 hours.

According to Delta’s original announcement, DL Flight 1218 with service from Austin to Detroit will depart at 12:15 PM CST for its roughly 1,380-mile, 3-hour-long trip. Once at a cruising altitude of 30,000-feet, passengers will be able to view the celestial event through the plane’s “extra-large windows,” which the official Airbus specs manual says measure in at 11×16 inches. For comparison, a Boeing 777 includes 10×15 inch glimpses of the outside world. Everyone on the plane will receive special glasses to safely watch the eclipse (which is nice to hear, given how few free amenities remain on most commercial flights).

[Related: We can predict solar eclipses to the second. Here’s how.]

While the solar eclipse will last several minutes for anyone on the ground, Flight 1218’s timing and route should grant a longer spectacle.

As cool as a first-class seat to the eclipse would be, there are plenty of (likely cheaper) locations across the US to consider visiting on April 8. After traveling across Central America, the path of totality will pass across large portions of  Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

If you’re truly determined to head to skies, NPR notes that there are other flight options scheduled to pass by at least some part of the eclipse, including from Delta, as well as several from Southwest.

But keep in mind: A plane’s altitude doesn’t necessarily guarantee a picture-perfect view of the eclipse—if anything, there’s a chance that cloud coverage could impede an onlooker’s vantage. There’s also the possibility of weather or air traffic control delays, which… well, this country has a history of such headaches.

So despite the multiple jetset options, your best bet to see April’s eclipse is simply making sure you’re within its route, firmly on the ground, and equipped with proper eyewear. Seriously, take it from NASA: “Viewing any part of the bright Sun through a camera lens, binoculars, or a telescope without a special-purpose solar filter secured over the front of the optics will instantly cause severe eye injury.”

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UPDATE, February 23, 2024 9:09 a.m. EST: Odie successfully landed on the moon and has started sending images back to Earth.

After a successful launch, Intuitive Machine’s robotic Odysseus spacecraft (aka Odie) beamed home its first images from space. In a post on X, Intuitive Machines wrote that the spacecraft “successfully transmitted its first IM-1 mission images to Earth on February 16, 2024.” The images were captured one day after the spacecraft blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

[Related: ‘Odie’ is en route for its potentially historic moon landing.]

According to the Houston-based company, the four images they selected were chosen from  hundreds of images taken by the lander’s cameras. These cameras were programmed to take five images every five minutes for the first two hours after Odysseus separated from the rocket’s second stage. 

“Out of all the images collected, Intuitive Machines chose to show humanity’s place in the universe with four wonderful images we hope to inspire the next generation of risk-takers,” the company wrote in a statement.

They capture the planet Earth fading into the background as the spacecraft continues on its 230,000-mile journey towards the moon.

Intuitive Machines also announced that Odysseus “continues to be in excellent health” and is communicating with mission control. Odysseus launched one month after Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander failed to complete its mission. The spacecraft burned in the Earth’s atmosphere about 10 days after a broken fuel tank and massive leak caused the mission to fail.

In addition to these first images, Odysseus’ engine also passed a crucial check in deep space over the weekend.

“Intuitive Machines flight controllers successfully fired the first liquid methane and liquid oxygen engine in space, completing the IM-1 mission engine commissioning. This engine firing included a full thrust mainstage engine burn and throttle down-profile necessary to land on the moon,” the company wrote in a post on X on February 16.

[Related: This private lander could be the first US machine on the moon this century.]

If the mission continues to go as planned, Odysseus will land on the moon on February 22, where it would be the first private spacecraft to conduct a successful lunar landing. Only government-funded programs from Russia, China, India, the United States, and most recently Japan have performed a lunar landing. 

The lander is aiming to touch down 186 miles away from the moon’s south pole. This region has cliffs, craters, and possibly frozen water. NASA is the main sponsor of the mission, paying Intuitive Machines about $118 million to deliver its payload to the moon. NASA hopes that if this mission is successful it will jumpstart the lunar economy ahead of future crewed missions. The space agency plans to land astronauts there later this decade. The six navigation and tech experiments in the lander’s payload that will collect data critical for these missions. 

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Looking for a change of pace from your day-to-day routine? Life on Earth feeling a bit overwhelming at the moment? How about a one-year residency alongside three strangers at a 3D-printed Mars habitat simulation?

On Friday, NASA announced it is now accepting applications for the second of three missions in its ongoing Crew Health and Performance Analog (CHAPEA) experiment. For 12 months, a quartet of volunteers will reside within Mars Dune Alpha, a 1,700-square-foot residence based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they can expect to experience “resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, and other environmental stressors.” 

[Related: To create a small Mars colony, leave the jerks on Earth.]

When not pretending to fight for your survival on a harsh, barren Martian landscape, CHAPEA team members will also conduct virtual reality spacewalk simulations, perform routine maintenance on the Mars Dune Alpha structure itself, oversee robotic operations, and grown their own crops, all while staying in shape through regular exercise regimens.

But if the thought of pretending to reside 300 million miles away from your current home sounds appealing, well… cool your jets. NASA makes it clear that there are a few requirements applicants must meet before being considered for the jobs—such as a master’s degree in a STEM field like engineering, computer science, or mathematics. Then you’ll need either two years professional experience in a related field, or a minimum of 1,000 hours spent piloting aircrafts. Also, only non-smokers between 30 and 55-years-old will be considered, and military experience certainly sounds like a plus.

Oh, and you’ll also need to fill out NASA’s lengthy questionnaire, which includes entries like, “Are you willing to have no communication outside of your crew without a minimum time delay of 20 minutes for extended periods (up to one year)?” and, “Are you willing to consume processed, shelf-stable spaceflight foods for a year with no input into the menu?”

It’s certainly a lot to consider. But as tough as it might be, simulations like CHAPEA are vital for NASA’s Artemis plans to establish a permanent human presence on both the moon and Mars. The truly intrepid and accomplished among you have until April 2 to fill out the official application. Seeing as how CHAPEA’s inaugural class is currently about halfway through their one-year stint, this second round of volunteers won’t need to report for duty until sometime in 2025. 

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Scientists have detected water molecules on the surface of an asteroid in space for the first time. The findings reveal new details about how water is distributed in the solar system and are detailed in a study published February 12 in The Planetary Science Journal.

[Related: What astronomers learned from a near-Earth asteroid they never saw coming.]

Water molecules have been detected in asteroid samples returned to Earth, but this marks the first time that the molecules have been discovered on the surface of an asteroid in space. The team studied four silicate-rich asteroids using data from the now-retired Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). This plane equipped with a telescope was operated by the German Aerospace Center and NASA. Some observations taken by SOFIA’s Faint Object InfraRed Camera (FORCAST) instrument revealed that asteroids Iris and Massalia have evidence of a specific wavelength of light that indicates that water molecules are present on their surface. The asteroid Iris is giant at 124-miles-diameters and orbits our sun between mars and Jupiter. Massalia is about 84 miles across and is also near the Red Planet.  

“Asteroids are leftovers from the planetary formation process, so their compositions vary depending on where they formed in the solar nebula,” Anicia Arredondo, study co-author and astronomer and asteroid specialist at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement. “Of particular interest is the distribution of water on asteroids, because that can shed light on how water was delivered to Earth.”

Dry silicate asteroids are described as anhydrous and they typically form closer to the sun. More icy space rocks like Chariklo are found further away from the sun. Understanding where asteroids are located in the solar system and what they are made from can tell us how the materials in our solar system have been distributed and evolved over time. Since water is necessary for all life on Earth, pinpointing where water could exist can drive where to look for life in our solar system and even beyond.

“We detected a feature that is unambiguously attributed to molecular water on the asteroids Iris and Massalia,” said Arredondo “We based our research on the success of the team that found molecular water on the sunlit surface of the moon. We thought we could use SOFIA to find this spectral signature on other bodies.”

The water molecules were detected by SOFIA in one of the moon’s largest craters in its southern hemisphere. Earlier observations of the moon and asteroids have found some form of hydrogen, but could not tell the difference between water and a close chemical relative called hydroxyl. The team found roughly the equivalent of a 12-ounce bottle of water on the crater. The water was chemical bound in minerals and trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface.

“Based on the band strength of the spectral features, the abundance of water on the asteroid is consistent with that of the sunlit Moon,” said Arredondo. “Similarly, on asteroids, water can also be bound to minerals as well as adsorbed to silicate and trapped or dissolved in silicate impact glass.”

[Related: NASA spacecraft Lucy says hello to ‘Dinky’ asteroid on far-flying mission.]

Parthenope and Melpomene were the two fainter asteroids in the study, and the data did not reveal any definitive conclusions about the presence of water molecules. According to the team, the FORCAST instrument is not sensitive enough to detect the water spectral feature if present here. The team is now getting the help from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to use its precise optics and ability to see in infrared signals to investigate other targets in space.

“We have conducted initial measurements for another two asteroids with Webb during cycle two,” said Arredondo. “We have another proposal in for the next cycle to look at another 30 targets. These studies will increase our understanding of the distribution of water in the solar system.”

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A potentially new frontier of lunar exploration began at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the wee hours of the morning. Intuitive Machines’ robotic Odysseus lunar lander successfully launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 15 at 1:05 a.m. EST. The uncrewed lander was successfully separated from the rocket about an hour after launch, beginning its 230,000-mile journey towards the moon.

If the mission goes as planned, Odysseus will land on the moon on February 22, where it would be the first private spacecraft to conduct a successful lunar landing. Only government-funded programs from Russia, China, India, the United States, and most recently Japan have performed a lunar landing. 

[Related: This private lander could be the first US machine on the moon this century.]

“It is a profoundly humbling moment for all of us at Intuitive Machines,” the company’s vice president of space systems Trent Martin said during a pre-launch press conference. “The opportunity to return the United States to the moon for the first time since 1972 demands a hunger to explore, and that’s at the heart of everyone at Intuitive Machines.”

The spacecraft is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing legs and is roughly 14 feet tall and five feet wide. Intuitive Machines calls the spacecraft design Nova-C and notes that it’s about the size of a classic red London telephone booth. When fully loaded with fuel, it weighs about 4,200 pounds. 

The lander is aiming to touch down 186 miles away from the moon’s south pole. This region has cliffs, craters, and possibly frozen water. NASA is the main sponsor of the mission, paying Intuitive Machines about $118 million to deliver its payload to the moon. NASA hopes that if this mission is successful it will jumpstart the lunar economy ahead of future crewed missions. The space agency plans to land astronauts there later this decade. The six navigation and tech experiments in the lander’s payload that will collect data critical for these missions. 

“NASA scientific instruments are on their way to the moon–a giant leap for humanity as we prepare to return to the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “These daring moon deliveries will not only conduct new science at the moon, but they are supporting a growing commercial space economy while showing the strength of American technology and innovation. We have so much to learn through CLPS flights that will help us shape the future of human exploration for the Artemis Generation.”

A camera constructed by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and an art project by Jeff Koons are also making the lunar journey.

Employees at Intuitive Machines held a naming contest to select the lander’s moniker, picking Odysseus after the hero in the ancient Greek poem the Odyssey by Homer. Engineer Mario Romero suggested the name as an analogy for a mission to the moon. 

[Related: Watch a giant, inflatable space station prototype explode during its intentional ‘ultimate burst.’]

“This journey takes much longer due to the many challenges, setbacks and delays,” Romero said in a statement. “Traveling the daunting, wine-dark sea repeatedly tests his mettle, yet ultimately, Odysseus proves worthy and sticks the landing back home after 10 years.”

Odysseus launches one month after Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander failed to complete its mission. The spacecraft burned in the Earth’s atmosphere about 10 days after a broken fuel tank and massive leak caused the mission to fail. Other attempts to get a privately-built lunar lander on the moon include Israel’s Beresheet lander in 2019 and Japan’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander in 2023. 

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The next solar eclipse to cross North America is fast approaching, but over on Mars, the Red Planet already experienced one of its own celestial shadow events this year.

On February 8, the asteroid-sized Martian moon Phobos crossed in front of the sun above Jezero Crater—the area just so happening to host NASA’s Perseverance rover. As Phobos continued across the sky, Percy’s left Mastcam-Z camera angled away from its usual landscape vista subject matter towards the satellite, snapping a few dozen photos for project coordinators back at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The images showcase a markedly different full lunar eclipse than the ones Earth receives every 2.5 or so years. Given both Phobos’ size and shape, the moon doesn’t fully cover the sun—instead, the  17x14x11 mile misshapen hunk of rock blocks only a small portion of the star as it continues along its path. The result arguably resembles more googly eye than awe-inspiring cosmic calendar occurrence, but it’s still a pretty impressive vantage point.

Phobos and its smaller sibling moon Deimos were discovered in 1877 by US astronomer Asaph Hall, and are respectively named after the Greek words for “Fear” and “Dread.” The origins of both satellites aren’t wholly understood, although astronomers theorize them to be either asteroids or debris leftover from the solar system’s formation that occurred around 4.5 billion years ago.

[Related: The Mars Express just got up close and personal with Phobos.]

While the Earth’s moon continues to inch away from its planetary pull at a rate of roughly 1.5 inches per year, Phobos is actually being drawn towards Mars—about six feet closer every century. While that makes for a comparatively slow descent, it does still mean the moon will eventually either crash into Mars, or break it up into thousands of fragments to form a planetary ring like Saturn’s. No need to worry, though, since that grand finale isn’t expected for another 50 million years. In the meantime, Phobos will continue orbiting Mars at a rate of three times per day, while the slower Deimos completes its journey every 30 hours.

Perseverance’s lunar eclipse capture, while incredible on its own, naturally fails to capture much detail of the moon’s pockmarked surface. Luckily, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express caught a closer look back in 2022, when the satellite came within just 52 miles of the moon to snap its own photos.

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On February 4, NASA’s Perseverance Rover snapped an image of its now defunct companion, the Ingenuity helicopter. The pair had spent almost three Earth years scouring the Red Planet for signs of ancient life, advancing aerial missions on Mars. The damaged ingenuity helicopter has been sitting there for just over two weeks. 

[Related: RIP Mars Ingenuity, the ‘little helicopter that could.’]

The Perseverance Rover snapped the image at 1:05 p.m. global mean solar time that shows the “little helicopter that could” sitting alone on a barren Martian sand dune in Neretva Vallis. Perseverance rolled away from its broken companion, possibility for the last time. The image was beamed back to Earth and processed by visual design student Simeon Schmauss, who stitched together the six raw NASA images into a panorama. 

Zooming in on Ingenuity's final resting place among the sand ripples in Neretva Vallis.

Full resolution panorama: https://t.co/jbDkOAM5bB

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Simeon Schmauß #ThanksIngenuity #MarsHelicopter pic.twitter.com/EiBZYYjbZR

— Simeon Schmauß (@stim3on) February 5, 2024

On January 18, Ingenuity’s rotors were damaged when it made a landing on what NASA called a “bland” patch of Martian landscape. Typically, the helicopter used rocks and other distinguishing features on the Red Planet to help it navigate, but the drone did not have many visual cues during its 72nd and final flight. 

NASA confirmed that the rotocopter damaged at least one blade when it completed the flight. While it landed upright and was still in communication with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), its flying days were officially over. The JPL is still analyzing the damage. 

On January 31, NASA held a live streamed tribute to Ingenuity. “We couldn’t be prouder or happier with how our little baby has done,” Ingenuity Project Manager Teddy Tzanetos said during the event. “It’s been the mission of a lifetime for all of us. And I wanted to say thank you to all of the people here that gave their weekends, their late nights. All the engineers, the aerodynamic scientists, the technicians who hand-crafted this aircraft.”

Ingenuity first landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. By April, it became the first powered aircraft to lift off from the surface of another planet. Ingenuity was initially intended to do five test flights with the Perseverance over 30 days. However, this four pound helicopter just kept going. It flew 14 times farther than planned and had a total flight time of two hours. Ingenuity hovered above the rover acting as a scout, as Perseverance puttered along the sands of Mars. It lasted about 33 times longer than NASA expected. 

[Related: Name a better duo than NASA’s hard-working Mars rover and helicopter.]

Before Ingenuity’s demise, the dynamic duo explored Mars’ Jezero Crater. This site contains evidence of ancient bodies of water that could have harbored life billions of years ago. Ingenuity worked by capturing aerial views of Mars that pinpointed places for Perseverance to explore further. 

During the January 31 livestream, NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Deputy Director Tiffany Morgan said that Ingenuity will have a lasting legacy for future aerial missions, and demonstrated how to use helicopters in missions to other planets

Thanks in part to Ingenuity’s success, NASA has proposed using two helicopters in a planned Mars Sample Return mission. These  small aircraft could help pick up the canisters of rock samples that the rover has been placing along the planet’s surface. The orbiter for this mission is expected to launch in 2027 and the lander in 2028, with the samples returned to Earth as early as 2033. 

Until then, Perseverance must go it alone. 

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SLIM, Japan’s historic moon lander, is officially powered down in preparation for a brutal, likely fatal lunar nighttime lasting around 14.5 days. Before drifting off to what very probably will be a permanent slumber, however, the small craft beamed back a few final glimpses of its new home to mission control at the Japanese space agency, JAXA.

[Related: Japan’s SLIM lunar lander stuck the landing—upside down.]

“Last night (January 31st to February 1st), we sent a command to turn on the probe’s communication device just in case, and when there was no response, we confirmed that SLIM had entered a dormant state,” reads a machine translated message from JAXA posted to X on Thursday. “This is the last scene taken by SLIM with its navigation camera before dusk.”

After completing operation from 1/30 ~ 1/31, #SLIM entered a two week dormancy period during the long lunar night 🌚. Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, we plan to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun will shine again on SLIM’s solar cells. pic.twitter.com/JO4ZgDaOxo

— 小型月着陸実証機SLIM (@SLIM_JAXA) February 1, 2024

Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, first ran into trouble during its descent on January 19, when its main engines malfunctioned approximately 162-feet above the lunar surface. The resultant loss of thrust threw the lander off kilter, and while it arrived intact, it did so nosedown with SLIM’s solar panels faced westward. Engineers worried the lander would be unable to generate enough power to continue communicating with Earth for very long, and SLIM subsequently went silent only a few hours after its arrival—although its two, tiny autonomous robots ejected unscathed to begin their own surveys.

Almost 10 days later, however, the sun’s return provided SLIM enough juice to reboot itself and commence a few more operations, including using its Multi-Band Camera to scan the chemical composition of its lunar surroundings. JAXA researchers are currently analyzing all the data SLIM relayed back to Earth, paying specific attention to the detection of olivine, which “will help solve the mystery of the origin of the moon,” JAXA officials said in a statement released on February 1.

SLIM’s final glimpse of the moon shows a darkening landscape as it enters its lengthy lunar night, when temperatures plummet as low as a balmy -208 Fahrenheit. It’s interesting to compare the last photo with SLIM’s two previous snapshots taken immediately after touchdown on January 19, as well as after coming back online ten days later. Viewed side-by-side, the triptych highlights an out-of-frame sun’s slow descent across the moon’s horizon as it casts lengthening shadows across the lunar landscape and regolith. (Pictured below: From left to right: SLIM’s images of the lunar surface from Jan. 19 to Feb. 1. Credit: JAXA/Takara Tomy/Sony Group Corporation/Doshisha University.)

But although it’s very likely SLIM’s official end to a monthslong journey, JAXA isn’t shutting down operations just yet. After all, spacecraft often prove far more resilient than initially believed—just ask the NASA teams behind Voyager or Ingenuity.

“Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, we plan to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun will shine again on SLIM’s solar cells,” JAXA posted to X on Thursday.

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Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have released new images of 19 nearby face-on spiral galaxies seen in a combination of near- and mid-infrared light. Spiral galaxies are some of the universe’s most awe-inspiring bodies. Their buff and wavy arms are chock full of stars arranged in a whirlpool pattern with vibrant colors and light. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the most visually spectacular spiral galaxies are considered “face-on,” which means that their spiral arms and bulge are clearly visible.

[Related: Elliptical galaxies may just be spiral galaxies with their arms lobbed off.]

These new images combine years of data collected from multiple different telescopes to paint a more complete picture of these whirly spiral galaxies and how they form. 

“I feel like our team lives in a constant state of being overwhelmed–in a positive way–by the amount of detail in these images,” Thomas Williams, a postdoctoral researcher from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. 

Tracing spiral arms

JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIR-Cam) captured millions of stars that appear in blue tones in the new images. Some of the stars appear climbed tightly together in clusters, while others are spread along the spiral arms. 

The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) data shows where glowing space dust exists around and between the stars. It also shows some stars that have not fully formed. These stars are still encased in the dust and gas that fuel their growth. 

“These are where we can find the newest, most massive stars in the galaxies,” Erik Rosolowsky, a physicist from the University of Alberta in Canada, said in a statement.

The JWST images also show large, spherical shells in the gas and dust. According to the team, these holes were potentially created by one or more stars that exploded. The explosion then carved out giant holes in interstellar material. 

The spiral arms also reveal the extended regions of gas that appear red and orange in the new images.  

“These structures tend to follow the same pattern in certain parts of the galaxies,” Rosolowsky added. “We think of these like waves, and their spacing tells us a lot about how a galaxy distributes its gas and dust.” 

Further research into these structures could provide key insights into how galaxies in our universe build, maintain, and stop star formation. 

Center of the galaxy

Spiral galaxies likely grow from the inside out. Stars will begin to form at the core of the galaxy before spreading along the arms and spiraling away from the center. The location of the stars can also provide clues to their ages. The younger stars are most likely the ones the furthest away from the galaxy’s core. The areas closest to the core that appear to be illuminated by a blue spotlight are believed to be the older stars.  

The galaxy cores in pink and red spikes may be a sign of a giant and non-dormant black hole.

“That’s a clear sign that there may be an active supermassive black hole,” Eva Schinnerer, a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, said in a statement. “Or, the star clusters toward the center are so bright that they have saturated that area of the image.”

Sinking PHANGS into space

The images are part of a long-standing project called PHANGS–Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS. It is supported by over 150 astronomers worldwide. Before JWST created the images, PHANGS was already analyzing large amounts of data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. 

[Related: Bursting stars could explain why it was so bright after the big bang.]

These previous observations were taken in ultraviolet, visible, and radio light. JWST’s new near- and mid-infrared contributions have provided several pieces of evidence to the study of spiral galaxies. 

“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” Janice Lee, a project scientist for strategic initiatives at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, said in a statement. “They’re mind-blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed, and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”

In addition to these new images, the PHANGS team has also released the largest catalog to date of about 100,000 star clusters which may help astronomers learn more about their stellar lives.

“Stars can live for billions or trillions of years,” Ohio State University astronomer Adam Leroy said in a statement. “By precisely cataloging all types of stars, we can build a more reliable, holistic view of their life cycles.”

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Earth’s moon is a constant in the night sky, following predictable phases in its orbit. However, its size likely has been changing over time. A study published January 25 in the Planetary Science Journal found that the moon has shrunk more than 150 feet in circumference as its core gradually cooled over the past few hundred million years. 

[Related: The moon is 40 million years older than we thought, according to crystals collected by Apollo astronauts.]

A team of scientists from NASA, the Smithsonian, Arizona State University, and The University of Maryland discovered evidence that the continuing shrinkage led to some surface changes around the Lunar South Pole. The terrain has even changed in areas where NASA hopes to land during the crewed Artemis III mission. 

How the moon is like a grape

This lunar shrinking process looks similar to how a grape wrinkles when it becomes a raisin. The moon also wrinkles and creases as it shrinks down. However, a grape has a flexible skin, while the moon has a brittle surface. The brittleness causes faults to form where sections of the crust push up against each other.

The fault formation caused by this continued shrinking often comes with seismic activity like moonquakes. Any locations near these moon fault zones could pose a threat to human exploration there, the same way that those living near fault lines on Earth face a greater risk of earthquakes. 

In the new study, the team linked a group of faults in the moon’s south polar region to a powerful moonquake recorded by Apollo seismometers over 50 years ago. They used computer models to simulate the stability of surface slopes here and found that some areas in particular were vulnerable to lunar landslides from the seismic activity.

“Our modeling suggests that shallow moonquakes capable of producing strong ground shaking in the south polar region are possible from slip events on existing faults or the formation of new thrust faults,” Thomas R. Watters, study co-author and senior scientist emeritus in the National Air and Space Museum, said in a statement. “The global distribution of young thrust faults, their potential to be active and the potential to form new thrust faults from ongoing global contraction should be considered when planning the location and stability of permanent outposts on the moon.”

Shaking for hours

Shallow moonquakes occur only about 100 or so miles deep into the moon’s crust. They are caused by faults and can be strong enough to damage equipment and human-made structures. Earthquakes tend to last for only a few seconds or minutes at most. Shallow moonquakes can last for hours and even a whole afternoon. The team connected the magnitude 5 moonquake recorded by the Apollo Passive Seismic Network in the 1970s  to a group of faults detected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter more recently. This means that this seismic activity could devastate any future hypothetical settlements on the moon. 

[Related: 10 incredible lunar missions that paved the way for Artemis.]

“You can think of the moon’s surface as being dry, grounded gravel and dust. Over billions of years, the surface has been hit by asteroids and comets, with the resulting angular fragments constantly getting ejected from the impacts,” study co-author and University of Maryland geologist Nicholas Schmerr, said in a statement. “As a result, the reworked surface material can be micron-sized to boulder-sized, but all very loosely consolidated. Loose sediments make it very possible for shaking and landslides to occur.”

The team will continue to map out this seismic activity on the moon, hoping to pinpoint more locations that could be dangerous for human exploration. NASA’s Artemis missions are currently scheduled to launch their first crewed flight in September 2025, with a crewed moon landing scheduled for September 2026. One of the ultimate goals of these future missions is a long-term human presence on the moon.

“As we get closer to the crewed Artemis mission’s launch date, it’s important to keep our astronauts, our equipment and infrastructure as safe as possible,” Schmerr said. “This work is helping us prepare for what awaits us on the moon—whether that’s engineering structures that can better withstand lunar seismic activity or protecting people from really dangerous zones.”

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Ingenuity—NASA’s tiny, overachieving Mars rotocopter—has officially ended its historic mission after three years of loyal, extended service. Despite initial plans to only conduct five-or-so test flights over roughly 30 days back in 2021, the four-pound, 19-inch-tall drone kept on trucking for another three years. Ingenuity ultimately spent over two hours buzzing through Red Planet’s thin, CO2-laden atmosphere during its 72 total flights, eventually traversing a whopping distance of roughly 11 miles.

On January 25, however, NASA confirmed its rotocopter damaged at least one blade while completing a flight on January 18. Although upright and still in communication with ground control, Ingenuity’s days of aerial exploration are definitely behind it.

Dubbed “the little helicopter that could” by NASA director Bill Nelson in a prerecorded message posted yesterday, Ingenuity “flew higher and farther than we ever imagined.”

“Through missions like Ingenuity, NASA is paving the way for future flight in our solar system and smarter, safer human exploration to Mars and beyond,” he continued.

The helicopter touched down alongside the Perseverance rover way back on February 18, 2021, but continued setting new records as recently as last month. On December 20, 2023, Ingenuity sped along at nearly 22.5 mph for 135 seconds, covering about 2,315 feet in the process. Another successful flight ensued on December 22, but Ingenuity’s 71st mission unfortunately ended in an emergency landing. A planned vertical takeoff to confirm its location on January 18 allowed Ingenuity to ascend 40 feet into the air for 4.5 seconds before starting a slow descent to the Martian surface.

At about three feet from landing, however, the rotocopter lost contact with Perseverance, which is (among many other things) responsible for relaying Ingenuity’s data back to Earth. NASA reestablished a link the following day, but later identified significant rotor blade damage.

[Related: NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter set a new flight distance record on Mars.] 

“Ingenuity is an exemplar of the way we push the boundaries of what’s possible every day,” Laurie Leshin, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in yesterday’s announcement. “I’m incredibly proud of our team behind this historic technological achievement and eager to see what they’ll invent next.”

According to NASA’s final tally, Ingenuity lived up to its name for nearly 1,000 Martian days—around 33 times longer than anticipated. During its tenure, the rotocopter received a software update beamed through space that allowed it to autonomously select the best landing sites, weathered destructive dust storms, contended with a dead sensor, and lived through Martian winter temperatures as low as -112 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Fare thee well, Ingenuity. For a trip down memory lane, check out NASA’s official mission website.

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Here’s the good news: Japan’s space agency confirmed its historic Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) successfully touched down last week with near pinpoint accuracy. 

The bad news? SLIM did it upside-down.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) confirmed the topsy-turvy predicament on Thursday, thanks to images received from a pair of autonomous probes dispatched by SLIM shortly ahead of touchdown. Regardless of its positioning, however, JAXA project manager Shinichiro Saki gave the endeavor a “perfect score.”

“Something we designed traveled all the way to the moon and took that snapshot. I almost fell down when I saw it,” he said through the Associated Press on January 25. “We demonstrated that we can land where we want. We opened a door to a new era.”

[Related: Japan makes history with its first uncrewed moon landing.]

Japan is now the fifth nation to make it to the moon’s surface, but differentiates its feat through its precision. Although lunar landers previously aimed for landing zones as large as six-miles-wide, SLIM lived up to its “Moon Sniper” nickname. Following a few days of analysis, JAXA confirmed the craft landed barely 180-feet from its already impressive 330-feet-wide target—well within the hopes of JAXA engineers. SLIM now resides close to the Shioli crater on the moon’s near side.

During its descent, however, officials have now confirmed the lander’s main engines malfunctioned an estimated 162-feet above the surface. This loss of thrust resulted in a slightly rougher touchdown than planned, likely influencing its current inverted position. Due to SLIM’s now-perpetual handstand, its solar panels are angled in the wrong direction. Without any reliable access to the sun’s energy, SLIM is basically powerless—at least for the time being. JAXA officials believe there still may be a chance for their lander to juice back up in a few days’ time, once the moon re-enters its daytime orbit.

But even if SLIM is destined to take an indefinite, much deserved nap, its mission has already provided researchers an initial batch of data. The lander’s two tiny drones, LEV-1 and LEV-2, transmitted a recording of their mothership’s landing alongside 275 images back home.

SLIM arguably marks one of JAXA’s biggest accomplishments in years. In 2003, the agency’s Hayabusa probe began its two-year journey to the 1,000-foot-long asteroid, Itokawa. Hayabusa took off yet again in 2005, finally returning to Earth in 2010 with samples in tow—a first in space exploration. JAXA repeated a similar mission with Hayabusa2, which returned from its sojourn to the asteroid Ryugu in 2020.

The lunar win also likely provides a welcome morale boost for the nation’s space enthusiasts. Last April, private Japanese company ispace’s Hakuto-R lander made it to the moon’s orbit, but promptly crashed during its descent attempt.

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The final samples collected from the asteroid Bennu are finally coming into view. Four months after they were dropped off in a Utah Desert and nine days after safely prying open two stubborn fasteners, a team of astromaterials experts at NASA’s John Space Center has revealed the contents of the fully disassembled OSIRIS-REx sampler. 

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials.]

On January 19, NASA’s planetary science division posted “It’s open! It’s open!” on Twitter/X along with a photograph of dark dust and tiny rocks inside the canister. The reveal comes after the team successfully removed the remaining two fasteners that prevented them from opening the Touch-and-Go-Sample-Acquisition-Mechanism (TAGSAM) head. 

The samples were collected in 2020 from a 4.5 billion year-old near-Earth asteroid named Bennu. According to NASA, the remaining sample material contains dust and rocks that are up to about 0.4 inch in size. The team will determine the final mass of the sample over the coming weeks. Previously, the team collected 2.48 ounces of asteroid material, which surpassed their initial goal of bringing at least 2.12 ounces back to Earth. 

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History debuted a piece of the asteroid Bennu to the public for the first time in November 2023. The sample was dropped off on Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on September 24, 2023. After the dropoff, the spacecraft continued on to a new mission called OSIRIS-APEX. It is set to explore the asteroid Apophis when it comes within 20,000 miles of Earth in 2029. 

What’s next for the Bennu samples

While it looks like average rocks and dirt to the naked eye, the sample is actually asteroid material that could hold chemical clues to our solar system’s formation. Evidence of essential elements like carbon in the rocks outside of the main sample container have already been uncovered by NASA scientists and these early samples also contain some water-rich minerals. Scientists believe that similar water-containing asteroids bombarded Earth billions of years ago, which provided the water that eventually formed our planet’s first oceans.

[Related: NASA sampled a ‘fluffy’ asteroid that could hold clues to our existence.]

The asteroid Bennu dates back to the first 10 million years of the solar system’s development, so it gives scientists a window into what this time period looked like. Bennu is shaped like a spinning top and is roughly one-third of a mile across at its widest part–slightly wider than the Empire State Building is tall. The space rock is classified as “potentially hazardous” by NASA because there is a slim 1 in 2,700 (about 0.037 percent) chance that Bennu could collide Earth by 2182.

The sample curation team at NASA is expected to release a publicly available catalog of the Bennu samples later this year. 

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Despite some recent delays, NASA’s Artemis program is still largely on track to establish a permanent human presence on the moon. Artemis astronauts will rely on a lot of logistical information, both while traversing the lunar surface, as well as for the semi-regular traffic to and from Earth. To prepare for this, NASA is testing various tools to ensure a safe, precise, and reliable extended lunar stay for visitors—and one of the space agency’s most successful recent experiments harnessed a long-used tactic here on Earth to achieve a first for the moon.

According to NASA, its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)—currently in moon’s orbit—recently aimed a laser altimeter approximately 100km (roughly 62 miles) away below at the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Vikram lander, near the South Pole region’s Manzinus crater. After firing off a series of five pulses on December 12, 2023, the LRO then recorded the signal mirrored off a small retroreflector aboard Vikram, confirming the method’s first lunar success.

[Related: NASA delays two crewed Artemis moon missions.]

Measuring a laser’s return time from a retroreflector can help accurately estimate an object’s distance and location. Laser altimeters are often utilized to track satellites above Earth, albeit in the reverse of last month’s test; pulses usually fire from equipment on the surface towards orbital satellites, instead of the other way around. Retroreflectors were also used during Apollo missions to measure the moon’s distance from Earth—an expanse revealed to be growing 1.5 inches further every year.

The Apollo missions’ suitcase-sized reflectors were much larger than the one aboard Vikram, however. In comparison, the Laser Retroreflector Array housed on the Vikram lander is just a circular, 2-inch-diameter aluminum framework. No power source is needed to do its job—all it has to do is wait for lasers to bounce off any of its eight quartz-corner-cube prisms back to the beam’s source.

And speaking of waiting, there was quite a lot of it. LRO’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) emits pulses that only cover a 32-feet-wide portion of the moon’s surface. Gaps between each pulse ensured only a small chance actually hitting the retroreflector as the LRO traveled over the Vikram lander.

“Altimeters are great for detecting craters, rocks, and boulders to create global elevation maps of the Moon. But they aren’t ideal for pointing to within one-hundredth of a degree of a retroreflector, which is what’s required to consistently achieve a ping,” NASA explained last week. Because of this, it took eight attempts to finally make contact with Vikram.

LRO’s altimeter is currently the only laser tool orbiting the moon, so many more will be needed to ensure consistent, accurate measurement readings from retroreflectors. Once those are in place, however, future laser systems could be used to help Artemis astronauts land in the near total lunar darkness, as well as mark locations of already landed spacecraft. Similar retroreflector arrays are currently employed to help cargo deliveries autonomously dock with the International Space Station. Think of them like tiny lunar air traffic controllers helping direct navigation and safety for astronauts. 

Until then, more retroreflectors are on their way—JAXA’s SLIM lander included one during its touchdown last week, and another is scheduled to be aboard a private company’s launch in mid-February.

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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) just confirmed its small car-sized Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) craft successfully arrived near the Shioli crater and has safely ejected its two small onboard robots. The historic achievement marks Japan’s first lunar landing, and makes it the fifth nation to ever reach the moon’s surface. According to JAXA officials, however, the SLIM’s “Moon Sniper” is not without complications.

“It seems the solar cell is not generating electricity at this point in time,” JAXA’s president Yamakawa Hiroshi said during a Friday morning news conference. As such, it is currently running on battery power that is only expected to last “several hours.”

“We are trying to maximize the scientific achievement,” Hiroshi continued, according to livestream translation from Japanese to English.

[Related: Peregrine lunar lander experiences ‘critical loss of propellant’ following successful launch.]

When asked if the mission is a success or failure, JAXA officials explained they consider soft landing itself successful, and that “most of the equipment is functional.” Engineers consider the solar cell problem a “separate issue,” and that SLIM is still sending and receiving data, including images, back to Earth.

SLIM launched to Earth orbit alongside an X-ray telescope on September 6, 2023. After a few weeks’ of diagnostic tests and observations from JAXA engineers, SLIM initiated an engine burn to leave Earth orbit on September 30, where it then begin its multi-day journey towards the moon. The craft maintained an orbit around the moon since October 4, and began landing procedures on January 19 at approximately 10:20am EST.

Friday’s achievement breaks an international streak of recent lunar mission failures. Less than 24 hours before SLIM’s soft landing, Astrobotic’s Peregrine spacecraft, originally destined for the moon, burned up upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Peregrine successfully launched on January 8 from Cape Canaveral, FL, but soon suffered a “critical loss of propellant” that ensured it would not reach its intended destination. In April 2023, the Japanese company ispace’s Hakuto-R achieved a lunar orbit, but crashed during its landing attempt.

Even if SLIM’s solar cell issues vastly shorten its lifespan, confirmation of its intended precision landing would mark a major moment for Japan’s space program. JAXA representatives estimate it could take roughly a month before knowing whether or not SLIM landed within 100-meters of its intended site. Officials, however, already expressed optimism regarding the achievement during Friday’s livestream.

“It used to be landing where we could, now we can land where we want,” said one JAXA representative.

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An international team of astronomers have created the most sensitive radio image ever of a globular cluster. The team imaged 47 Tucanae, an ancient ball of tightly-packed stars and is the second brightest globular cluster in the night sky. The team also documented a previously undetected radio signal emitting from 47 Tucanae’s center. The research was published January 16 in The Astrophysical Journal.

[Related: This glittery Hubble image shows how far we’ve come in studying distant stars.]

Globular clusters are an ancient relic of the Early Universe. During this period of time just after the Big Bang, the universe was a “hot soup of particles” or protons, neutrons, and electrons. When the universe began to cool down, the protons and neutrons began to combine into ionized atoms of hydrogen. Globular clusters allow today’s astronomers to learn more about this foundational period of the universe. They are very dense, and have thousands to millions of stars packed together in a sphere shape. 47 Tucanae can be seen without a telescope and was first cataloged in 1751.

Like light, radio waves coming from planets, stars, and globular clusters with changing magnetic fields travel through space. Radio telescopes can then intercept these signals. Astronomers can then convert the waves into pictures and create radio images. Using data collected by radio telescopes, scientists can learn about the objects’ structure, composition, and even motion. Radio telescopes have to be physically larger than optical telescopes that gather and magnify the data, according to NASA. 

“Our image is of 47 Tucanae, one of the most massive globular clusters in the galaxy. It has over a million stars and a very bright, very dense core,” study co-author and astronomer Arash Bahramian said in a statement. Bahramian is affiliated with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and Curtin University in Australia.

This new ultra-sensitive image was created from over 450 hours of observations on CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array. The telescope is located in Gomeroi Country, one of the largest Indigenous nations in Australia. According to the team, this is the deepest, most sensitive radio image ever compiled by any Australian radio telescope.

While 47 Tucanae can be seen with the naked eye, detailed imaging allows the team to discover a very faint and previously undiscovered radio signal at the center of the cluster. According to study co-author and astronomer Alessandro Paduano, the detection was an exciting discovery that could be attributed to one of two possibiliites. 

“The first is that 47 Tucanae could contain a black hole with a mass somewhere between the supermassive black holes found in the centers of galaxies and the stellar black holes created by collapsed stars,” Paduano said in a statement. While intermediate-mass black holes are thought to exist in globular clusters, there hasn’t been a clear detection of one yet.” Paduano is also affiliated with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and Curtin University in Australia

If the second signal is a black hole, the discovery could mark the first ever radio detection of one inside a cluster like this.

[Related: An enormous radio telescope may soon be a powerful tool for planetary defense.]

The second possible source of the signal is a pulsar, a type of rotating neutron star that emits radio waves.

“A pulsar this close to a cluster center is also a scientifically interesting discovery, as it could be used to search for a central black hole that is yet to be detected,” said Paduano.

According to the team, this ultra-sensitive image is an example of what could be coming down the road from the SKA radio telescopes, currently being built in Australia and South Africa. They will be the two largest radio telescope arrays in the world once fully constructed and could help tackle some of the most fundamental questions about the universe.

“We managed to achieve close to SKA-quality science with the current generation of radio telescopes, combining hundreds of hours of observations to reveal the faintest details,” said Bahramian. “It gives us a glimpse of the exciting capabilities the next generation of radio telescopes will achieve when they come online.”

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An orbital satellite testing the technological feasibility of one day harvesting and transmitting solar energy down to Earth has concluded its year long mission, and researchers are eager to dive into the results. According to Caltech’s mission recap released today, engineers behind the Solar Space Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) consider all three of 110-pound prototype’s onboard tools a success and believe the project “will help chart the future of space solar power.” That future, however, is still potentially decades away, if such projects are funded.

Launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in early January 2023, the SSPD-1 contained  a trio of experiments: First, its Deployable on-Orbit ultraLight Composite Experiment (DOLCE) investigated the durability and efficacy lightweight, origami-inspired solar panel structures, while ALBA (Italian for “dawn”) tested 32 different photovoltaic cell designs to determine which may best be suited for space. At the same time, the Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment (MAPLE) tested microwave transmitters meant to convey solar power harvested in orbit back to Earth.

[Related: A potentially revolutionary solar harvester just left the planet.]

Perhaps most importantly, MAPLE successfully demonstrated for the first time ever that solar power can be collected by photovoltaic cells and transmitted down to Earth via a microwave beam. Over the course of eight more months, SSPD-1 team members purposefully ramped up MAPLE’s stress tests, eventually leading to a drop in transmission capabilities. Researchers then reproduced the issue in a laboratory setting, eventually determining that complex electrical-thermal interactions and the wear-down of individual array components were to blame.

Ali Hajimiri, co-director of Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project (SSPP) and the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering, announced today that the results “have already led to revisions in the design of various elements of MAPLE to maximize its performance over extended periods of time.”

“Testing in space with SSPD-1 has given us more visibility into our blind spots and more confidence in our abilities,” Hajimiri added.

Today’s solar cells used in satellites and other space technologies are as much as 100 times more expensive to manufacture than their terrestrial counterparts. Caltech explains this is largely due to the cost of adding protective crystal films known as epitaxial growth. ALMA determined that perovskite solar cells, although a promising design here on Earth, showed major performance variabilities in space. At the same time, gallium arsenide cells worked consistently well over a large period of time—but without the need for including epitaxial growth.

As for DOLCE, researchers readily admitted on Monday that “not everything went according to plan.” Although originally meant to deploy over three-to-four-days, DOLCE encountered multiple engineering issues, such as snagged wiring and jammed mechanical components. Thankfully, the team managed to sort out the issues by referencing onboard cameras to mimic the problems on a full-scale lab replica. Despite the headaches, DOLCE’s space test “demonstrated the robustness of the basic concept,” according to SSPP co-director and Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering, Sergio Pellegrino.

[Related: Are solar panels headed for space?]

But even with SSPD-1’s overall successes, it still may be years before solar power could be efficiently and affordably amassed using satellite arrays. Previous estimates put solar power gathered in space at costing $1-2/kWh, while it is currently less than $0.17/kWh for US electricity. Material costs will need to drastically decrease, while also still remaining strong enough to endure space’s solar radiation and geomagnetic activity.

There are other issues that need addressing before space-derived solar power can ever contribute to humanity’s sustainable energy infrastructure. As The New York Times noted last year, the amount of energy transferred by SSPD-1 through a microwave beam was extremely negligible compared to what’s needed for everyday use, and such orbital solar arrays will likely need to be several thousand feet wide—the International Space Station, for reference, is just 357-feet-long. There are also questions of safety regarding beaming powerful microwaves and laser beams back to Earth.

SSPP researchers are aware that all these problems require solutions before orbital solar farms are truly possible. But their most recent progress indicates that, at the very least, they appear to be on a promising path.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Spring, summer, fall and winter–the seasons on Earth change every few months, around the same time every year. It’s easy to take this cycle for granted here on Earth, but not every planet has a regular change in seasons. So why does Earth have regular seasons when other planets don’t?

I’m an astrophysicist who studies the movement of planets and the causes of seasons. Throughout my research, I’ve found that Earth’s regular pattern of seasons is unique. The rotational axis that Earth spins on, along the North and South poles, isn’t quite aligned with the vertical axis perpendicular to Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

That slight tilt has big implications for everything from seasons to glacier cycles. The magnitude of that tilt can even determine whether a planet is habitable to life.

Seasons on Earth

When a planet has perfect alignment between the axis it orbits on and the rotational axis, the amount of sunlight it receives is fixed as it orbits around the Sun–assuming its orbital shape is a circle. Since seasons come from variations in how much sunlight reaches the planet’s surface, a planet that’s perfectly aligned wouldn’t have seasons. But Earth isn’t perfectly aligned on its axis.

This small misalignment, called an obliquity, is around 23 degrees from vertical for Earth. So, the Northern Hemisphere experiences more intense sunlight during the summer, when the Sun is positioned more directly above the Northern Hemisphere.

Then, as the Earth continues to orbit around the Sun, the amount of sunlight the Northern Hemisphere receives gradually decreases as the Northern Hemisphere tilts away from the Sun. This causes winter.

The planets spinning on their axes and orbiting around the Sun look kind of like spinning tops–they spin around and wobble because of gravitational pull from the Sun. As a top spins, you might notice that it doesn’t just stay perfectly upright and stationary. Instead, it may start to tilt or wobble slightly. This tilt is what astrophysicists call spin precession.

Because of these wobbles, Earth’s obliquity isn’t perfectly fixed. These small variations in tilt can have big effects on the Earth’s climate when combined with small changes to Earth’s orbit shape.

The wobbling tilt and any natural variations to the shape of Earth’s orbit can change the amount and distribution of sunlight reaching Earth. These small changes contribute to the planet’s larger temperature shifts over thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. This can, in turn, drive ice ages and periods of warmth.

Translating obliquity into seasons

So how do obliquity variations affect the seasons on a planet? Low obliquity, meaning the rotational spin axis is aligned with the planet’s orientation as it orbits around the Sun, leads to stronger sunlight on the equator and low sunlight near the pole, like on Earth.

On the other hand, a high obliquity–meaning the planet’s rotational spin axis points toward or away from the Sun–leads to extremely hot or cold poles. At the same time, the equator gets cold, as the Sun does not shine above the equator all year round. This leads to drastically varying seasons at high latitudes and low temperatures at the equator.

When a planet has an obliquity of more than 54 degrees, that planet’s equator grows icy and the pole becomes warm. This is called a reversed zonation, and it’s the opposite of what Earth has.

Basically, if an obliquity has large and unpredictable variations, the seasonal variations on the planet become wild and hard to predict. A dramatic, large obliquity variation can turn the whole planet into a snowball, where it’s all covered by ice.

Spin orbit resonances

Most planets are not the only planets in their solar systems. Their planetary siblings can disturb each other’s orbit, which can lead to variations in the shape of their orbits and their orbital tilt.

So, planets in orbit look kind of like tops spinning on the roof of a car that’s bumping down the road, where the car represents the orbital plane. When the rate–or frequency, as scientists call it–at which the tops are precessing, or spinning, matches the frequency at which the car is bumping up and down, something called a spin-orbit resonance occurs.

Spin-orbit resonances can cause these obliquity variations, which is when a planet wobbles on its axis. Think about pushing a kid on a swing. When you push at just the right time–or at the resonant frequency–they’ll swing higher and higher.

Mars wobbles more on its axis than Earth does, even though the two are tilted about the same amount, and that actually has to do with the Moon orbiting around Earth. Earth and Mars have a similar spin precession frequency, which matches the orbital oscillation–the ingredients for a spin-orbit resonance.

But Earth has a massive Moon, which pulls on Earth’s spin axis and drives it to precess faster. This slightly faster precession prevents it from experiencing spin orbit resonances. So, the Moon stabilizes Earth’s obliquity, and Earth doesn’t wobble on its axis as much as Mars does.

Exoplanet seasons

Thousands of exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, have been discovered over the past few decades. My research group wanted to understand how habitable these planets are, and whether these exoplanets also have wild obliquities, or whether they have moons to stabilize them like Earth does.

To investigate this, my group has led the first investigation on the spin-axis variations of exoplanets.

We investigated Kepler-186f, which is the first discovered Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone. The habitable zone is an area around a star where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet and life may be able to emerge and thrive.

Unlike Earth, Kepler-186f is located far from the other planets in its solar system. As a result, these other planets have only a weak effect on its orbit and movement. So, Kepler-186f generally has a fixed obliquity, similar to Earth. Even without a large moon, it doesn’t have wildly changing or unpredictable seasons like Mars.

Looking forward, more research into exoplanets will help scientists understand what seasons look like throughout the vast diversity of planets in the universe.

Disclaimer: Gongjie Li receives funding from NASA.

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Even the brilliant minds at NASA sometimes have trouble opening up a tightly-sealed container. Engineers and scientists from Johnson Space Center finally opened a container of asteroid sample material, after two fasteners had been stuck for about 3.5 months. 

[Related: NASA’s OSIRIS mission delivered asteroid samples to Earth.]

On September 24, 2023, the agency received roughly 2.5 ounces of rocks and dust collected from a 4.5 billion year-old near-Earth asteroid named Bennu. The regolith was dropped off by OSIRIS-REx in a Utah desert. This is the first United States mission to collect samples from an asteroid. The spacecraft traveled 1.4-billion-miles from Earth, to the asteroid Bennu, and then back again to drop off the asteroid dust. However, NASA announced in October that some of the material was out of reach in a capsule inside a robotic arm with a storage container called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM). 

The asteroid samples must be analyzed in a specialized glovebox with a flow of nitrogen to prevent them from becoming contaminated. According to NASA, 35 fasteners were holding the sampler shut and two of the fasteners were too difficult to open with any of the pre-approved ways to access containers of such precious samples. They initially managed to collect some black dust and debris l from the TAGSAM head when the aluminum head was first removed and could access some of the material from inside the canister with tweezers or a scoop, while the TAGSAM head’s mylar flap was held down. 

To pry open the stuck fasteners, NASA needed to develop new materials and specialized tools that minimize the risk that the precious space rock samples will be damaged or contaminated. These new tools include custom-fabricated bits built from a specific grade of surgical, non-magnetic stainless steel. This is the hardest metal approved for use in the container’s pristine curation gloveboxes. These techniques enabled the team to open the stuck fasteners. 

“In addition to the design challenge of being limited to curation-approved materials to protect the scientific value of the asteroid sample, these new tools also needed to function within the tightly-confined space of the glovebox, limiting their height, weight, and potential arc movement,” Johnson Space Center OSIRIS-REx curator Nicole Lunning said in a statement. “The curation team showed impressive resilience and did incredible work to get these stubborn fasteners off the TAGSAM head so we can continue disassembly. We are overjoyed with the success.”

After a few additional disassembly steps, the remainder of the sample will be fully visible. Image specialists will be able to take ultra-high-resolution pictures of the sample while it is still inside TAGSAM’s head. After imaging, this portion of the sample will be removed, weighed, and the team will determine the total mass of the asteroid material captured by the mission. 

Bennu dates back to the crucial first 10 million years of the solar system’s development. Its age offers scientists a window into what this time period looked like. The space rock is shaped like a spinning top and is about one-third of a mile across at its widest part–slightly wider than the Empire State Building is tall. It revolves around the sun between the orbits of Earth and Mars.

An analysis of Bennu’s dust conducted last fall revealed that the asteroid had a lot of water in the form of hydrated clay minerals. The team believes that signs of water on asteroids support the current theory of how water arrived on Earth.

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials.]

OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta told PopSci in October that asteroids like Bennu were likely responsible for all of Earth’s oceans, lakes, rivers, and rain. Water likely arrived when space rocks landed on our planet about 4 billion years ago. The asteroid Bennu has water-bearing clay with a fibrous structure, which was the key material that ferried water to Earth, according to Lauretta.

The Bennu sample also contained about 4.7 percent carbon. According to Daniel Glavin, the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, this sample has the highest abundance of carbon that a team from the Carnegie Institution for Science have measured in an extraterrestrial sample. Glavin told PopSci that when the team opened it, “There were scientists on the team going ‘Wow, oh my God!’ And when a scientist says that ‘Wow;’ that’s a big deal.”

In the spring, the curation team is scheduled to release a catalog of the OSIRIS-REx samples for the global scientific community to study. OSIRIS-REx is now renamed OSIRIS-APEX and is currently on its way to study a potentially asteroid named Apophis. That rendezvous is scheduled for sometime in 2029.

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On January 8 at 2:18 a.m. local time, the United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) new Vulcan Centaur rocket successfully launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket separated from the lander after about an hour and sent Peregrine Mission One into space.

Several hours after the launch, the company who built the Peregrine lander announced that it had experienced an “anomaly” that stopped Peregrine from pointing its solar panels stably at the sun. In a press release, Astrobotic stated that it has engineers working on this issue, but without the spacecraft’s ability to charge its battery, the plan to for a soft landing on the moon is in jeopardy.

At 1:03 p.m. EST Astrobotic issued an update saying that the mission will likely not go on as planned, as the lunar lander is experiencing a failure within its propulsion system.

Later, Astrobotic announced that Peregrine is suffering a critical fuel leak and has less than two days of fuel left.  An image taken by the lander in space showed damaged insulation on the spacecraft, which indicates a leak in Peregrine’s propulsion system.

“An ongoing propellant leak is causing the spacecraft’s Attitude Control System (ACS) thrusters to operate well beyond their expected service life cycles to keep the lander from an uncontrollable tumble,” the company wrote.

On Tuesday January 9, Astrobiotic announced that it would be abandoning its attempt for a soft landing on the moon. The lunar lander was slated to attempt to make the first soft landing on the moon by the United States since 1972. Peregrine’s mission is to study the lunar surface ahead of future human missions to the moon.

The launch also began a new chapter in the age of private space exploration. The United Launch Alliance is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, with the Vulcan rocket designed to replace two older rockets and compete with SpaceX. The private company owned by Elon Musk sent close to 100 rockets into orbit in 2023 alone. The United States Space Force is also counting on the Vulcan Centaur rocket to launch spy satellites and other spacecraft that Space Force believes are in the interest of national security. 

The Peregrine lander was built by Pittsburgh-based space robotics firm Astrobotic and aimed to become the first lunar lander constructed by a private company. This is also the first mission to fly under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, where NASA pays private companies to send scientific equipment to the moon.

“It’s a dream … For 16 years we’ve been pushing for this moment today,” said Astrobotic CEO John Thornton during a webcast of the launch according to CNN. “And along the way, we had a lot of hard challenges that we had to overcome and a lot of people doubted us along the way. But our team and the people that supported us believed in the mission, and they created this beautiful moment that we’re seeing today.”

Peregrine has a total of 20 payloads on board, five for NASA and 15 others. They include five small moon rovers and the first Latin American scientific instruments attempting to reach the lunar surface. If successful, the technology on board will measure properties including radiation levels, magnetic field, ice and water on the surface and subsurface, and a layer of gas called the exosphere. A better understanding of the exosphere and the moon’s surface is expected to help minimize risks when humans return to its surface, as early as 2025.  

Several non-scientific payloads are aboard as well, including a lunar dream capsule with over 180,000 messages from children around the world, a chunk of Mount Everest, and a physical coin containing one bitcoin.

Controversially, Peregrine is carrying human remains on behalf of commercial space burial companies Celestis and Elysium Space. Celestis offers to carry ashes to the moon for prices starting at more than $10,000. The 265 capsules include human remains from Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and original cast members and DNA samples from three former US presidents–George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. Bringing human remains to the moon is strongly opposed by the Navajo Nation, as allowing human remains to touch the lunar surface would be desecration of a body that many tribes consider sacred. In a statement on January 4, Navajo Nation president Buu Nygren said that NASA or other government officials should address the tribe’s concerns ahead of the launch. 

“The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology,” Nygren wrote. “The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.”

[Related: The moon is 40 million years older than we thought, according to crystals collected by Apollo astronauts.]

According to The New York Times, NASA officials said in a news conference that they were not in charge of this mission and do not have a direct say on the payloads that were sold on Peregrine. ”There’s an intergovernmental meeting being set up with the Navajo Nation that NASA will support,” deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA Joel Kearns said on January 4.

Peregrine 1 was originally scheduled to touch down on the surface of the moon on February 23, near Sinus Viscositatis–or the Bay of Stickiness. This area is named for rock domes that were potentially created by viscous lava.

Update January 9, 2:39PM: Additional information from the company about the technical problems has been added.

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For decades, images taken of Neptune have looked like the planet has a deep blue hue, while Uranus seemed more green. However, these two ice giants may actually look more similar to eachother than astronomers previously believed. According to a study published January 5 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, our solar system’s furthest planets’ true colors could both be similar pale shades of greenish blue. 

[Related: The secret to Voyagers’ spectacular space odyssey.]

Images versus reality

NASA’s Voyager 2 mission remains the only flyby of both ice giants conducted by a spacecraft. It gave us the first detailed images of these far-flung planets. Voyager 2 conducted a flyby of Uranus in 1986, and the images revealed a planet with a more pale cyan or blue color. The vessel flew by Neptune in 1989 and the imagery showed a planet with a rich blue color.

However, astronomers have long understood that most modern images of both planets don’t accurately reflect their true colors. Voyager 2 captured images of each planet in separate colors and these single-color images were then put together to make composites. These composite images were not always accurately balanced, particularly for the planet Neptune which was believed to appear too blue. The contrast on the early Voyager images of Neptune were also strongly enhanced to better reveal the clouds and winds of the planet. 

“Although the familiar Voyager 2 images of Uranus were published in a form closer to ‘true’ color, those of Neptune were, in fact, stretched and enhanced, and therefore made artificially too blue,” study co-author and University of Oxford astronomer Patrick Irwin said in a statement. “Even though the artificially-saturated color was known at the time amongst planetary scientists–and the images were released with captions explaining it–that distinction had become lost over time.”

Creating a more accurate view

In the new study, the team applied data taken from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. 

With both the STIS and MUSE, each pixel is a continuous spectrum of colors, so their observations can be processed more clearly to determine the more accurate color of the planets, instead of what is being seen with a filter. 

The team used the data to rebalance the composite color images that were recorded by Voyager 2’s onboard camera and by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3. The rebalancing revealed that both Uranus and Neptune are actually a similar pale shade of greenish blue. Neptune has a slight hint of more blue, which the model showed to be a thin layer of haze on the planet. 

The changing colors of Uranus

This research also provides a likely answer to why Uranus changes color slightly during its 84 year-long orbit around the sun. The team first compared images of Uranus to measurements of its brightness that were taken at blue and green wavelengths by the Lowell Observatory in Arizona from 1950 to 2016. These measurements showed that Uranus looks a little greener during its summer and winter solstices, when its poles are pointed towards the sun. However, during the equinoxes–when the sun is over the planet’s equator–it appears to have a more blue tinge. 

One already established reason for the change is due to Uranus’ a highly unusual spin. The planet spins almost on its side during orbit, so its north and south poles point almost directly towards the sun and Earth during its solstices. Any changes to the reflectivity of Uranus’ poles would have a major impact on the planet’s overall brightness when viewed from the Earth, according to the authors. What was less clear to astronomers was how and why this reflectivity differs. The team developed a model to compare the bands of colors of Uranus’s polar regions to its equatorial regions. 

They found that polar regions are more reflective at green and red wavelengths than at blue wavelengths. Uranus is more reflective at these wavelengths partially because gas methane absorbs the color red and methane is about half as abundant near Uranus’ poles than the equator.

[Related: Neptune’s bumpy childhood could reveal our solar system’s missing planets.]

However, this wasn’t enough to fully explain the color change so the researchers added a new variable to the model in the form of a ‘hood’ of gradually thickening icy haze which has previously been observed when Uranus moves from equinox to summer solstice. They believe that this haze is likely made up of methane ice particles.

After simulating this pole shift in the model, the ice particles further increased the reflection at green and red wavelengths at the planet’s poles, which explained that Uranus looks greener at the solstice due to less methane at the poles and increased thickness of the methane ice particles. 

“The misperception of Neptune’s color, as well as the unusual color changes of Uranus, have bedeviled us for decades,” Heidi Hammel, of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy said in a statement. “This comprehensive study should finally put both issues to rest.” Hammel is not an author of the new study. 

Filling in this gap between the public perception of Neptune and its reality shows how data can be manipulated to show off certain features of a planet or enhance visualizations. 

“There’s never been an attempt to deceive,” study co-author and University of Leicester planetary scientist Leigh Fletcher told The New York Times. “But there has been an attempt to tell a story with these images by making them aesthetically pleasing to the eye so that people can enjoy these beautiful scenes in a way that is, maybe, more meaningful than a fuzzy, gray, amorphous blob in the distance.”

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Over the holiday weekend, NASA released new images of Jupiter’s icy, volcanic moon Io. The Juno spacecraft flew within roughly 930 miles of the celestial body’s surface on December 30, 2023, capturing images that show off a volatile and pockmarked moon. 

[Related: Astronomers find 12 more moons orbiting Jupiter.]

The JunoCam imager captured the new images. They depict a red sphere dotted with giant gray volcanoes. Io is considered the most volcanic world in our solar system. By comparison, Earth sees roughly 50 eruptions each year and Io may have volcanic activity that is 100 times greater. Jupiter’s gravitational pull is largely responsible for Io’s volcanism. A tug-of-war between the large planet and the additional gravitational effects of Jupiter’s other giant moons–Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto–intensifies frictional tidal heating on Io. It takes this moon about 42 hours to orbit Jupiter, and the immense heat produced during orbit likely creates an ocean of magma underneath Io’s surface, fueling eruptions.

According to NASA, this was the closest flyby of Io since a similar flight made by the Galileo spacecraft in October 2001. Launched in 2011, the Juno spacecraft first entered Jupiter’s orbit in 2016. It is the first explorer to look below the gas giant’s dense clouds, with a mission to study our solar system’s largest planet and the origins of the solar system as a whole. The Juno mission has been monitoring the moon’s volcanic activity from distances ranging from about 6,830 miles to more than 62,100 miles. The team hopes that information collected in the December flyby and previous observations from the mission help them learn more about these intense volcanoes.  

“We are looking for how often they erupt, how bright and hot they are, how the shape of the lava flow changes, and how Io’s activity is connected to the flow of charged particles in Jupiter’s magnetosphere,” Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement. 

[Related: A mysterious magma ocean could fuel our solar system’s most volcanic world.]

A second close flyby of Io is scheduled for February 3, 2024, where Juno will fly within about 930 miles of the moon’s surface again. The spacecraft has also performed close flights near the of the Jupiterian moons Ganymede and Europa.

“With our pair of close flybys in December and February, Juno will investigate the source of Io’s massive volcanic activity, whether a magma ocean exists underneath its crust, and the importance of tidal forces from Jupiter, which are relentlessly squeezing this tortured moon,” said Bolton. 

Beginning in April, Juno will also perform a series of occultation experiments that use Juno’s Gravity Science experiment to probe the makeup of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Studying what materials compose this part of the planet’s atmosphere should provide astronomer’s with key data on Jupiter’s shape and interior structure. The Juno mission is scheduled to wrap-up in late 2025. 

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NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter (technically a rotorcraft) has made dozens of tiny aerial jaunts across Mars since first arriving on the planet in February 2021, but its latest flight set a new record for the tiny aircraft. On December 21, NASA reported Ingenuity’s 69th flight was also its farthest, according to its flight log—over 135 seconds, the four-pound, 19-inch-tall helicopter traveled roughly 2,315 feet at a speed of nearly 22.5 mph, beating its previous distance of about 2,310 feet achieved in April 2022.

As impressive as Ingenuity’s most recent flight already is, the trip went even better than originally expected. According to NASA’s Flight 69 preview log, the agency estimated its helicopter to journey about 2,304 feet over 131 seconds.

[Related: Name a better duo than NASA’s hard-working Mars rover and helicopter.]

In total, Ingenuity has so far spent 125.5 minutes aloft to fly nearly 10.5 miles across the surface at altitudes as high as almost 80 feet. While chugging along, the helicopter snaps images of the ground beneath it to send back home to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) team overseeing the program in California. As Digital Trends notes, the visual aids have so far helped NASA engineers plot efficient, safe paths for the project’s Perseverance rover. In some instances, photographs even revealed new nearby geologic formations that the rover then detoured to explore.

Ingenuity long surpassed its original estimated lifespan, even without taking its latest feats into consideration. When first launched back in 2021, NASA expected the aircraft to only last for 5 flights in order to test avionic capabilities in the thin Martian air (just 1 percent of Earth’s atmosphere), and had no intention of utilizing it as a major component in the overall Perseverance mission.

It hasn’t all been smooth flying for Ingenuity, however. Back in May 2022, the helicopter briefly went dark after a seasonal increase in atmospheric dust prevented its solar arrays from fully recharging. Thankfully, engineers sorted out the situation and reestablished communications with their rotorcraft. Now, after nearly 14 times more trips than first intended under its wings, Ingenuity doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

[Related: Why NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter briefly went dark on Mars.]

Now that the helicopter exceeded NASA’s hopes, the agency believes similar, more advanced iterations could be deployed during future Mars missions, and perhaps even other locales throughout the solar system. For now, however, it’s one day at a time for Ingenuity—its 70th flight is also tentatively scheduled for this week.

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NASA’s Psyche spacecraft accomplished yet another historic communications achievement less than a month after successfully firing its “first light” laser data transmission. On December 11, the onboard Deep Space Optical Communications array’s flight laser transceiver sent an “ultra-high definition” video clip approximately 19 million miles back to Earth—a new record not just for transmission, but for cat videos, as well.

According to NASA’s December 18 announcement, Psyche sent an encoded near-infrared laser beam to Earth last week at its maximum bandwidth speed of 267 megabits per second (Mbps) while en route to the space probe’s final destination, a metal-heavy asteroid located between Mars and Jupiter. Roughly 101 seconds later, researchers at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory received and downloaded the data package. The team then sent each individual video frame over to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the clip played in real time. And then, a cat named Taters made space exploration history.

As NASA explains, the 15-second video clip’s main character is an ode to some of the very first television test broadcast transmissions. Beginning in 1928, many of these earliest airings included a tiny statue of popular cartoon character, Felix the Cat. In honor of cats’ long lineage in telecommunications, Psyche’s brief scene showcases a sizable orange tabby named Taters chasing a red laser pointer across a couch while chilled out music plays in the background. Overlaid graphics also display information about the cute cat such as its heart rate, alongside more pertinent project info like Psyche’s orbital path, technical specs, and data bit rate information. 

[Related: NASA’s Psyche wins first deep space laser relay.]

Even across millions of miles of space, the demonstration reportedly holds up to some of the best internet download rates here on Earth.

“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, [Psyche] was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” Ryan Rogalin, JPL’s receiver electronics lead for the project, explained on Monday. “In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space.”

Thanks to this and future Psyche laser system testing, NASA plans to ready astronauts’ communications arrays for longterm voyages to the moon and Mars.

“Increasing our bandwidth is essential to achieving our future exploration and science goals, and we look forward to the continued advancement of this technology and the transformation of how we communicate during future interplanetary missions,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said in the agency’s December 18 announcement.

For now, however, Taters takes center stage—although the video’s focal point wasn’t only a callback television’s very first test broadcasts.

“Today, cat videos and memes are some of the most popular content online,” reads NASA’s announcement, adding in its accompanying material that, “Coincidentally, cats like to chase lasers.”

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Volcanic eruptions are not a major threat to the Martian landscape, but an area about the size of Alaska was potentially covered with lava as recently as one million years ago. The findings are detailed in a study published December 15 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets and reveal that the presence of large fissures could have resulted in major flooding events. The reactions from the mixture of lava and water from the floods may have created an environment that could harbor life. 

[Related: Giant quake that shook Mars for hours had a surprising source.]

A geologically ‘dead’ planet?

Planet Earth is home to very active plate tectonics and these constantly churning chunks of crust alter our planet’s surface. Mars has long been considered a geologically “dead” planet due to its lack of plate tectonics and volcanic activity has never been observed there. However, some recent discoveries have questioned the notion that Mars was always this way, including evidence that a giant mantle plume underneath the region of Elysium Planitia was once behind intense seismic and volcanic activity in the planet’s relatively recent past. Elysium Planitia has the youngest terrain on the Red Planet, so studying it helps scientists better understand its past, including more hydrological and volcanic events. 

In this new study, a team from the University of Arizona and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, combined images taken with NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and measurements from ground-penetrating radar to recreate a 3D model of every individual lava flow they could detect evidence of in Elysium Planitia. The survey revealed more than 40 volcanic events in the planet’s recent past. One of the largest flows possibly filled a Martian valley named Athabasca Valles with almost 1,000 cubic miles of basalt.

“Elysium Planitia was volcanically much more active than previously thought and might even still be volcanically alive today,” study co-author and planetary geologist Joana Voigt said in a statement. Voight completed this research as part of her PhD at the University of Arizona and is now postdoctoral researcher at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Marsquakes recorded by NASA’s InSight lander between 2018 and 2022 also provided the team on this study with further proof that the Red Planet is not so dead just below the surface. 

“Our study provides the most comprehensive account of geologically recent volcanism on a planet other than Earth,” study co-author and University of Arizona planetary geologist Christopher Hamilton said in a statement. “It is the best estimate of Mars’ young volcanic activity for about the past 120 million years, which corresponds to when the dinosaurs roaming the Earth at their peak to present.”

What steam could mean for finding evidence of life 

These study’s findings have implications for future research into whether Mars harbored life at some point in its history. Elysium Planitia has traces of several large floods and the interaction of the outpouring lava with flood water or ice likely shaped the landscape in dramatic ways. The team found evidence of steam explosions across Elysium Planitia. Astrobiologists are interested in these types of interactions, as they may have created hydrothermal environments that were conducive to microbial life.

For a closer look, the team used images taken with the Context camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other images from the orbiter’s HiRISE camera in selected areas. They also used data records from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor. They then combined the images with survey data taken with NASA’s Shallow Radar (SHARAD) probe. 

[Related: Mars rover snaps pics of dusty craters that may have once roared with water.]

“With SHARAD, we were able to look as deep as 460 feet below the surface,” said Voigt. “Combining the datasets allowed us to reconstruct a three-dimensional view of the study area, including what the topography was like before lava erupted from multiple cracks and filled basins and channels previously carved by running water.”

This detailed reconstruction of Mars’ geological features provides scientists a peek into the processes that shaped its past. Understanding the relationship between the planet’s volcanoes and crust is a key to recreating the planet’s paleo-environmental conditions. In addition to water from within the magma being flung into the Martian atmosphere and then freezing on the surface, eruptions can also allow for major releases of groundwater onto the surface.

The team plans to continue to use complex datasets obtained with various imaging methods to build more detailed insights of the Martian surface and what lies beneath.

According to Voigt, lava flow surfaces are similar to “open books that provide a wealth of information about how they came to be if you know how to read them. These areas that used to be considered featureless and boring, like Elysium Planitia, I think they contain a lot of secrets, and they want to be read.”

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Even six years after its dramatic plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere, NASA’s now complete Cassini mission continues to fuel discovery. Data from the mission recently revealed evidence that the giant plume of water vapor and ice grain spewing from Saturn’s moon Enceladus contains hydrogen cyanide. This linear molecule is key to the origin of life. Cassini found strong confirmation for the molecule and the possibility that the ocean under Enceladus’ icy outer shell holds a powerful source of chemical energy. The findings were published December 14 in Nature Astronomy.

[Related: NASA hopes its snake robot can search for alien life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.]

In June, a new analysis of Cassini data found that, in theory, Enceladus has all the chemicals it needs to support life within its plume. The ocean under Enceladus likely supplies most of this material for the plume streaming off of the moon. This newly identified energy source also comes in the form of several organic compounds. Some of these compounds serve as fuel for organisms here on Earth. It’s possible that there is more chemical energy inside of this small moon than astronomers previously thought. The more energy, the more likely it would be for the celestial body to sustain life. 

“Our work provides further evidence that Enceladus is host to some of the most important molecules for both creating the building blocks of life and for sustaining that life through metabolic reactions,” study co-author and Harvard University doctoral student Jonah Peter said in a statement. “Not only does Enceladus seem to meet the basic requirements for habitability, we now have an idea about how complex biomolecules could form there, and what sort of chemical pathways might be involved.”

The ‘Swiss army knife of amino acid precursors’

Hydrogen cyanide is of the most crucial and versatile molecules needed to form the amino acids needed to sustain life, because its molecules can be stacked together in many different ways. The team on this study calls hydrogen cyanide the “Swiss army knife of amino acid precursors.”

“The discovery of hydrogen cyanide was particularly exciting, because it’s the starting point for most theories on the origin of life,” said Peter. “The more we tried to poke holes in our results by testing alternative models, the stronger the evidence became. Eventually, it became clear that there is no way to match the plume composition without including hydrogen cyanide.”

In 2017, scientists found evidence that Enceladus potentially had chemistry that could help sustain life in its ocean. The combination of hydrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide inside of the plume pointed to a methanogenesis. This metabolic process produces methane and is widespread on Earth. Methanogenesis also may have been critical to the origin of life on our planet.

[Related: Here’s how life on Earth might have formed out of thin air and water.]

The new study found evidence for additional energy chemical sources that produce a process stronger than methanogenesis. Scientists found numerous organic compounds that were oxidized. Oxidation helps drive the release of chemical energy, so the presence of oxidized compounds indicates that there are multiple chemical pathways to potentially sustain life present in Enceladus’ subsurface ocean. 

“If methanogenesis is like a small watch battery, in terms of energy, then our results suggest the ocean of Enceladus might offer something more akin to a car battery, capable of providing a large amount of energy to any life that might be present,” study co-author and astrobiologist and planetary scientist at NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory Kevin Hand said in a statement.

How Earth math works on Saturn’s moons

The team also performed a detailed statistical analysis to recreate the conditions that Cassini found on Enceladus. They examined data on the gas, ions, and ice grains around Saturn that Cassini’s ion and neutral mass spectrometer gathered. The statistical models helped the team tease out the small differences in various chemical compounds.

“There are many potential puzzle pieces that can be fit together when trying to match the observed data,” Peter said. “We used math and statistical modeling to figure out which combination of puzzle pieces best matches the plume composition and makes the most of the data, without overinterpreting the limited dataset.”

While determining if life could originate on Enceladus is still a long way off, this new research shows the chemical pathways for life on this Saturnian moon can be tested in the lab on Earth. 

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Six decades of human lunar exploration has shaped the moon’s environment. There has been enough change that some scientists argue that a new geological epoch on the moon should be declared. In a commentary published December 8 in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of anthropologists and geologists say it should be called the Lunar Anthropocene and “space heritage” should be preserved and cataloged. 

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

Why the Lunar Anthropocene?

Scientists used the term Anthropocene to describe the epoch where humans began to have a significant impact on Earth’s ecosystem and geology. The planet is about 4.5 billion years old, and modern humans have only been around for 200,000 years. In that short amount of time, Homo sapiens have significantly altered Earth’s biological, chemical, and physical systems. 

The beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch is still being debated and has a large range. Some suggest it began thousands of years ago. Others pinpoint 1950, when plutonium isotopes from nuclear weapons tests were found at the bottom of a relatively pristine lake in Canada. Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses accelerating global warming, ocean acidification, increased species extinction, habitat destruction, and natural resource extraction are additional signs that humans have dramatically modified our planet.

“The idea is much the same as the discussion of the Anthropocene on Earth—the exploration of how much humans have impacted our planet,” study co-author and Kansas University archaeologist Justin Holcomb said in a statement. “Similarly, on the moon, we argue the Lunar Anthropocene already has commenced, but we want to prevent massive damage or a delay of its recognition until we can measure a significant lunar halo caused by human activities, which would be too late.”

64 years of moon exploration–and disturbance

On September 13, 1950, the USSR’s uncrewed spacecraft Luna 2 first descended onto the lunar surface. In the decades since, over 100 other spacecraft have touched the moon. NASA’s Apollo Lunar Modules followed in the 1960s and 1970s and China got the first seedling to sprout on the moon in 2019. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) successfully landed on the moon with the Chandrayaan-3 mission in August. 

All of this activity has displaced more of the moon’s surface than natural meteroid impacts and other natural processes. 

In Nature Geoscience, the team argues that upcoming lunar missions and projects will change the face of the moon in more extreme ways. They believe that the concept of the Lunar Anthropocene may help correct a myth that the moon is barely impacted by human activity and is an unchanging environment. 

[Related: Lunar laws could protect the moon from humanity.]

“Cultural processes are starting to outstrip the natural background of geological processes on the moon,” Holcomb said. “These processes involve moving sediments, which we refer to as ‘regolith,’ on the moon. Typically, these processes include meteoroid impacts and mass movement events, among others. However, when we consider the impact of rovers, landers and human movement, they significantly disturb the regolith.”

They believe that the lunar landscape will look entirely different in only half a century, with multiple countries having some presence on the surface of the moon. 

University College London astrophysicist Ingo Waldmann told New Scientist that the moon has entered its version of the Anthropocene. He said that lunar geology isn’t very dramatic. The moon might see an asteroid impact every couple of million years, but there aren’t too many other big events. “Just us walking on it has a bigger environmental impact than anything that would happen to the moon in hundreds of thousands of years,” said Waldmann.

The moon is currently in a geological division called the Copernican Period. It dates over one billion years ago. In that time, Earth has gone through roughly 15 geological periods.

Leave only footprints

The unofficial motto of the United States National Park Service here on Earth is “take only photographs, leave only footprints.” The authors of this commentary believe that a similar mindset should apply to the moon. Debris from human missions to the moon includes everything from spacecraft components, excrement, golf balls, flags, and more.

“We know that while the Moon does not have an atmosphere or magnetosphere, it does have a delicate exosphere composed of dust and gas, as well as ice inside permanently shadowed areas, and both are susceptible to exhaust gas propagation,” the authors wrote. “Future missions must consider mitigating deleterious effects on lunar environments.”

The team hopes that calling a similar attention to the environmental impact of the moon will protect their historical and anthropological value. There are currently no laws or policy protections against disturbing the moon. The team hopes that this concept of a Lunar Anthropocene will spark conversations about human impacts on the moon and how historical artifacts are preserved.

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A new image from NASA’s almost two-year-old James Webb Space Telescope features new details of a portion of our galaxy’s dense center for the first time. The image includes some parts of the star-forming hotspot that astronomers are still trying to fully understand. The region is named Sagittarius C and is about 300 light-years away from Sagittarius A*, or the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

[Related: Gaze upon the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.]

“There’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity we get with Webb, so we are seeing lots of features here for the first time,” observation team principal investigator Samuel Crowe said in a statement. “Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in this sort of environment in a way that wasn’t possible previously.” Crowe is an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

The image features roughly 500,000 stars and a cluster of young stars called protostars. These are stars that are still forming and gaining mass, while generating outflows that glow in the midst of an infrared-dark cloud. A massive previously-discovered protostar that is over 30 times the mass of our sun is located at the heart of this young cluster. 

The protostars are emerging from a cloud that is so dense that the light from stars behind it cannot reach the JWST. This light trick makes the region look deceptively less crowded. According to the team, this is actually one of the most tightly packed areas of the image. Smaller infrared-dark clouds dot the image where future stars are forming. 

“The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way galaxy, where current theories of star formation can be put to their most rigorous test,” University of Virginia astronomer Jonathan Tan said in a statement. 

JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) also captured large-scale emission from ionized hydrogen that is surrounding the lower side of the dark cloud. According to Crowe, this is the result of energetic photons that are being emitted by young massive stars. The expanse of the region spotted by JWST came as a surprise to the team and needs more investigation. They also plan to further examine the needle-like structures in the ionized hydrogen, which are scattered in multiple directions.

“The galactic center is a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation,” Rubén Fedriani, a co-investigator of the project at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain, said in a statement. “Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it.”

[Related: ‘Christmas tree’ galaxy shines in new image from Hubble and JWST.]

At roughly 25,000 light-years from Earth, the galactic center is close enough for the JWST to study individual stars. This allows astronomers to collect data on both how stars form, but also how this process may depend on the cosmic environment when compared to other regions of the galaxy. One question this could help answer is if there are more massive stars in the center of the Milky Way, as opposed to on the edges of the galaxy’s spiral arms.

“The image from Webb is stunning, and the science we will get from it is even better,” Crowe said. “Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear cores, so understanding them better is like learning the origin story of much of the universe.”

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With their winding and buff arms made up of billions of stars, spiral galaxies offer some of the beautiful images of the universe. Our own Milky Way galaxy is a spiral galaxy, yet these types of swirling clusters are relatively scarce in a part of the universe called the Supergalactic Plane. A team of astrophysicists believes that the bright elliptical galaxies without a defined center are more common than swirling galaxies because of the difference in density of the environments found inside and outside of the Plane. The findings are described in a study published November 20 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

[Related: Behold six galactic collisions, masterfully captured by Hubble.]

Smoothing out the arms

The Supergalactic Plane is a flattened structure in the universe that extends nearly a billion light years across. Our own Milky Way galaxy is embedded within the Plane and is about 100,000 light years wide. There are dozens of enormous armless galaxy clusters called elliptical galaxies in the Plane, but not nearly as many disk-shaped galaxies with spiral arms. 

According to the new study, the different distributions of elliptical and disk galaxies are a natural occurrence. Galaxies experience frequent interactions and mergers with other galaxies in the Plane because the region is so densely packed. This galactic demolition derby then turns the spiral galaxies into elliptical galaxies. The arms are smoothed out and the lack of internal structure in the elliptical galaxy and presence of dark matter leads to the growth of supermassive black holes. Since the dark matter outweighs everything else, it has the power to shape the newly formed elliptical galaxy and tends to guide the growth of the central black hole.

The stars in an elliptical galaxy also orbit around the core in random directions and are generally older than those in spiral galaxies, according to NASA. 

In parts of the universe away from Plane, galaxies can evolve in relative isolation. This solitude helps them preserve their spiral structure.

“The distribution of galaxies in the Supergalactic Plane is indeed remarkable,” Carlos Frenk, a study co-author and astrophysicist at Durham University in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “It is rare but not a complete anomaly: our simulation reveals the intimate details of the formation of galaxies such as the transformation of spirals into ellipticals through galaxy mergers.”

A galactic time machine

In the study, the team used a supercomputer simulation called Simulations Beyond the Local Universe. It follows the evolution of the universe over a period of 13.8 billion years from around the time of the Big Bang up to the present. 

[Related: Hubble image captures stars forming in a far-off phantom galaxy.]

Most cosmological simulations consider random patches of the universe, which cannot be directly compared to other observations. Instead, SIBELIUS works to precisely reproduce the observed structures in space, including the Supergalactic Plane. According to the team, the final simulation is remarkably consistent with observations of our universe through telescopes.

“The simulation shows that our standard model of the universe, based on the idea that most of its mass is cold dark matter, can reproduce the most remarkable structures in the universe, including the spectacular structure of which the Milky Way is part,” said Frenk.

Scientists have been studying the separation of elliptical and spiral galaxies since the 1960s. This partitioning features prominently in a recent list of cosmic anomalies that was compiled by cosmologist and 2019 Nobel laureate Professor Jim Peebles.

“By chance, I was invited to a symposium in honor of Jim Peebles last December at Durham, where he presented the problem in his lecture,” study co-author and astrophysicist at the University of Helsinki in Finland Till Sawala said in a statement. “And I realized that we had already completed a simulation that might contain the answer. Our research shows that the known mechanisms of galaxy evolution also work in this unique cosmic environment.”

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Two of the most powerful space telescopes in the universe have joined forces to showcase a panorama of colorful galaxy clusters about 4.3 billion light-years away from Earth. The image of  galaxy cluster MACS0416 is from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope and combines both visible and infrared light. 

[Related: Euclid telescope spies shimmering stars and galaxies in its first look at the ‘dark’ universe.]

According to NASA, MACS0416 is a pair of colliding galaxy clusters that will eventually combine to form an even bigger cluster. It includes numerous galaxies outside of the cluster and some other light sources that vary over time. The variation is likely due to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, where light is distorted and amplified from distant background sources.

Color coding

In the image, different colors represent the varying wavelengths of light. The shortest are blue, the intermediate are green, and the longest are red. The wavelengths range from 0.4 to 5 microns and the variation creates a particularly vivid landscape of galaxies.

The colors also give clues to how far away the galaxies are. The bluest galaxies are relatively close, tend to show intense star formation, and are best detected by Hubble. The more red galaxies tend to be further away and are best spotted by JWST. Some of the galaxies also appear very red because they have a large amount of cosmic dust that tends to absorb bluer colors of starlight.

“The whole picture doesn’t become clear until you combine Webb data with Hubble data,” Rogier Windhorst said in a statement. Windhorst is an astronomer at Arizona State University and principal investigator of the PEARLS program (Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science), which took the JWST observations.

Oh Christmas tree

While the images are pleasant to look like, they were also taken for a specific scientific purpose. The team was using their data to search for objects varying in observed brightness over time, known as transients. All of these colors twinkling together in the galaxy look like shining colorful lights on a Christmas tree. 

“We’re calling MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it’s so colorful and because of these flickering lights we find within it. We can see transients everywhere,” said astronomer Haojing Yan of the University of Missouri in Columbia said in a statement. Yan is a co-author of one paper describing the scientific results published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The team identified 14 transients across the field of view. Twelve of the transients were located in three galaxies that are highly magnified by gravitational lensing. This means that they are likely to be individual stars or multiple-star systems that are very highly magnified for a short period of time. The other two transients are located within more moderately magnified background galaxies, so they are likely to be supernovae.

More observations with JWST could lead to finding numerous additional transients and in other similar galaxy clusters. 

Godzilla and Mothra 

One of the transients stood out in particular. The star system is located in a galaxy that existed roughly three billion years after the big bang and is magnified by a factor of at least 4,000. They nicknamed the star system Mothra in a nod to its “monster nature” of being both very bright and magnified. Mothra joins another lensed star the researchers previously identified that they nicknamed “Godzilla.” In Japanese cinema, Godzilla and Mothra are giant monsters known as kaiju.

In addition to the new JWST images, Mothra is also visible in the Hubble observations that were taken nine years ago. According to the team, this is unusual, because a very specific alignment between the foreground galaxy cluster and the background star is needed to magnify a star this much. The alignment should have been eliminated by the mutual motions of the star and the cluster.

An additional object within the foreground cluster could be adding more magnification. 

“The most likely explanation is a globular star cluster that’s too faint for Webb to see directly,” astronomer Jose Diego of the Instituto de Física de Cantabria in Spain said in a statement. “But we don’t know the true nature of this additional lens yet.” Diego is also a co-author of a paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics that details this finding. 

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What happens to glass if you leave it out in the open for several billion years—but with no air and no running water? We can find the answers to that question by studying naturally occurring glass on the moon. The moon may lack the features that usually weather rocks or minerals on Earth, but that doesn’t make this satellite completely inert. Scientists know that prolonged exposure to radiation leaves a mark on the lunar surface. Now, new research suggests that billions of years of radiation exposure appear to stiffen lunar glass, according to a team who published their work yesterday in the journal Science Advances.

The moon may not seem like an obvious place to find glass. But tiny glass spheroids riddle the lunar regolith—the rock chips and other loose material covering the lunar surface. Meteoroids constantly bombard the material, melting it into tiny pools. As the molten regolith cools back down, it hardens into glass. 

Glass is more than just a brittle, transparent sheet that fills windows. Scientists think of the stuff as the result of a liquid cooling rapidly without its atoms slotting into a defined structure. For that reason, some scientists consider glass to be its own separate state of matter.

And, even on the moon, glass does not last for billions of years without changing. Though the moon has neither a significant atmosphere nor running water to weather rocks like on Earth, the lunar surface is subject to something that our planet’s atmosphere typically filters out: radiation. Some of it comes from the sun; some arrives as cosmic rays from far greater distances. Regardless, over billions of years of radiation exposure, the effects build up.

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

Geologists have long been interested in how radiation affects lunar soil. “There have been 20 years’ worth of study on it,” says Rhonda Stroud, a space materials scientist at Arizona State University, who was not an author of the paper. 

Much of that work involved taking facsimiles of lunar soil, which they call simulants, and exposing them to radiation. But, Stroud says, it’s hard to know how individual material particles react by studying vast quantities of them. “Any one little dust particle or sub-millimeter glass sphere could have its own age,” she says. “Things get buried, the regolith churns.”

Fortunately, we have actual lunar glass on Earth in the form of samples returned by our moon missions. Most recently, we can thank the Chang’e-5 lunar lander, which lifted off from China in November 2020 and returned less than a month later bearing 3.81 lbs of souvenirs. Chang’e-5 did not land in a place on the moon that experienced many impacts—and, consequently did not return with much glass. 

Still, scientists managed to sift through Chang’e-5’s bounty and pick out five particular glassy particles, each one about the width of a human hair. They examined each particle under a transmission electron microscope, allowing them to view its structure. They also pressed a tiny probe on each particle, allowing them to test how the particle reacted to force.

The researchers then “rejuvenated” the samples by heating them up to liquid temperatures of more than 1100 degrees F, holding them there for a minute, then letting them cool. They repeated the same microscope and pressure tests on the de-aged samples, allowing them to estimate what the particles looked like before hundreds of millions or even billions of years sitting on the moon and basking in radiation.

[Related: We finally have a detailed map of water on the moon]

They found a drastic change in a property that engineers call the Young’s modulus, which measures how much force a material needs to distort by a certain length. If the researchers’ rejuvenated samples were any indication, then prolonged radiation exposure increased the Young’s modulus of the glass by as much as 70 percent. More subtly, radiation also seemed to harden some of the particles.

These discoveries can help scientists figure out how glass behaves in the soil of other worlds. And the research team believes that it might also help us understand the behavior of the glass we make on Earth. 

In fact, this paper’s authors believe that lunar glass itself may soon be useful. In their vision, moon-dwellers might sift through the lunar regolith for glass beads and convert them into glass that they could use for their vehicles or habitats.

But it is not obvious to everyone how research like this yet translates into actual infrastructure. “The radiation from solar wind is very, very slow,” Stroud says. “I don’t think we need materials to withstand billions of years.”

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NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been exploring Jupiter since it arrived at the planet in 2016. In recent years, the mission has turned its attention to the gas giant’s many moons, including the hellish volcanic world Io and the ice ball Europa. Now, in research published in Nature Astronomy, the Juno team revealed new photos of Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, which show evidence of salts and organic compounds. These materials are likely the residue of salty sea water from an underground ocean that bubbled up to the frozen surface of Ganymede. And, excitingly, a salty ocean indicates conditions there might be conducive to life.

Ganymede is a particularly weird place. Not only is it Jupiter’s most massive satellite, it’s the biggest moon in the whole solar system—it’s even larger than the planet Mercury. It also is the only moon to have its own magnetic field, generated from a molten metal core deep in its interior. Like other icy worlds of the outer solar system, such as Europa or possibly Pluto, Ganymede probably has an ocean lurking under its icy crust. Some studies suggest multiple seas, stacked together in a layer cake of ice sheets and oceans, hide underground.

“Because Ganymede is so big, its interior structure is more complicated” than that of smaller worlds, explains University of Arizona geologist Adeene Denton, who is not affiliated with the new work. She notes that the moon’s massive size means there’s a lot of space for interesting molecules to mix about. But that also means they’re tricky to spot, because material must cover a large distance  to get to the surface where our spacecraft can see them.

Juno finally passed close enough to Ganymede—within 650 miles, less than the distance from New York City to Chicago—to take a close look at the chemicals on its surface using its Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM). This incredible instrument tracked the composition of Ganymede’s surface in great detail, noting features as small as 1 kilometer wide. If JIRAM were looking at New York City, it would be able to map Manhattan in ten-block chunks.

[Related: Astronomers find 12 more moons orbiting Jupiter]

Importantly, material on the surface of Ganymede might tell us about the water hiding below. If there are salts above, the subsurface ocean might have that same brine. Oceans, including the ones on Earth, acquire their salt from chemical interactions where liquid water touches a rocky mantle. This kind of exchange is “one of the conditions necessary for habitability,” says lead author Federico Tosi, research scientist at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, Italy.

However, other current research suggests that Ganymede doesn’t have a liquid water layer directly touching its mantle. Instead, icy crusts separate the ocean from the rock. But because the team did see these salts in the JIRAM data, it suggests they were touching at one point in the past, if not now. “This testifies to an era when the ocean must have been in direct contact with the rocky mantle,” explains Tosi.

As for the organic chemicals that Juno detected, the team still isn’t completely  sure what flavor of compound they are. They’re leaning towards aliphatic aldehydes, a type of molecule found elsewhere in the solar system that’s known as an intermediate step necessary to build more complex amino acids. These usually indicate liquid water and a rocky mantle are interacting. This definitely isn’t a detection of life, but it’s interesting for the possibility of life lurking in Ganymede’s hidden oceans. “The presence of organic compounds does not imply the presence of life forms,” says Tosi. “But the opposite is true: life requires the presence of some categories of organic compounds.”

[Related: Why a 3,000-mile-long jet stream on Jupiter surprised NASA scientists]

Unfortunately, Juno won’t have a chance to swing by Ganymede again to search for more salty shores—instead, it’s headed toward the explosive Io. The probe’s most recent survey of these minerals was a “a unique opportunity to take a close look at this satellite,” Tosi says. We won’t have to wait too much longer, though, for a second visit. In about ten years, he adds, we’ll get another chance to explore these salty waters with the ESA JUICE mission, “which is expected to achieve complete and unprecedented coverage of Ganymede.”

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A very dry start

When the solar system first came together, some of the young planets were too hot for water. “Earth and Mars should have formed extremely dry,” says Humberto Campins, an asteroid expert at the University of Central Florida—due to their locations in the solar system’s frost line.

When the sun was coalescing out of a collapsing cloud of gas and dust 4.6 billion years ago, its tremendous heat made a boundary. Outside of it, space was cool enough for ice grains to solidify. (This helps explain why far-out Jupiter and Saturn have ocean moons.) Inside of it, heat vaporized water. Earth and the other inner planets clumped together from the dry rock and dense metal that remained. Something must have happened, some millions of years later, to nourish those planets with water. Astronomers have explored several possible scenarios. 

Craters on the surface of our moon indicate that our side of the frost line was constantly hit with space rocks, including a particularly violent shower known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. Some experts think those projectiles—specifically meteorites, the bits of asteroids that fall to Earth—might have been more like cosmic water balloons. The hypothesis is supported by the 2010 discovery of a thin crust of frost on asteroid 24 Themis. More recently, NASA found water-bearing clay minerals in the near-Earth asteroid Bennu during a ground-breaking sample-retrieval mission.

Still, it’s possible that other processes were involved in delivering water to Earth, such as gas from the cloudy solar nebula that dissolved hydrogen into the planet’s magma layer. It’s also possible that there were multiple sources and steps.

“The pieces of the puzzle are not clear,” says Campins, who is a member of the team that probed Bennu’s contents. But he points to one major clue that “gives us an idea of where the water may be coming from”: the type of hydrogen that flows through our aquatic systems.

Matching elements

The most common form of hydrogen in the universe has a lone proton orbited by an electron. But there’s a slightly different version called deuterium with a proton and a neutron squished into the center. Astronomers have measured the proportion of deuterium to regular hydrogen in Earth’s water and looked for that “D-H ratio” in other objects around the solar system.

This lends to the idea that a bunch of space bodies hit Earth with noble gasses, H₂O, and who knows what else. “If most of the water gets contributed by asteroid impacts and most of the noble gasses are contributed by comets,” the elemental math seems to add up, Campins says. “But I think that nature is a little bit more complicated than that…it could be that the timing of those two was not the same.” 

In fact, newer evidence emphasizes a different kind of space rock from closer to home.

Local rocks

If space rocks brought water to the Red Planet, could they have done so elsewhere? “What we’re learning here may not only be applicable to our understanding of what we should expect on Mars,” Campins says, “but about the possibility of water and organic molecules being delivered to planets around other stars, which would give you an environment that could be conducive to the formation of life.”

Putting these lines of evidence together gives us a recipe that would have involved lots of damp local rocks and a few of the more distant ice balls. Hydrogen, nitrogen, and zinc isotopes “all tell the same story” of a wet Earth, Raymond says: Previously overlooked non-carbonaceous meteorites probably supplied about 70 percent of the planet’s water, and just a dash of carbonaceous meteorites touched up its vast blue surface. 

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On November 3, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History debuted a piece of the asteroid Bennu to the public for the first time. The sample was deposited on Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on September 24. The spacecraft did not land, but instead dropped a capsule containing about nine ounces of asteroid samples down to Earth. The spacecraft continued on to a new mission called OSIRIS-APEX. It is set to explore the asteroid Apophis when it comes within 20,000 miles of Earth in 2029. 

On display is a 0.3-inch in diameter stone that weighs only 0.005-ounces. The stone was retrieved amidst rocks and dust collected by the spacecraft in 2020 after two years of exploring Bennu. 

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials.]

OSIRIS-REx stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer and is the first US mission to collect samples from an asteroid. The spacecraft traveled 1.4-billion-miles from Earth, to the asteroid Bennu, and then back again. Bennu is roughly 4.5 billion years old and dates back to the crucial first 10 million years of the solar system’s development. Its age offers scientists a window into what this time period looked like. The space rock is shaped like a spinning top and is about one-third of a mile across at its widest part–slightly wider than the Empire State Building is tall. It revolves around the sun between the orbits of Earth and Mars.

“The OSIRIS-REx mission is an incredible scientific achievement that promises to shed light on what makes our planet unique,” Kirk Johnson, the Sant Director of the National Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. “With the help of our partners at NASA, we are proud to put one of these momentous samples on display to the public for the first time.”

The sample was labeled OREX-800027-0 by NASA scientists at Houston’s Johnson Space Center and is being stored in a nitrogen environment to keep it safe from contamination. CT scans of the displayed stone revealed that it is composed of dozens of smaller rocks. The fragments were fused back together at some point and the entire stone was changed by the presence of water. The alterations to the stone produced clays, iron oxides, iron sulfides, and carbonates as its major minerals and even carbon. 

The samples from this mission hold chemical clues to our solar system’s formation. Evidence of essential elements like carbon in the rocks outside of the main sample container have already been uncovered by NASA scientists. These early samples also contain some water-rich minerals. Scientists believe that similar water-containing asteroids bombarded Earth billions of years ago, which provided the water that eventually formed our planet’s first oceans.

[Related: NASA’s OSIRIS mission delivered asteroid samples to Earth.]

“Having now returned to Earth without being exposed to our water-rich atmosphere or the life that fills every corner of our planet, the samples of Bennu hold the promise to tell us about the water and organics before life came to form our unique planet,” museum meteorite curator Tim McCoy said in a statement. McCoy has worked on the OSIRIS-REx mission for nearly two decades as part of an international team of scientists.

According to Space.com, a sizable crowd turned out to see the space rock and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and other space agency and Smithsonian officials were present at the unveiling ceremony. Additional Bennu samples will be on display at a later date and at the Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum at the University of Arizona in Tucson and Space Center Houston, next to to NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

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The freshly released images from NASA’s Lucy spacecraft’s first asteroid flyby reveal that Dinkinesh is actually a binary pair. A binary asteroid pair has a larger main asteroid and a smaller satellite orbiting around it. In the weeks leading up to the flyby, the Lucy team had wondered if Dinkinesh was actually a binary system because Lucy’s instruments detected the brightness of the asteroid changing over time. This is a sign that something is getting in the way of the light, likely a body orbiting the main space rock. 

[Related: NASA spacecraft Lucy says hello to ‘Dinky’ asteroid on far-flying mission.]

From a preliminary analysis of the first available images, the team estimates that the larger asteroid body is roughly 0.5 miles at its widest and that the smaller body is about 0.15 miles in size.

Dinkinesh is another name for the Lucy fossil that this mission is named after. The 3.2 million-year-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor were found in Ethiopia in 1974. The name Dinkinesh means “marvelous” in the Amharic language. 

“Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement. “When Lucy was originally selected for flight, we planned to fly by seven asteroids. With the addition of Dinkinesh, two Trojan moons, and now this satellite, we’ve turned it up to 11.”

The November 1 encounter primarily served as an in-flight test of the asteroid-studying spacecraft. It specifically focused on testing the system that allows it to autonomously track an asteroid as it whizzes by at 10,000 miles per hour. The team calls this its terminal tracking system.

“This is an awesome series of images. They indicate that the terminal tracking system worked as intended, even when the universe presented us with a more difficult target than we expected,” Lockheed Martin guidance and navigation engineer Tom Kennedy said in a statement. “It’s one thing to simulate, test, and practice. It’s another thing entirely to see it actually happen.”

It will take up to a week for the remainder of the data from the flyby to be downloaded to Earth. This week’s encounter was carried out as an engineering check, but the team’s scientists are hoping this data will help them glean insights into the nature of small asteroids.

“We knew this was going to be the smallest main belt asteroid ever seen up close,” NASA Lucy project scientist Keith Noll said in a statement. “The fact that it is two makes it even more exciting. In some ways these asteroids look similar to the near-Earth asteroid binary Didymos and Dimorphos that DART saw, but there are some really interesting differences that we will be investigating.”

[Related: Why scientists are studying the clouds of debris left in DART’s wake.]

The Lucy team plans to use this first flyby data to evaluate the spacecraft’s behavior and  prepare for its next close-up look at an asteroid. This next encounter is scheduled for April 2025, when Lucy is expected to fly by the main belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson. This asteroid is named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johnson, one the scientists who discovered the Lucy fossils.

Launched in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy mission is the first spacecraft set to explore the Trojan asteroids. This group of primitive space rocks is orbiting our solar system’s largest planet Jupiter. They orbit in two swarms, with one moving  ahead of Jupiter and the other lagging behind it. 

There are about 7,000 asteroids in this belt, with the largest asteroid estimated to be about 160 miles across. The asteroids are similar to fossils and represent the leftover material that is still hanging around after the giant planets including Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune formed.

Lucy will then travel into the leading Trojan asteroid swarm. After that, the spacecraft will fly past six Trojan asteroids, including binary asteroids like Dinkinesh: Eurybates and its satellite Queta, Polymele and its yet unnamed satellite, Leucus, and Orus. 

In 2030, Lucy will return to Earth for yet another bump that will gear it up for a rendezvous with the Patroclus-Menoetius binary asteroid pair in the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm. This mission is scheduled to conclude some time in 2033.

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On November 1, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft successfully completed its first asteroid flyby. The 56 feet-long spacecraft came within 230 miles of the asteroid Dinkinesh aka “Dinky.” This fairly small space rock is in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

[Related: Meet Lucy: NASA’s new asteroid-hopping spacecraft.]

Dinkinesh is the first of 10 asteroids the probe will visit over the next 10 years. The asteroid is about 10 to 100 times smaller than the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that are the main target of the Lucy mission. Dinkinesh is another name for the Lucy fossil that this mission is named after. The 3.2 million-year-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor were found in Ethiopia in 1974.

Lucy zoomed by Dinkinesh at about 10,000 miles per hour.  This encounter was the first in-flight test of the spacecraft’s terminal tracking system. 

“The Lucy operations team has confirmed that NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has phoned home after its encounter with the small main belt asteroid, Dinkinesh,” NASA wrote in a blog post. “Based on the information received, the team has determined that the spacecraft is in good health and the team has commanded the spacecraft to start downlinking the data collected during the encounter.”

It will take NASA up to a week to download the data on how Lucy performed during this first in-flight test during the encounter. NASA planned for the high-resolution grayscale camera onboard Lucy to take a series of images every 15 minutes. Dinkinesh has been visible to Lucy’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) as a single point of light since early September. The team began to use L’LORRI to assist with the navigation of the spacecraft. 

Lucy’s thermal infrared instrument (L’TES) should also begin to collect data. Since L’TES was not designed to observe an asteroid quite as small as Dinkinesh, the team is interested to see if it can detect the half-mile wide asteroid and measure its temperature during the encounter.

Astronomers plan to use the data from this approach to gain a better understanding of small near-Earth asteroids and if they originate from larger main belt asteroids. 

Launched in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy mission is the first spacecraft set to explore the Trojan asteroids. These are a group of primitive space rocks orbiting our solar system’s largest planet Jupiter. They orbit in two swarms, with one ahead of Jupiter and the other lagging behind it. Lucy is expected to provide the first high-resolution images of what these space rocks look like. 

There are about 7,000 asteroids in this belt with the largest about 160 miles across. The asteroids are similar to fossils and represent the leftover material that is still hanging around after the giant planets including Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter, and Saturn formed.

[Related: New image reveals a Jupiter-like world that may share its orbit with a ‘twin.’]

In 2024, Lucy will return towards Earth for a second gravity push that will give it the energy needed to cross the solar system’s main asteroid belt. It is expected to observe asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson in 2025. This asteroid is named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johnson, one the scientists who discovered the Lucy fossils.

It will then travel into the leading Trojan asteroid swarm. After that, the spacecraft will fly past six Trojan asteroids: Eurybates and its satellite Queta, Polymele and its yet unnamed satellite, Leucus, and Orus. 

In 2030, Lucy will return to Earth for yet another bump that will gear it up for a rendezvous with the Patroclus-Menoetius binary asteroid pair in the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm. This mission is scheduled to end some time in 2033.

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In the summer, astronomers spotted an airplane-sized asteroid—large enough to potentially destroy a city—on an almost-collision course with Earth. But no one saw the space rock until two days after it had zoomed past our planet. 

This asteroid, named 2023 NT1, passed by us at only one-fourth of the distance from Earth to the moon. That’s far too close for comfort. Astronomers weren’t going to let this incident go without a post-mortem. They’ve recently dissected what went wrong and how we can better prepare to defend our planet from future impacts, in a new paper recently posted to the preprint server arXiv.

We know from history that asteroids can cause world-shattering events and extinctions—just look at what happened to the dinosaurs. The study team estimated that, if NT1 hit Earth, it could have the energy of anywhere from 4 to 80 intercontinental ballistic missiles. “2023 NT1 would have been much worse than the Chelyabinsk airburst,” says University of California, Santa Barbara astronomer Philip Lubin, a co-author on the new work, referring to the meteor that exploded over a Russian city in 2013. As devastating as that would be, it’s “not an existential threat like the 10-kilometer hit that killed our previous tenants,” he adds.

The asteroid-monitoring system ATLAS, the “Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System”—four telescopes in Hawaii, Chile, and South Africa—discovered NT1 after the rock flew by. ATLAS’s entire purpose is to scour the skies for space rocks that might threaten Earth. So with this set of eyes on the sky, how did we miss it? 

It turns out that Earth has what Brin Bailey, UC Santa Barbara astronomer and lead author on the paper, calls a “blindspot.” Any asteroid coming from the direction of the sun gets lost in the glare of our nearest star.” There’s another way for asteroids to sneak up on us, too: the smaller the asteroid, the harder it is for our telescopes to spot them, even when the rocks come from parts in the sky away from the sun.

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials]

“Currently, there is no planetary defense system which can mitigate short-warning threats,” Bailey says. “While NT1 has no chance of intercepting Earth in the future, it serves as a reminder that we do not have complete situational awareness of all potential threats in the solar system,” they add. That leads to Lesson #1: We simply need better detection methods for planetary defense. 

If we can manage to detect an asteroid with a few years’ warning, we might be able to redirect it with the technology recently tested by NASA’s Double-Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.For a case with very little warning, such as NT1, though, we’d need a different approach—that’s Lesson #2. Bailey and colleagues propose a method they call “Pulverize It” (PI). 

PI’s plan is exactly what it sounds like: break the asteroid into tiny pieces, small enough to burn up in the atmosphere or fall to the ground as much less dangerous little rocks. They’d do this by launching one or multiple rockets to send arrays of small impactors to space. The impactors—six-foot-long, six-inch-thick rods—would smash into the asteroid like buckshot, efficiently dismantling it. “Had we intercepted it [NT1] even one day prior to impact, we could have prevented any significant damage,” claims Lubin.

It sounds simple enough, but some astronomers aren’t quite convinced. “I think the PI method is impractical even though it does not violate the laws of physics,” says University of California, Los Angeles astronomer Ned Wright, who was not involved in the new work. “When a building is demolished by implosion using explosive charges, a weeks-long testing and planning phase is needed in order to place the charges in the right locations and set up the proper timing. The PI method seeks to do this measuring, planning, and placing the explosives all within a period of 1 minute or so just before the spacecraft hits the asteroid.”

[Related: NASA’s first attempt to smack an asteroid was picture perfect]

Lubin points out that unlike a careful demolition on Earth, the goal is a sudden, bomb-like explosion—an event that needs less prep to pull off. But whether we use PI or another line of defense, it’s clear that we need to plan ahead. Not only is there the hazy threat of an asteroid coming out of nowhere, there are two specific, extremely risky events headed our way: asteroid Apophis’ near flyby in 2029, and close approaches from the even larger Bennu (recently sampled by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission) in 2054, 2060, and 2135.

“Humanity now possesses the technology to robustly detect and defend the planet if we choose to do so,” says Lubin. “And a variety of people are working hard to ensure we can.”

This story has been updated: An earlier version indicated that the asteroid-destroying impactors would be filled with explosives. While that may be an option, most forms of the “Pulverize It” method use non-explosive metal rods.

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As the darkest nights of the year approach in the Northern Hemisphere, the night skies will light up, giving us a chance to see three meteor showers. Our closest planetary neighbor Venus will also be particularly radiant this month. It is also the time of year to keep an eye out for the Aurora Borealis. Here are some of the events to look out for this month. If you happen to get any stellar sky photos, please tag us and include #PopSkyGazers.

[Related: Astronomers find 12 more moons orbiting Jupiter.]

November 2 to 3 – Jupiter at Opposition

The month kicks off with our solar system’s largest planet appearing at its biggest and brightest state of the year, which is called opposition. Jupiter hits opposition at 12 a.m. EDT on November 3 and will be visible in the eastern horizon for skygazers in the Northern Hemisphere. 

According to Larry Wassterman from the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, opposition occurs when a planet, Earth, and the sun lie along a straight line with Earth in the middle. The planet and the sun are on the opposite sides of Earth so they are considered in opposition. 

“The planet is as close to the Earth as possible and will appear as big and as bright as it can ever get. This is a great time to take a look and discover Jupiter in opposition for yourself. During Jupiter’s opposition, Earth will pass between Jupiter and the Sun, and the proximity will make Jupiter appear larger in the sky. On the day of opposition, Jupiter rises when the Sun sets,” Wassterman writes. 

November 5 and 6 – Southern Taurids Meteor Shower Predicted Peak 

November’s first meteor shower is predicted to peak November 5th and 6th. Both of the Taurids meteor showers don’t have very definite peaks. The meteors ramble along in space and are especially noticeable from late October into early November, when both the Southern and Northern Taurids overlap. 

According to EarthSky, under dark skies with no moon, both South Taurids produce about five meteors per hour and 10 total when the North and South Taurids overlap. Fireballs are also possible, like the ones that appeared in 2022. Taurid meteors are slower than those from other meteor showers, but can be very bright.  

The Taurids are visible almost everywhere on Earth, except for the South Pole. 

[Related: Meteorites older than the solar system contain key ingredients for life.]

November 9 – Moon and Venus Conjunction

Already the brightest planet in our solar system, Venus will shine particularly brilliantly early this month. Venus will put on a show in the eastern horizon at 2:55 AM EST. As the morning continues Venus will shift upwards, and be one teach one degree to the upper right by the time morning twilight begins at about  5:44 a.m. EST. For some viewers, the moon will pass in front of Venus, blocking it from view at this time. 

Visibility will be best in northern Canada, most of Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, west Russia, most of Europe, parts of north Africa, and most of the Middle East.

November 11 through 13 – Northern Taurids Meteor Shower Predicted Peak

Due to the moon’s phases, the best chance for seeing the Northern Taurids this month is from November 11 through the 13. Ideal viewing times will be around midnight because the moon will only be about 2 percent full that night. The sky will be darker and more primed for you to spot any meteors under clear skies.

November 18 – Leonids Meteor Shower Predicted Peak

For the Leonids, the night sky will be free of moonlight when the shower is predicted to peak on November 18th. For best viewing, watch late on the night of November 17 until dawn on November 18. The morning of November 17 may also be worthwhile for viewing. It is possible to see 10 to 15 Leonid meteors per hour under a moonless sky. 

The Leonid meteor shower is famous for producing one of the greatest meteor storms in living history. On November 17, 1966, there were thousands of meteors per minute during a 15-minute span. Leonid meteor storms sometimes happen in cycles of 33 to 34 years, but this cycle did not occur during the 1990s as anticipated. 

The Leonids will be visible in both hemispheres.

[Related: The moon is 40 million years older than we thought, according to crystals collected by Apollo astronauts.]

November 27 – Full Beaver Moon

November’s full moon will reach peak illumination on November 27 at 4:16 a.m. EST. The moon will also appear very full and close on the night of November 26. According to the Farmer’s Almanac, it is called the Beaver Moon in reference to the time of year when beavers begin to shelter in their lodges, after storing up food for the winter. This was also when beavers pelts are at their thickest.

Some other names for November’s full moon include the Whitefish Moon or Adikomemi-giizis in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), the Little Winter Moon or Gahsá’kneh in Seneca, and the Leaf Fall Moon or Yapa Huktugere Nuti in the Catawba language.

The same skygazing rules that apply to pretty much all space-watching activities are key this month: Go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour. 

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For the first time, astronomers using data from the Keck II telescope have detected the presence of an infrared aurora on the planet Uranus. The discovery could shed light on some of the unknown properties of the magnetic fields of our solar system’s planets. It could also help explain why a planet so far from the sun is hotter than it should be. The findings are described in a study published on October 23 in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

[Related: Uranus got its name from a very serious authority.]

The NIRSPEC instrument (Near InfraRed SPECtrograph) at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii  was used to collect 6 hours of observations of Uranus in 2006. The study’s authors carefully studied 224 images to find signs of a specific particle–ionized triatomic hydrogen or H3+. They found evidence of H3+ in the data after collisions with charged particles. The emission created an infrared auroral glow over Uranus’ northern magnetic pole. The image itself is an artist’s rendition of the infrared aurora, superimposed on a Hubble Space Telescope image of Uranus.

Uranian auroras vs. Earth auroras

Auroras on the planet Uranus are caused when charged particles from the sun interact with the planet’s magnetic field the same way they do on Earth. The particles are funneled along magnetic field lines toward the magnetic poles. When they enter the Uranian atmosphere, the charged particles bump into atmospheric molecules. This causes the molecules to glow. 

The dominant gasses in Uranus’ atmosphere are hydrogen and helium and they are at much lower temperatures than on Earth. The presence of these gasses at these temperatures cause Uranus’ auroras to predominantly glow at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. By comparison, auroras on Earth come from oxygen and nitrogen atoms colliding with the charged particles and the colors are mostly blue, green, and red and can generally be seen with the human eye at the right latitudes. 

Uranus and Neptune are unusual planets in our solar system because their magnetic fields are misaligned with the axes in which they spin. Astronomers haven’t found an explanation for this, but clues could lie in Uranus’s aurora. 

Measuring the infrared

In the study, a team of astronomers used the first measurements of the infrared aurora at Uranus since investigations into the planet began in 1992. The ultraviolet aurorae of Uranus was first observed 1986, but the infrared aurora has not been observed until now, according to the team. 

By analyzing specific wavelengths of light emitted from the planet. With this data, they can analyze the light called emission lines from these planets, which is similar to a barcode. In the infrared spectrum, the lines emitted by the H3+ particles will have different levels of brightness depending on how hot or cold the particle is and how dense this layer of the atmosphere is. The lines then act like a thermometer taking the planet’s temperature.

The astronomers found that there were distinct increases in H3+ density in Uranus’s atmosphere with little change in temperature. This is consistent with ionization that is caused by the presence of an infrared aurora. These measurements can help astronomers understand the magnetic fields on the other outer planets in the solar system. They could also scientists identify other planets that are suitable for supporting life.

[Related: Ice giant Uranus shows off its many rings in new JWST image.]

“The temperature of all the gas giant planets, including Uranus, are hundreds of degrees Kelvin/Celsius above what models predict if only warmed by the sun, leaving us with the big question of how these planets are so much hotter than expected? One theory suggests the energetic aurora is the cause of this, which generates and pushes heat from the aurora down towards the magnetic equator,” study co-author and University of Leicester PhD student Emma Thomas said in a statement. 

Clues to life on exoplanets

According to Thomas, most of the exoplanets astronomers have discovered are in the sub-Neptune category, so they are a similar size as Neptune and Uranus. Similar magnetic and atmospheric characteristics could also exist on these exoplanets. Uranus’s aurora directly connects to the planet’s magnetic field and atmosphere, so studying it can help astronomers make predictions about the atmospheres and magnetic fields and their suitability for supporting life.

These results may also provide insight into a rare phenomenon on Earth called geomagnetic reversal. This occurs when the north and south poles switch hemisphere locations. According to NASA, pole reversals are pretty common in Earth’s geologic history and the last one occurred roughly 780,000 years ago. Paleomagnetic records show that over the last 83 million years, Earth’s magnetic poles have reversed 183 times. They’ve also reversed at least several hundred times in the past 160 million years. The time intervals between these reversals have fluctuated, but average about 300,000 years.

“We don’t have many studies on this phenomena and hence do not know what effects this will have on systems that rely on Earth’s magnetic field such as satellites, communications and navigation,” said Thomas. “However, this process occurs every day at Uranus due to the unique misalignment of the rotational and magnetic axes. Continued study of Uranus’s aurora will provide data on what we can expect when Earth exhibits a future pole reversal and what that will mean for its magnetic field.”

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When humans finally return to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, they’ll arrive with a bevy of high-tech equipment to capture new, awe-inspiring glimpses of Earth’s satellite. But cameras have come a long way since the Apollo missions. In 2023, some incredibly advanced options are already almost moon-ready right off the shelf.

According to a recent update from the European Space Agency, engineers collaborating with NASA are finalizing a Handheld Universal Lunar Camera (HULC) with real-world testing in the rocky, lunar-esque vistas of Lanzarote, Spain. While resilient enough to travel to the moon, HULC’s underpinning tech derives from commercially available professional cameras featuring high light sensitivities and cutting-edge lenses. To strengthen the lunar documentation device, researchers needed to add a blanket casing that is durable enough to protect against ultra-fine moon dust, as well as the moon’s extreme temperature swings ranging between -208 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. At the same time, the covering can’t impede usage, so designers also created a suite of ergonomic buttons compatible with astronaut spacesuits’ thick gloves.

[Related: Check out this Prada-designed Artemis III spacesuits.]

So far, HULC has snapped shots in near pitch-black volcanic caves, as well as in broad daylight to approximate the lunar surface’s vast spectrum of lighting possibilities. According to the ESA, HULC will also be the first mirrorless handheld camera used in space—such a design reportedly offers quality images in low light scenarios.

Even with the numerous alterations and adjustments, the HULC is still not quite ready for the Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2025. The ESA reports that at least one version of the camera will soon travel to the International Space Station for additional testing.

“We will continue modifying the camera as we move towards the Artemis III lunar landing,” Jeremy Myers, NASA lead on the HULC camera project, told the ESA on October 24. “I am positive that we will end up with the best product–a camera that will capture Moon pictures for humankind, used by crews from many countries and for many years to come.”

Images of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong striding across the lunar surface during the Apollo 11 moonwalk instantly became iconic photographs in 1969, but they were only a preview of many more to come. Over the next three years, 10 more astronauts documented their visits to the moon using an array of video and photographic cameras. When humans finally return as part of the Artemis program, HULC will be in tow to capture new, awe-inspiring glimpses of Earth’s satellite.

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Despite being our closest planetary neighbor, Venus is a pretty inhospitable place. It is about 100 times hotter than Earth and spacecraft exploring its thick atmosphere have been crushed in only two hours. However, Venus may have once had tectonic plate movements that are similar to what occurred during Earth’s early days. The new finding gives astronomers some novel scenarios to evaluate regarding the possibility of early life on Venus, its evolutionary past, and the history of the solar system. The findings are described in a study published October 26 in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

[Related: We finally know why Venus is absolutely radiant.]

In the study, researchers used atmospheric data from Venus and computer modeling to show that the composition of the planet’s current atmosphere and surface pressure could have only resulted from an early form of plate tectonics. This process is critical to life and involves multiple continental plates pushing, pulling, and sliding beneath one another. 

On Earth, these plate tectonics have intensified over billions of years. This process has formed new continents, mountains, and led to the chemical reactions that stabilized Earth’s surface temperature. It also created an environment that is more conducive for life to develop.

Venus went in the opposite direction and has surface temperatures of 867 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead. Astronomers have always believed that Venus has a “stagnant lid.” This means that the planet’s surface only has a single plate with minimal amounts of give, so most of the gasses remain trapped beneath the outer crust lid.

The team used current data on Venus’ atmosphere as the endpoint for these models and started by assuming Venus has had a stagnant lid through its entire existence. They were quickly able to see that computer simulations recreating the planet’s current atmosphere didn’t match up with where Venus is now. 

Next, the team simulated what would have had to happen on Venus for the planet to get to its current state. They eventually matched the numbers almost exactly when they accounted for limited tectonic movement early in Venus’ history followed by the stagnant lid model that exists today.

Due to the abundance of nitrogen and carbon dioxide present in Venus’ atmosphere, the team believes that Venus must have had plate tectonics about 4.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago after the planet formed. They suggest that like on Earth, this early tectonic movement would have been limited in terms of the number of plates moving around and in how much they shifted. The process also would have been occurring on Venus and Earth at the same time. 

“One of the big picture takeaways is that we very likely had two planets at the same time in the same solar system operating in a plate tectonic regime—the same mode of tectonics that allowed for the life that we see on Earth today,” study co-author and Brown University planetary geophysicist Matt Weller said in a statement. 

[Related: A private company wants to look for life just above Venus.]

According to the team, this further bolsters the possibility that microbial life existed on ancient Venus. It also shows that at one point, both Earth and Venus were even more alike than scientists previously thought before diverging. Both planets are about the same size, have the same mass, density, and volume and live in the same solar neighborhood.

The work also shows the possibility that plate tectonics on all planets might simply come down to timing, so life itself may also be a product of the perfect timing. 

“We’ve so far thought about tectonic state in terms of a binary: it’s either true or it’s false, and it’s either true or false for the duration of the planet,” study co-author and Brown University geobiologist and geophysicist Alexander Evans said in a statement. “This shows that planets may transition in and out of different tectonic states and that this may actually be fairly common. Earth may be the outlier. This also means we might have planets that transition in and out of habitability rather than just being continuously habitable.”

Understanding the transition of tectonic states will be important for future studies of nearby moons and distant exoplanets. Jupiter’s fourth largest moon Europa has already shown evidence of Earth-like plate tectonics.

“We’re still in this paradigm where we use the surfaces of planets to understand their history,” Evans said. “We really show for the first time that the atmosphere may actually be the best way to understand some of the very ancient history of planets that is often not preserved on the surface.”

Future NASA DAVINCI missions will measure gasses in Venus’ atmosphere and could help solidify this study’s findings and the details of how this happened may hold important implications for Earth.

“That’s going to be the next critical step in understanding Venus, its evolution and ultimately the fate of the Earth,” Weller said. “What conditions will force us to move in a Venus-like trajectory, and what conditions could allow the Earth to remain habitable?”

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The moon is our closest neighbor in space and the only celestial body humans have set foot on, yet we are still learning about it. In fact, Earth’s moon might actually be 40 million years older than scientists previously believed. By conducting an atom-by-atom analysis on crystals that were brought back by Apollo astronauts in 1972, a team of geochemists and plenary scientists now calculate that the igneous orb is at least 4.46 billion years old. The findings are described in a study published today in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters.

Intertwined fates

Heck is a curator for the meteorite collection at the Field Museum in Chicago and a professor at the University of Chicago. He says that studying the moon also helps us understand our own planet because of the topographical differences.

“Earth’s surface is much, much younger because there’s so much geologic activity [here] from volcanism and weathering,” explains Heck. “The moon’s surface is essentially an archive of solar system dynamics. This is a record that we don’t have on Earth, but our planet’s evolution is tied to these impacts that happened in the early solar system.”

A historical perspective

In the study, the team looked at moon dust brought back by the Apollo 17 crew. The 1972 lunar landing included NASA geologist Harrison Schmidt, who collected multiple rocks to study back on Earth. His samples contain very small crystals that were created billions of years ago and can help indicate when the moon was formed.

The energy created by the impact from the object that struck Earth and created the moon melted the rock that eventually became the lunar surface. That offers a clue to the elements that existed on the celestial body since its emergence versus the ones that appeared much later. For example, zirconium, a silver metal found on both the Earth and the moon, could not form and survive on the molten lunar surface: Any zircon crystals that are currently present on the moon must have formed after the magma ocean cooled. Determining the age of these structures can thus reveal the minimum possible age for the moon, assuming that they emerged right after the impact.

Looking atom by atom

Researchers have previously suggested that the moon is older than estimated, but this new study is the first to use an analytical method called atom probe tomography to pinpoint the age from the oldest known lunar crystal retrieved by humans.

“In atom probe tomography, we start by sharpening a piece of the lunar sample into a very sharp tip using a focused ion beam microscope, almost like a very fancy pencil sharpener,” study co-author and planetary scientist Jennika Greer said in a statement. “Then, we use UV lasers to evaporate atoms from the surface of that tip. The atoms travel through a mass spectrometer, and how fast they move tells us how heavy they are, which in turn tells us what they’re made of.”

This atom-by-atom analysis revealed how much of the zircon crystals had undergone radioactive decay—a process where atoms that have an unstable configuration shed some protons and neutrons. They then transform into different elements, like how uranium decays into lead. Based on the amount of conversion and the known half-lives of different chemical isotopes, experts can estimate the age of the sample.

“Radiometric dating works a little bit like an hourglass,” Heck said in a statement. “In an hourglass, sand flows from one glass bulb to another, with the passage of time indicated by the accumulation of sand in the lower bulb. Radiometric dating works similarly by counting the number of parent atoms and the number of daughter atoms they have transformed to. The passage of time can then be calculated because the transformation rate is known.”

The team working with the Apollo 17 sample found that the proportion of lead isotopes (the daughter atoms created during the decay) indicated that the crystals were about 4.46 billion years old, so the moon must at least be that old too. While this puts the moon’s age back 40 million years, that’s still a very short time compared to the universe’s roughly 13.7 billion-year history. 

“It’s amazing being able to have proof that the rock you’re holding is the oldest bit of the moon we’ve found so far. It’s an anchor point for so many questions about the Earth. When you know how old something is, you can better understand what has happened to it in its history,” Greer said.

From Apollo to Artemis

In future studies, clues pulled from these decades-old samples could be pooled with those from samples taken by upcoming Artemis lunar missions. Artemis III is scheduled for 2025 and will land on and explore the lunar South Pole. The Apollo 17 mission collected samples from the Taurus-Littrow valley on the eastern edge of Mare Serenitatis, so crystals from a different region of the moon could yield unimaginable discoveries. 

[Related: Scientists have new moon rocks for the first time in nearly 50 years]

“I am convinced that there is older stuff on the moon—we just haven’t found it yet. I even think we have older zircons in the Apollo samples. This is really the power of sample return,” says Heck. 

A mixture of new samples and future advances in technology could further anchor the timeline of how our solar system was formed and beyond.  “Maybe in 50 or 100 years or even later, new generations of scientists will have the tools we can only dream about today to address scientific questions we can’t even think about today,” says Heck. “These templates are a legacy for future generations.”

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NASA plans to return humans to the moon in 2025 with the Artemis III mission. Before that, the space agency will conduct a vital preliminary mission in November 2024, when the Artemis II mission flies a crew of astronauts in lunar orbit for the first time since the 1970s. But the “important first step” toward those goals, as NASA put it in a recent blog post, is the planned launch of the IM-1 mission carrying the NOVA-C lunar lander in a few weeks. It will attempt to land several NASA science experiments near Malapert A, a crater in the southern lunar polar region. Those studies could help NASA prepare for astronaut operations in the area in 2025. 

Unlike the Artemis missions, though, NOVA-C isn’t a big NASA project. Instead, the truck-sized craft designed to ferry small payloads to the lunar surface was built, and will be operated by, the small Texas-based company Intuitive Machines. 

If it succeeds in landing near the lunar south pole, NOVA-C will be the first US soft landing on the moon since the 1970s, and the first ever commercial landing on the moon that hasn’t crashed or failed. So why is a small spacecraft built by a relatively small company a key part of NASA’s big moon program?

“There is a pattern that we have now seen of NASA trying to move to more commercial solutions and services, rather than do it all on their own,” says Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy expert and instructor at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. It’s much like NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo programs, which contracted with SpaceX to fly astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station aboard its Dragon space capsules. 

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

Now NASA is turning to commercial companies to prepare the way for humanity’s return to the moon. Intuitive Machines was one of the first companies to receive a contract—for $77 million— under NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS program, back in 2019. NASA designed CLPS to fund private sector companies interested in building small, relatively inexpensive spacecraft to fly experiments and rovers to the moon, allowing NASA to simply purchase room on the spacecraft rather than developing and operating it themselves. 

In the case of NOVA-C, five NASA payloads will ride along with devices from universities including Louisiana State and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. ”The NASA payloads will focus on demonstrating communication, navigation and precision landing technologies, and gathering scientific data about rocket plume and lunar surface interactions, as well as space weather and lunar surface interactions affecting radio astronomy,” the space agency wrote in a blog post about the mission. 

“We don’t still don’t know a lot about the moon,” Whitman Cobb adds. The moon has variable gravity depending on where there are more metallic materials. “Finding out where those places are, how lunar dust is going to kick up when you’re trying to land or take off—all of these things are really key.”

That’s why NASA is sending payloads to ride along with NOVA-C. But the reason NOVA-C is landing where it is, about 300 kilometers from the south pole, has more to do with how the whole world is now thinking about the moon.

NOVA-C was originally destined to land in the Oceanus Procellarum, one of the large, dark areas known as mares, or “seas,” on the lunar surface. But in May, NASA and Intuitive Machines announced the change in plans and the new target near the south pole. 

[Related: We finally have a detailed map of water on the moon]

”The decision to move from the original landing site in Oceanus Procellarum was based on a need to learn more about terrain and communications near the lunar South Pole,” NASA announced in a blog post at the time. “Landing near Malapert A also will help mission planners understand how to communicate and send data  back to Earth from a location that is low on the lunar horizon.”

The reasons NASA wants to land near the lunar south pole with Artemis, and why the recent and successful Chandrayaan 3 mission of India, and the failed Russian Luna 25 mission, both targeted the lunar south pole are twofold: research and resources, according to Richard Carlson, a lunar geologist who retired from the Carnegie Institute for Science in 2021.  

“Both north and south polar regions have permanently shadowed craters where water has been detected from orbit,” he says. ”The real question is whether that water is a one micron surface coating of water on a few grains, or whether it’s a substantial abundance of water. Water of course being useful for a lot of things, from drinking water to turning it into hydrogen and oxygen, which is rocket fuel.”

The other motivation for going to the south pole is that it’s geologically very different from where the Apollo missions landed, according to Carlson. “They all landed on a pretty small portion of the moon on the Earth facing side of the moon on the nice flat mares, and that’s a rather unusual part of the moon geologically,” he says. ”If you think of studying the Earth this way, the Apollo lunar program would have basically landed on, let’s say, just North America, and that’s it.”

The lunar south polar region is much more geologically varied, with tall mountains and ridges, as well as rocks dug out from deep within the moon and scattered over the region by impact craters billions of years ago, Carlson says. But of course, such a landscape has its downsides for spacecraft coming from Earth. 

“You look at the pictures of the places that they selected [for Artemis III] and I wouldn’t want to land there. I mean, they’re really rough,” he says. “If we land on a rock, the spacecraft is going to fall over.” Sending small, uncrewed craft like NOVA-C to the moon’s south polar ahead of Artemis astronauts will test how difficult landing there really is. 

After all, as Witman Cobb notes, touching down anywhere on the moon is really hard. Before the failed Luna 25 landing on August 21, there were two failed commercial lunar landings. The Israeli company SpaceIL saw its Beresheet lander crash land in 2019, while the Hakuto-R M1 lander from Japanese company ispace crashed in April. 

”We haven’t seen a commercial company be successful in landing on the moon yet,” Whitman Cobb says. ”That’s really fascinating when you think about our capability of landing humans on the moon in the 1960s, and 1970s. That today, with all of the technology that we now have, this is still a really, really difficult thing to do.”

The post This private lander could be the first US machine on the moon this century appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best overall		Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ		SEE IT	A solid build and specs, paired with smartphone-guided sky recognition technology, makes this telescope perfect for starry-eyed explorers.
Best for viewing planets		Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope		SEE IT	This telescope punches above its weight class in size and power, making it an ideal scope for checking out neighboring orbs.
Best for kids		Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit		SEE IT	The entire package is designed to inspire kids during the window where they stare curiously out of the windows.

Telescopes under $500 can provide a passport to the universe without emptying your wallet. In their basic function, telescopes are our connection to the stars. For millennia, humankind has gazed skyward with wonder into the infinite reaches of outer space. And as humans are a curious bunch, our ancestors devised patterns in the movements of celestial bodies, gave them names, and built stories around them. The ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greeks indulged in star worship. But you don’t have to follow those lines to geek out over the vastness of the night sky. It’s just so cool. Fortunately, whatever your motivation for getting under the stars, there is an affordable option for you on our list of the best telescopes under $500.

• Best overall: Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ
• Best for viewing planets: Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope
• Best for astrophotography: William Optics Guide Star 61
• Best for kids: Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit
• Best budget: Popular Science by Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope

How we chose the best telescopes under $500

The under-$500 telescope market is crowded with worthy brands and models, so we looked at offerings in that price range from several well-known manufacturers in the space. After narrowing our focus based on personal experience, peer suggestions, critical reviews, and user impressions, we considered aperture, focal length, magnification, build quality, and value to select these five models.

The best telescopes under $500: Reviews & Recommendations

To get the best views of the stars, planets, and other phenomena of outer space, not just any old telescope will get the job done. There are levels of quality and a wide range of price points and features to sort through before you can be sure you’re making the right purchase for what you want out of your telescope, whether it’s multi-thousands, one of the best telescopes for under $1,000, or one of our top picks under $500.

Best overall: Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ

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Why it made the cut: Solid build and specs, paired with the remarkable StarSense Explorer app, make this telescope a perfect introduction to celestial observation.

Specs

• Focal length: 650mm
• Aperture: 130mm, f/5
• Magnification: 65x, 26x

Pros

• App aids in finding stars
• Easy to operate
• Steady altazimuth mount

Cons

• Eyepieces are both low power

Newbies to astronomy today can have a decidedly different experience than beginners who started stargazing before smartphones were a thing. Instead of carting out maps of the night sky to find constellations, the StarSense Explorer series from Celestron, including the DX 130AZ refractor, makes ample use of your device to bring you closer to the stars. 

With your smartphone resting in the telescope’s built-in dock, the StarSense Explorer app will find your location using the device’s GPS and serve up a detailed list of celestial objects viewable in real time. Looking for the Pleiades cluster? This app will tell you how far away it is from you and then lead you there with on-screen navigation. The app also includes descriptions of those objects, tips for observing them, and other useful info. 

The StarSense Explorer ships with an altazimuth mount equipped with slow-moving fine-tuning controls for both axes so you can find your target smoothly. And for those times you want to explore the night sky without tethering a smartphone, the scope’s red dot finder will help you zero in on your targets. The two eyepieces, measuring 25mm and 10mm, are powerful enough to snag stellar views of the planets but not quite enough to see the details a high-powered eyepiece would deliver.

Best for viewing planets: Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope

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Why it made the cut: This telescope punches above its weight class in size and power, making it an ideal scope for viewing planets.

Specs

• Focal length: 1300mm
• Aperture: 102mm, f/12.7
• Magnification: 130x, 52x

Pros

• Great for viewing planets and galaxies
• Sharp focus and contrast
• Powerful

Cons

• Not ideal for deep-space viewing

Let’s be real—most consumers in the market for a moderately priced telescope are in it to gain spectacular views of the planets and galaxies, but probably not much else. And it’s easy to see why. Nothing makes celestial bodies come alive like viewing them in real time, in all their colorful glory.

If that sounds like you, allow us to direct you to the Sky-Watcher Skymax 102, a refracting telescope specializing in crisp views of objects like planets and galaxies with ample contrast to make them pop against the dark night sky. The Skymax 102 is based on a Maksutov-Cassegrains design that uses both mirrors and lenses, resulting in a heavy-hitting scope in a very compact and portable unit. A generous 102mm aperture pulls in plenty of light to illuminate the details in objects, and the 1300mm focal length results in intense magnification.

Two included wide-angle eyepieces measuring 25mm and 10mm deliver 130x and 52x magnification, respectively. The package also includes a red-dot finder, V-rail for mounting, 1.25-inch diagonal viewing piece, and a case for transport and storage. Look no further if you’re looking for pure colors across a perfectly flat field in a take-anywhere form factor.

Best for astrophotography: William Optics GuideStar 61 

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Why it made the cut: Top-notch specs and an enviable lens setup make this telescope ideal for astrophotography.

Specs

• Focal length: 360mm
• Aperture: f/5.9
• Magnification: 7x (with 2-inch eyepiece)

Pros

• Well-appointed specs
• Sturdy, durable construction
• Carrying case included

Cons

• Flattener is an extra purchase

Sometimes you want to share more than descriptions of what you see in the night sky, and that’s where this guidescope comes in, helping you to focus on the best full-frame image. You can go as deep into the details (not to mention debt) as your line of credit will allow in your quest to capture the most impressive images of space. Luckily, though, this is a worthy option at a reasonable price. 

The Williams Optics Guide Star 61 telescope is a refracting-type scope with a 360mm focal length, f/5.9 aperture, and 61mm diameter well-suited to capturing sharp images of planets, moon, and bright deep-sky objects. The GS61 shares many specs with the now-discontinued Zenith Star 61, including focal length, aperture, and diameter, as well as the FPL53 ED doublet lens for high-contrast images.

The scope’s optical tube is about 13 inches long and weighs just 3 lbs.—great for traveling with the included carrying case—with a draw-tube (push-pull) focuser for coarse focusing and a rotating lens assembly for fine focus. Attaching a DSLR camera to the Guide Star 61 is a fairly easy job, but note that the flattener for making that connection is a separate purchase.

Best for kids: Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit

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Why it made the cut: The entire package is designed to get kids exploring space right out of the box.

Specs

• Focal length: 700mm
• Aperture: 60mm, f/11.7
• Magnification: 70x, 28x

Pros

• Capable of detailed views of moon and planets
• Lightweight construction
• Lots of handy accessories

Cons

• Not enough optical power to reach deep space

Parents have a limited window of time to recognize and develop their kids’ interests, so kindle a fascination with the stars through a star projector and then fan it with a telescope. That’s what makes the Orion Observer II such a great buy. Seeing the craters on the moon or the rings of Saturn for the first time can affirm your kids’ curiosity about space and expand their concept of the universe—and they can get those goosebumps while learning through this altazimuth refractor telescope.

The Orion Observer II is built to impressive specifications, with a 700mm focal length that provides 71x magnification for viewing the vivid details of planets in our solar system. True glass lenses (not plastic) are a bonus at this price point, and combined with either included Kellner eyepieces (25mm and 10mm), the telescope delivers crisp views of some of space’s most dazzling objects. 

Kids and parents can locate celestial objects with the included red-dot finder. The kit also includes MoonMap 260, a fold-out map that directs viewers to 260 lunar features, such as craters, valleys, ancient lava flows, mountain ranges, and every U.S. and Soviet lunar mission landing site. An included copy of Exploring the Cosmos: An Introduction to the Night Sky gives a solid background before they go stargazing. And with its aluminum tube and tripod, the entire rig is very portable, even for young ones, with a total weight of 4.3 pounds. Find more options for the best telescopes for kids here. (And/or go the opposite direction with a microscope for kids—a love of science begets more science.)

Best budget: Popular Science by Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Popular Science has teamed up with Celestron on a line of products. The decision to include this model in our recommendations was made by our reviewer independently of that relationship, but we do earn a commission on its sales—all of which helps power Popular Science.

Why it made the cut: With its feature set, portability, and nice price point, this scope is ready for some serious stargazing without a serious investment.

Specs

• Focal length: 400mm
• Aperture: 70mm, f/5.7
• Magnification: 168x

Pros

• Bluetooth remote shutter release
• Ships with two eyepieces
• Pack included

Cons

• Lacks optical power for deep space

Getting out of town, whether camping in the wilderness or driving in the countryside, is one of the attractions of stargazing. Out in the great wide open, far away from streetlights, the stars explode even to the naked eye. Add a handy telescope like the Popular Science Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope—our pick for the best portable telescope under $500—and you’ll see much farther into space. The fact that it’s as affordable as it is moveable just adds to the value.

The Popular Science Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope is a well-equipped refractor telescope built for backpacking and adventuring but without skimping on cool gadgets. Whether you’re gazing at celestial or terrestrial objects, the smartphone adapter will aid you in capturing images with your personal device, with an included Bluetooth remote shutter release.

Designed with portability and weight in mind, the entire package fits into an included pack with a total of 3.3 pounds—that includes the telescope, tripod stand, 20mm and 10mm eyepieces, 3x Barlow lens, and more. Download Celestron’s Starry Night software to help you get the most from your astronomy experience. 

Here are some other options from the Celestron and Popular Science collaboration:

• Popular Science StarSense Explorer DX 100AZ Smartphone App-Enabled Telescope
• Popular Science AstroMaster 80mm – Portable Refractor Telescope
• Popular Science StarSense Explorer DX 5” Smartphone App-Enabled Telescope 
• Popular Science by Celestron Outland X 12x50mm Monocular with Tripod, Smartphone Adapter, and Bluetooth remote

What to consider when buying the best telescopes under $500

Optics

There are three types of optics available on consumer telescopes, and they will help you achieve three different goals. Refractor telescopes use a series of glass lenses to bring celestial bodies like the moon and near planets into focus easily. Reflector telescopes—also known as Newtonian scopes for their inventor, Sir Isaac Newton—swap lenses for mirrors and allow stargazers to see deeper into space. Versatile compound telescopes combine these two methods in a smaller, more portable form factor, with results that land right in the middle of the pack. 

Aperture

Photographers will recognize this: The aperture controls the amount of light entering the telescope, like on a manual camera. Aperture is the diameter of the lens or the primary mirror, so a telescope with a large aperture draws more light than a small aperture, resulting in views into deeper space. F-ratio is the spec to watch here. Low f-ratios, such as f/4 or f/5, are usually best for wide-field observation and photography, while high f-ratios like f/15 can make deep-space nebulae and other bodies easier to see and capture. Midpoint f-ratios can get the job done for both.

Mounts

All the lens and mirror power in the world won’t mean much if you attach your telescope to a subpar mount. In general, the more lightweight and portable the tripod mount, the more movement you’ll likely get while gazing or photographing the stars. Investing in a stable mount will improve the viewing experience. The two common mount types are alt-az (altitude-azimuth) and equatorial. Altazimuth mounts operate in the same way as a camera tripod, allowing you to adjust both axes (left-right, up-down), while equatorial mounts also tilt to make it easier to follow celestial objects.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best telescopes under $500

• Best overall: Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ
• Best for viewing planets: Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope
• Best for astrophotography: William Optics Guide Star 61
• Best for kids: Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit
• Best budget: Popular Science by Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope

Although this group of sub-$500 scopes is fairly diverse, the Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ stands out in our best telescopes under $500 as the best place to start your interstellar journey due to its versatility and sky recognition app, which make for a fun evening of guided tours through the star patterns, no experience necessary. 

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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Jupiter and its dynamic atmosphere are ready for another closeup in a new image taken with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Using the telescope’s data, scientists have discovered a new and never-before-captured high-speed jet stream. The jet stream sits over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks, barrels at speeds twice as high as a Category 5 hurricane, and spans more than 3,000 miles. The findings were described in a study published October 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

[Related: This hot Jupiter exoplanet unexpectedly hangs out with a super-Earth.]

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and its atmosphere has some very visible features, including the infamous Great Red Spot, which is large enough to swallow the Earth. The planet is ever-changing and there are still mysteries in this gas giant that scientists are trying to unravel. According to NASA, the new discovery of the jet stream is helping them decipher how the layers of Jupiter’s famously turbulent atmosphere interact with each other. Now, JWST is helping scientists look further into the planet and see some of the lower and deeper layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere where gigantic storms and ammonia ice clouds reside. 

“This is something that totally surprised us,” study co-author Ricardo Hueso said in a statement.  “What we have always seen as blurred hazes in Jupiter’s atmosphere now appear as crisp features that we can track along with the planet’s fast rotation.” Hueso is an astrophysicist at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain.

The research team analyzed data from JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) that was obtained in July 2022. The Early Release Science program was designed to take images of Jupiter 10 hours apart (one Jupiter day) in four different filters. Each filter detected different types of changes in the small features located at various altitudes of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The resulting image shows Jupiter’s atmosphere in infrared light. The jet stream is located over the equator, or center, of the planet. There are multiple bright white spots and streaks that are likely very high-altitude cloud tops of condensed convective storms. Jupiter’s northern and southern poles are dotted by auroras that appear red and extend to the higher altitudes of the planet. 

“Even though various ground-based telescopes, spacecraft like NASA’s Juno and Cassini, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have observed the Jovian system’s changing weather patterns, Webb has already provided new findings on Jupiter’s rings, satellites, and its atmosphere,” study co-author and University of California, Berkeley astronomer Imke de Pater said in a statement.  

The newly discovered jet stream travels at roughly 320 miles per hour and is located close to 25 miles above the clouds, in Jupiter’s lower stratosphere. The team compared the winds observed by JWST at higher altitudes with the winds observed at deeper layers by the Hubble Space Telescope. This enabled them to measure how fast the winds change with altitude and generate wind shears.

[Related: Jupiter formed dinky little rings, and there’s a convincing explanation why.]

The team hopes to use additional observations of Jupiter to determine if the jet’s speed and altitude change over time. 

“Jupiter has a complicated but repeatable pattern of winds and temperatures in its equatorial stratosphere, high above the winds in the clouds and hazes measured at these wavelengths,” Leigh Fletcher, a study co-author and planetary scientists at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “If the strength of this new jet is connected to this oscillating stratospheric pattern, we might expect the jet to vary considerably over the next 2 to 4 years–it’ll be really exciting to test this theory in the years to come.”

The post Why a 3,000-mile-long jet stream on Jupiter surprised NASA scientists appeared first on Popular Science.

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The recent “ring of fire” solar eclipse looked stunning across portions of North and South America and we now have a new view of the stellar event. The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite created the image of the eclipse on Saturday October 14, depicting the mostly blue Earth against the darkness of space, with one large patch of the planet in the shadow of the moon. 

[Related: Why NASA will launch rockets to study the eclipse.]

Launched in 2015, DSCOVR is a joint NASA, NOAA, and U.S. Air Force satellite. It offers a unique perspective since it is close to 1 million miles away from Earth and sits in a gravitationally stable point between the Earth and the sun called Lagrange Point 1. DSCOVR’s primary job is to monitor the solar wind in an effort to improve space weather forecasts. 

A special device aboard the satellite called the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) imager took this view of the eclipse from space. According to NASA, the sensor gives scientists frequent views of the Earth. The moon’s shadow, or umbra, is falling across the southeastern coast of Texas, near Corpus Christi.

An annular solar eclipse occurs when the moon moves between Earth and the sun. The sun does not vanish completely in this kind of eclipse. Instead, the moon is positioned far enough from Earth to keep the bright edges of the sun visible. This is what causes the “ring of fire,” as if the moon has been outlined with bright paint.

While this year’s event could be seen to some degree across the continental United States, the 125-mile-wide path of annularity began in Oregon around 9:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time. The moon’s shadow then moved southeast across Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, before passing over Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. It continued south towards Mexico’s Yucatan, Peninsula, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Brazil

Unlike the colorful Aurora Borealis, eclipses are much easier to predict. Scientists can say when annular and solar eclipses will happen down to the second centuries in advance. The precise positions of the moon and the sun and how they shift over time is already known, so scientists can see how the moon’s shadow will fall onto Earth’s globe. Advances in computer technology have also enabled scientists to even chart eclipse paths down to a range of a few feet.

[Related: We can predict solar eclipses to the second. Here’s how.]

The next annular solar eclipse will be at least partially visible from South America on October 2,2024. One of these ‘ring of fire’ eclipses will not be visible in the United States until June 21, 2039. However, a total solar eclipse will darken the sky from Maine to Texas on April 8, 2024. There is still plenty of time to get eclipse glasses or make a pinhole camera to safely watch the next big celestial event. 

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A giant seismic event on Mars—a “marsquake”—that shook the Red Planet last year had an unexpected source, surprising astrophysicists from around the world. They suspected a meteorite strike. Instead, enormous tectonic forces within Mars’s crust, which caused vibrations that lasted for six hours, caused the quake and not a meteorite strike. The findings are described in a study published October 17 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

[Related: Two NASA missions combined forces to analyze a new kind of marsquake.]

NASA’s InSight lander recorded the magnitude 4.7 marsquake on May 4, 2022, which scientists named S1222a. Its seismic signal was similar to those of previous quakes that were caused by meteorite impacts, so the team began to search for an impact crater. 

In the new study, a team from the University of Oxford worked with the European Space Agency, Chinese National Space Agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation, and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency to scour more than 55 million square miles on Mars. Each group examined the data coming from its own satellites to look for a crater, dust cloud, or other signature of a meteorite impact. Because the search came up empty, they now believe that S1222a was caused by the release of huge tectonic forces from within the Martian interior. 

That doesn’t mean Mars’s tectonic plates are moving the way they do during an earthquake. The best available evidence suggests the planet is remaining still. “We still think that Mars doesn’t have any active plate tectonics today, so this event was likely caused by the release of stress within Mars’ crust,” study co-author and University of Oxford planetary geophysicist Benjamin Fernando said in a statement. “These stresses are the result of billions of years of evolution; including the cooling and shrinking of different parts of the planet at different rates.”

While Fernando explains that scientists do not fully understand why some parts of Mars seem to have more stress than others, these results can help them investigate further. “One day, this information may help us to understand where it would be safe for humans to live on Mars and where you might want to avoid!” he said.

S1222a was one of the last events recorded by NASA’s InSight mission before its end. The InSight lander launched in May 2018 and survived “seven minutes of terror” to touch down on Mars, where it studied the planet’s interior and seismology for years. The last of the spacecraft’s data was returned in December 2022, after increasing dust accumulation on its solar panels caused InSight to lose power. 

[Related: InSight says goodbye with what may be its last wistful image of Mars.]

In its four years and 19 days of service, InSight recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes. At least eight of these events were from a meteorite impact; the largest two formed craters that were almost 500 feet in diameter. If the S1222a event was formed by an impact, the team estimates that the crater to be would have been at least 984 feet in diameter.

The team is applying knowledge from this study to other work, including future missions to our moon and the tectonics that are similar to California’s famed San Andreas fault located on one of Saturn’s moons named Titan. They also hope that it encourages additional major international collaborations to study the Red Planet and beyond. 

“This has been a great opportunity for me to collaborate with the InSight team, as well as with individuals from other major missions dedicated to the study of Mars,” study co-author and New York University Abu Dhabi astrophysicist Dimitra Atri said in a statement. “This really is the golden age of Mars exploration!”

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Last Friday, NASA launched the Psyche spacecraft toward an asteroid of the same name. Psyche is blazing a trail as the first mission to a metal asteroid, and it’s also about to blaze a literal blue trail. The source of its bright wake—the probe’s remarkable propulsive system—will switch on within the first 100 days of the mission.

A mechanism known as a Hall thruster will propel the Psyche through space. This thruster glows blue as it ionizes xenon, a noble gas also used in headlights and plasma televisions, to move the spacecraft forward. This is the first time this tech, which has only been available for NASA spaceflight since 2015, has been used to travel beyond the moon—but what makes it so special, and why is Psyche using it?

When planning a space mission, engineers are focused on efficiency. Carrying chemical fuel along for the massive interplanetary journey would be like trying to drive around the entire world while having to keep all the gasoline you need in the trunk, because there are no rest stops along the way—it’s just not feasible. To get to its destination, Psyche would need thousands and thousands of pounds of chemical propellant.

[Related: How tiny spacecraft could ‘sail’ to Mars surprisingly quickly]

To get around this problem, engineers turned to electric thrusters. These come in many flavors: “There are many different types of electric thrusters, almost as many as there are different makers of cars,” explained NASA’s Psyche chief engineer Dan Goebel in a blog post. But space travel uses two kinds in particular, known as ion thrusters and Hall thrusters. “They can probably be considered the Tesla versions of space propulsion,” Goebel wrote. Rather than burning fuel, electric thrusters rip off the electrons from the propellant’s atoms in a process known as ionization. Then they chuck those ions out at some 80,000 miles per hour. This generates a higher specific impulse—which Goebel says is “equivalent to miles per gallon in your car,” but for spacecraft—than chemical fuels, enabling a thruster-powered spacecraft to go farther on less propellant.

Ion thrusters use high electric voltages to make a plasma (the fourth state of matter) and spew ions into space. NASA’s Dawn mission used these to get to dwarf planet Ceres, but they’re not the fastest—according to NASA, it would take the spacecraft four days to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour. Definitely not race car material! 

[Related: Want to learn about something in space? Crash into it.]

Hall thrusters, on the other hand, use a magnetic field to swirl electrons in a circle, producing a beam of ions. They don’t get quite as good “mileage” as ion thrusters, but they pack a bigger punch. The Psyche team picked this system because it allowed them to make a smaller, and therefore more cost-efficient, spacecraft. 

For the thrusters to work, the spacecraft needs power—which it gets from the sun, via solar panels—and something to ionize. For Psyche, that’s xenon gas. “Xenon is the propellant of choice because it’s inert (it doesn’t react with the rest of the spacecraft) and is easy to ionize,” explained Goebel. It also gives the thrusters their remarkable blue shine. Psyche carries about 150 gallons of the stuff, and gets about 10 million miles per gallon. 

Now that the mission has launched, the team will spend the next 100 days checking out all the spacecraft’s systems to ensure they’re ready for the journey. At some point in this period, those glimmering blue thrusters will turn on.

If Psyche proves to be a success, Hall thrusters will be likely to make an appearance on future space missions. They offer “the right mix of cost savings, efficiency, and power, and could play an important role in supporting future science missions to Mars and beyond,” said Steven Scott, program manager for the Psyche mission at the company Maxar, which built the thrusters, in a press release. Thanks to these propulsive devices, Psyche should reach its destination in the asteroid belt in just 3.5 years—and we can’t wait to see what lies at the end of its electric blue trail.

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On Saturday, October 14, you’ll be able to watch an annular “ring of fire” eclipse as the moon passes in front of the sun at a distance where it’s unable to cover all of Earth’s nearest star. But only an exclusive crowd will be able to witness the event in its fully blazing glory—unless you know where to look.

Although it may be too late to travel to one of the best locations to watch this year’s final solar eclipse, nearly everyone in all 50 US states will have a chance to catch at least a glimpse (sorry western Alaska and western Hawaii). The 125-mile-wide path of annularity, however, will stretch from Oregon to Texas and cross just nine states before continuing on to Central and South America. You’ll only be able to see the sun form a fiery halo around the moon along that route. If you’re outside its range, you can simply load up one of several official livestreams to see what you’re missing.

How to watch the October 14, 2023 eclipse in person

The path of annularity will enter the US in Oregon at 12:13 p.m. Eastern Time (9:13 a.m. Pacific Time) and leave Texas at 1:30 p.m. ET (12:03 p.m. Central Time). The “ring of fire,” will pass over 29 national park sites and dozens of other pieces of public land. Worldwide, about 33 million people will be able to see it firsthand, while everyone else will have to settle for a less dramatic experience.

No matter where you are, make sure you’re wearing protective glasses to avoid damaging your eyes if you plan to look directly at the eclipse, or make a pinhole camera to project the event onto a sheet of paper. And of course, weather conditions may make it hard or impossible to see anything, so take note of the forecast.

If you want to know exactly what to expect where you are, astronomy website Time and Date has an interactive map that will help you set your eclipse-viewing plans. Once you’ve opened the map, click the magnifying glass icon on the left to open the search menu. Type the name of any city or town into the search bar and select it from the list that populates underneath. A pin will appear on the map and a box full of eclipse data will show up under the search bar.

That data will show you how much of the moon will cover the sun at that location, when the eclipse will begin and end there, when maximum coverage will occur, and the weather forecast for that spot on the globe. If you click the play icon next to the duration, you’ll go to another page where you can watch a simulation of what the eclipse will look like at that exact spot.

How to watch the annular “ring of fire” eclipse online

Just because you aren’t part of the 0.41 percent of people in the world who will be able to physically bear witness to the celestial spectacle doesn’t mean you’re stuck with whatever’s happening in the sky above you. All you have to do is turn your eyes away from the wonders of the natural world and look at a screen—there are four livestreams we think will offer an exquisite show.

The Exploratorium’s livestreams

The San Francisco-based Exploratorium will be broadcasting two livestreams starting at 8 a.m. PT (11 a.m. ET), one from their telescopes in Valley of the Gods, Utah, and another from their telescopes in Ely, Nevada. They will also broadcast Spanish-language coverage of the event starting at 9 a.m. PT (12 p.m. ET) on YouTube.

According to Time and Date, annularity—the “ring of fire”— will last 4 minutes and 46 seconds at the Valley of the Gods. There are morning clouds in the forecast, though, so the view might be obscured, but this has the potential to be the most scenic livestream on our list. 

• Eclipse start: 9:10 a.m. Mountain Time (11:10 a.m. ET)
• “Ring of fire” start: 10:29 a.m. MT (12:29 p.m. ET)

In Ely, meanwhile, annularity will last for 3 minutes and 38 seconds. The weather is expected to be partly cloudy, so the eclipse could be hard to see.

• Eclipse start: 8:07 a.m. PT (11:07 a.m. ET)
• “Ring of fire” start: 9:24 a.m. PT (12:24 p.m. ET)

Time and Date’s livestream

Time and Date’s eclipse chasers will be broadcasting a livestream from Roswell, New Mexico. There, according to the website’s own interactive map, the annularity will last for 4 minutes and 41 seconds. It’s expected to be sunny there, so the view should be clear.

• Eclipse start: 9:15 a.m. MT (11:15 a.m. ET)
• “Ring of fire” start: 10:38 a.m. MT (12:38 p.m. ET)

NASA’s livestreams

NASA, of course, will also be livestreaming the eclipse, with feeds from Kerrville, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, starting at 11:30 a.m. ET. Annularity will last 4 minutes and 14 seconds at Kerrville, according to Time and Date.

• Eclipse start: 10:22 a.m. CT (11:22 a.m. ET)
• “Ring of fire” start: 11:50 a.m. CT (12:50 p.m. ET)

At Albuquerque, which is supposed to have sunny skies during the eclipse, annularity will last 4 minutes and 48 seconds.

• Eclipse start: 9:13 a.m. MT (11:13 a.m. ET)
• “Ring of fire” start: 10:34 a.m. MT (12:34 p.m. ET)

The space agency will also be broadcasting a live feed of three rocket launches that are part of its Atmospheric Perturbations around the Eclipse Path (APEP) mission to study how Earth’s ionosphere responds to a sudden drop in sunlight. You might want to cue that one up in a different browser window alongside the eclipse, or set up picture-in-picture on your device.

Whatever you do, just know that your scheduling calculations and technological machinations are probably way less complicated than all the math scientists do to predict the paths of future eclipses.

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The powdery material that NASA officials unveiled on Wednesday looked like asphalt or charcoal, but was easily worth more than its weight in diamonds. The fragments were from a world all their own—pieces of the asteroid Bennu, collected and returned to Earth for analysis by the OSIRIS-REx mission. The samples hold chemical clues to the formation of our solar system and the origin of life-supporting water on our planet.

The clay and minerals from the 4.5 billion-year-old rock had been preserved in space’s deep freeze since the dawn of the solar system. Last month, after a seven-year-long space mission, they parachuted to a desert in Utah, where they were whisked away by helicopter. 

And now those pristine materials sit in an airtight vessel in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where researchers like University of Arizona planetary scientist Dante Lauretta are getting their first chance to study the sample up close. 

“The electron microscopes were fired up and ready” by September 27, Lauretta said in a news conference. “And boy did we really nail it.” (Lauretta, the principal investigator, gave the mission its name, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.) The preliminary investigation of a tiny fraction of the sample revealed it is rich in water, carbon, and organic compounds.

Carbon is essential for all living things on Earth, forming chemical bonds with hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements necessary to build proteins and enzymes. “We’re looking at the kinds of minerals that may have played essential roles in the origin of life on Earth,” Lauretta said. 

The Bennu sample contained about 4.7 percent carbon, as measured by the Carnegie Institution for Science, according to Daniel Glavin, the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This is “the highest abundance of carbon” the Carnegie team has measured in an extraterrestrial sample, Glavin said. “There were scientists on the team going ‘Wow, oh my God!’ And when a scientist says that ‘Wow;’ that’s a big deal.”

[Related: This speedy space rock is the fastest asteroid in our solar system]

The Bennu sample is also flush with organic compounds, too, which glowed like tiny stars within the dark sample when exposed to a black light. “We picked the right asteroid—and not only that, we brought back the right sample,” Glavin said. “This stuff is an astrobiologist’s dream.”

Asteroids like Bennu were most likely responsible for all of Earth’s wet features—the water in oceans, lakes, rivers, and rain probably arrived when space rocks landed on our young planet some 4 billion years ago. Bennu has water-bearing clay with a fibrous structure, which according to Lauretta, was the key material that ferried H₂O to Earth.

Under magnification, the clay has a sinuous shape. “We call this serpentine because they look like serpents or snakes inside the sample, and they have water locked inside their crystal structure,” he said. “That is how we think water got to the Earth.”

This is only the start. The OSIRIS-REx science team, as they catalog the sample, have months of more detailed work ahead. After six months, they will publish the catalog; scientists from around the world will be able to propose studies using the materials—though more than half the sample will be kept in reserve for research to take place years or even decades in the future. 

[Related: NASA’s mission to a weird metal asteroid will blast off … soon]

They have more than a half-pound of material to work with. OSIRIS-REx recovered an estimated 250 grams of Bennu material, more than four times the 60 grams the mission had targeted. And as the science team began dissembling the sample return capsule at Johnson Space Center, they discovered what NASA is calling bonus material: bits of Bennu adhering to the collector head and lid of the sealed canister that brought the bulk of the sample home. 

”The first thing we noticed was that there was black dust and particles all around the outer edge,” Lauretta said. “Already this is scientific treasure.”

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The 2018 winner of PopSci’s annual Best of What’s New continues to impress. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is still edging closer to the sun than any other spacecraft has ever achieved, and it’s setting new speed records in the process. According to a recent status update from the space agency, the Parker Solar Probe has broken its own record (again) for the fastest thing ever made by human hands—at an astounding clip of 394,736 mph.

The newest milestone comes thanks to a previous gravity-assist flyby from Venus, and occurred on September 27 at the midway point of the probe’s 17th “solar encounter” that lasted until October 3. As ScienceAlert also noted on October 9, the Parker Solar Probe’s speed would hypothetically allow an airplane to circumnavigate Earth about 15 times per hour, or skip between New York City and Los Angeles in barely 20 seconds. Not that any passengers could survive such a journey, but it remains impressive.

[Related: The fastest human-made object vaporizes space dust on contact.]

The latest pass-by also set its newest record for proximity, at just 4.51 million miles from the sun’s plasma “surface.” In order not to vaporize from temperatures as high as nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the Parker Solar Probe is outfitted with a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite shield to protect its sensitive instruments. These tools are measuring and imaging the sun’s surface to further researchers’ understanding of solar winds’ origins and evolution, as well as helping to forecast environmental changes in space that could affect life back on Earth. Last month, for example, the probe raced through one of the most intense coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever observed. In doing so, the craft helped prove a two-decade-old theory that CMEs interact with interplanetary dust, which will improve experts’ abilities in space weather forecasting.

Despite its punishing journey, NASA reports the Parker Solar Probe remains in good health with “all systems operating normally.” Despite its numerous records, the probe is far from finished with its mission; there are still seven more solar pass-bys scheduled through 2024. At that point (well within Mercury’s orbit), the Parker Solar Probe will finally succumb to the sun’s extreme effects and vaporize into the solar winds— “sort of a poetic ending,” as one mission researcher told PopSci in 2021.

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On October 10, the European Space Agency (ESA) published some interim data from its nearly a decade-long Gaia mission. The data includes half a million new and faint stars in a massive cluster, over 380 possible cosmic lenses, and the position of over 150,000 asteroids within the solar system. 

[Related: See the stars from the Milky Way mapped as a dazzling rainbow.]

Launched in December 2013, Gaia is an astronomical observatory spacecraft with a mission to generate an accurate stellar census, thus mapping our galaxy and beyond. A more detailed picture of Earth’s place in the universe could help us better understand the diverse objects that make up the known universe. 

500,000 new stars and cluster cores

In 2022, Gaia’s third data release (DR3) contained data on over 1.8 billion stars, which built a rather complete view of the Milky Way and beyond. Even with all that data, there were still gaps in the ESA’s mapping. Gaia still hadn’t fully explored areas of the sky that were particularly densely packed with stars, overlooking the stars that shine a little less brightly than their neighbors. 

A key example of this is in globular clusters. These are some of the oldest objects in the known universe and are especially valuable for looking back into our cosmic past. However, their bright cores can sometimes overwhelm telescopes trying to get a clear view. 

Gaia selected Omega Centauri to help fill in the gaps in the stellar map. Omega Centauri is the largest globular cluster that can be seen from Earth and is a good example of one of the galaxy’s more ‘typical’ clusters. Gaia enabled a special mode to truly map a wider patch of sky that is surrounding the cluster’s core whenever the cluster came into view.

“In Omega Centauri, we discovered over half a million new stars Gaia hadn’t seen before – from just one cluster!” study co-author and astrophysicist from the Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) Katja Weingrill said in a statement. “We didn’t expect to ever use it for science, which makes this result even more exciting.”

The data also allowed the team to detect new stars that are too close together to be properly measured.

“With the new data we can study the cluster’s structure, how the constituent stars are distributed, how they’re moving, and more, creating a complete large-scale map of Omega Centauri. It’s using Gaia to its full potential—we’ve deployed this amazing cosmic tool at maximum power,” study co-author and AIP astrophysicist Alexey Mints said in a statement. 

The half million new stars showed that Omega Centauri is one of the most crowded regions that Gaia has explored so far. 

Currently, Gaia is exploring eight more regions using these same techniques. The scoop from those exploration will be included in Gaia Data Release 4. It should help astronomers truly understand what is happening within these cosmic building blocks and more accurately confirm the age of our galaxy.

Spotting gravitational lenses 

Gravitational lensing happens when the image of a faraway object in space becomes warped by a disturbing mass, such as a galaxy or star, sitting between the observer and the object. The mass in the middle acts like a giant lens that can magnify the brightness of light and cast multiple images of the faraway source onto the sky. 

[Related: Gravitational Lens Splits Supernova’s Light 4 Different Ways.]

“Gaia is a real lens-seeker,” study co-author and Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux astrophysicist Christine Ducourant  said in a statement. “Thanks to Gaia, we’ve found that some of the objects we see aren’t simply stars, even though they look like them.”

Some of the objects here are not ordinary stars, but distant quasars. These quasars are extremely bright, high-energy galaxies powered by black holes. To date, Gaia has found 381 candidates for lensed quasars. This is a “goldmine” for cosmologists, says Ducourant , and the largest set of candidates ever detected at once. 

Detecting lensed quasars is challenging, since a lensed system’s constituent images can clump together on the sky in misleading ways.

“The great thing about Gaia is that it looks everywhere, so we can find lenses without needing to know where to look,” study co-author and Université Côte d’Azur astrophysicist Laurent Galluccio said in a statement. “With this data release, Gaia is the first mission to achieve an all-sky survey of gravitational lenses at high resolution.”

Asteroids and The Milky Way

One of the studies in this data release reveals more about 156,823 asteroids, pinpointing their positions over nearly double the previous timespan. In the fourth Gaia data release, the team plans to complete the set and include comets, planetary satellites, and double the number of asteroids.

[Related: Smashed asteroid surrounded by a ‘cloud’ of boulders.]

Another study maps the disc of the Milky Way by tracing the weak signals seen in starlight, faint imprints of the gas and dust that floats between the stars. The Gaia team stacked six million spectra to study these signals and the data will hopefully allow scientists to finally narrow down the source of these signals.

“This data release further demonstrates Gaia’s broad and fundamental value—even on topics it wasn’t initially designed to address,” study co-author and ESA Project Scientist Timo Prusti said in a statement. “Although its key focus is as a star surveyor, Gaia is exploring everything from the rocky bodies of the solar system to multiply imaged quasars lying billions of light-years away, far beyond the edges of the Milky Way. The mission is providing a truly unique insight into the Universe and the objects within it, and we’re really making the most of its broad, all-sky perspective on the skies around us.”

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On October 14, the Western Hemisphere will witness an annular solar eclipse. The moon will be too small and far away in our view to totally block out the sun’s disc. Instead, it will blot out its center, leaving a ring at the edges. The best locations to view that ring of fire in the sky will be along a path that cuts through Oregon, Texas, Central America, Colombia, and finally northern Brazil. You might decide to visit Albuquerque, New Mexico, where you’ll experience exactly 4 minutes and 48 seconds of an annular eclipse.

And if you’re seeking a true total eclipse, you only have to wait another six months. On April 8, 2024, at 2:10 p.m. Eastern (12:10 p.m. local time), Mazatlan, Mexico will become the first city in North America to see most of the sun vanish in shadow. The path of totality then arcs through Dallas and Indianapolis into Montréal, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland in Canada. We know all of these precise details—and more—thanks to our knowledge of where the moon and sun are situated in the sky at any given moment.

In fact, we can predict and map eclipses farther into the future, even centuries from now. Because they know the precise positions of the moon and the sun and how they shift over time, scientists can project the moon’s shadow onto Earth’s globe. And with cutting-edge computers, it’s possible to chart eclipse paths down to a range of a few feet.

A solar eclipse needs three things. It results when the moon blocks the sun’s light from our vantage point on Earth. So to predict an eclipse, you must know where and how the sun, moon, and Earth move in relation to each other. This isn’t quite as elementary as it may seem, because the solar system isn’t flat. The moon’s orbit slants about 5 degrees in relation to the sun’s path, which astronomers call the ecliptic. While our satellite passes between Earth and the sun around once a month—which we call a new moon—the two rarely seem to cross paths.

Solar eclipses can only occur when the moon is at one of the two points where the moon’s orbit crosses the ecliptic, known as a node. If the moon is new at this crossing, the result is a solar eclipse.

In centuries past, trying to predict eclipses meant predicting minute details of finicky orbits. But as astronomers learned more about how celestial objects moved, they began tabulating what they call ephemerides: predictions of where the moon, sun, and planets will be in the sky. Ephemerides are still the key to eclipse prediction.

[Related: Make a classic pinhole camera to watch the upcoming solar eclipse]

“All you need is the ephemeris data…you don’t have to actually track the orbit,” says C. Alex Young, a solar physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

With ephemeris data, astronomers can pinpoint dates and times when the moon and sun cross paths. Once you know that date, mapping an eclipse is relatively straightforward. Ephemerides let scientists project the moon’s shadow onto Earth’s sphere; with 19th-century mathematics, they can calculate the shape and latitude of two features of that shadow, the umbra and penumbra. Then, by knowing what time it is and where Earth is angled in its rotation, it’s possible to determine the longitudes. Putting these together produces an eclipse map.

In the past, astronomers printed the ephemerides in almanacs, long tomes filled with page after page of coordinate tables. Just as all of astronomy has advanced into an era of computers, so have ephemerides. Scientists today mathematically model the paths of the moon, sun, planets, other moons, asteroids, and much more.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) regularly publishes a new compendium of celestial locations every few years. The most recent edition, 2021’s DE440, accounts for details like the moon’s core and mantle sloshing around and slowing its rotation. “Generally speaking, we know where the moon is from the Earth to about a meter, maybe a couple of meters,” says Ryan Park, an engineer at JPL. “We typically know where the sun is to maybe a couple hundred meters, maybe 300 meters.”

[Related: How to look at the eclipse without damaging your eyes]

Ephemerides serve other purposes, especially when planning spaceflight missions. But it’s largely due to more sophisticated ephemeris data that we can now reliably predict the motions of the moon for the centuries ahead. In fact, you can find detailed maps of solar eclipses nearly a millennium in the future. (If you’re lucky enough to be in Seattle on April 23, 2563 or in Amsterdam on September 7, 2974, prepare for total eclipse day.)

But these maps, like most eclipse maps, show the path of totality or annularity as a smooth line crossing Earth’s surface. That isn’t an accurate representation. “This was designed for pencil and paper calculation, so it makes a lot of simplifying assumptions that are just a tiny bit wrong,” says Ernie Wright, who makes eclipse maps for NASA Goddard, “for instance that the moon is a perfectly smooth sphere.”

Both the moon and Earth are jagged at the edge. Earth’s terrain can block some views of the sun, and the moon has its own patchwork of mountains and valleys. In fact, sunbeams passing through lunar vales create the Baily’s beads and “diamond ring” often seen at an eclipse’s edge. “We now have detailed terrain information of these mountains from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter,” Young says.

Wright has helped devise a new way of mapmaking that swaps the Victorian-age mathematics out for modern computer graphics. His method turns Earth’s surface into a map of pixels, each one with different latitude, longitude, and elevation, with the sun and moon in the sky above. Then, the method calculates which pixels see which parts of the moon block which parts of the sun. 

“You then make a whole sequence of maps at, say, one-second intervals for the duration of the eclipse,” Wright says. “You end up with a frame sequence that you can put together to make a movie of the shadow.” This new technique—only possible with modern computers and ultraprecise ephemerides—may allow us to make eclipse maps that clearly show whether you can see an eclipse from, say, your house. 

“I think that’s going to provide a whole new set of maps in the future that are going to be much more accurate,” says Young. “It’s going to be pretty exciting.”

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NASA’s Artemis III astronauts are apparently going to look incredibly fashionable walking the lunar surface. On October 4, the commercial aerospace company Axiom Space announced a new collaboration with luxury fashion house Prada to design spacesuits for the upcoming moon mission currently scheduled for 2025.

According to Wednesday’s reveal, Prada’s engineers will assist Axiom’s systems team in finalizing its Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit while “developing solutions for materials and design features to protect against the unique challenge of space and the lunar environment.” Axiom CEO Michael Suffredini cited Prada’s expertise in manufacturing techniques, innovative design, and raw materials will ensure “not only the comfort of astronauts on the lunar surface, but also the much-needed human factors considerations absent from legacy spacesuits.”

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’.]

NASA first unveiled an early prototype of the AxEMU spacesuit back in March, and drew particular attention to the fit accommodating “at least 90 percent of the US male and female population.” Given the Artemis mission has long promised to land the first woman on the lunar surface, such considerations are vital for astronauts’ safety and comfort.

In Wednesday’s announcement, Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada’s Group Marketing Director, cited the company’s decades of technological design and engineering experience. Although most well known for luxury fashion, Prada is also behind the cutting-edge Luna Rossa racing yacht fleet.

“We are honored to be a part of this historic mission with Axiom Space,” they said. “It is a true celebration of the power of human creativity and innovation to advance civilization.”

Despite Prada’s association with high fashion, the final AxEMU design will undoubtedly emphasize safety and function over runway appeal. After all, astronauts will need protection against both solar radiation and the near-vacuum of the lunar surface, as well as ample oxygen resources and space for HD cameras meant to transmit live feeds back to Earth. According to the BBC earlier this year, each suit will also incorporate both 3D-printing and laser cutters to ensure precise measurements tailored to each astronaut.

Although NASA’s first images of the AxEMU in March showcased a largely black-and-gray color palette with blue and orange accents, Axiom Space’s newest teases hint at an off-white cover layer more reminiscent of the classic Apollo moon mission suits. It might not be much now, but you can expect more detailed looks at the spacesuits in the coming months as the Artemis Program continues its journey back to the moon.

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NASA’s Psyche mission to a unique, metallic asteroid of the same name launched from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 10:20 a.m. Eastern on October 13 via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

It was, finally, a smooth exit from Earth for the probe. Psyche had been scheduled to blast off on October 5, the first day of a window that stretches through October 25. But NASA officials announced a delay on September 28, citing issues with the spacecraft’s maneuvering thrusters, which are used to point the vehicle where it needs to go. “The change allows the NASA team to complete verifications of the parameters used to control the Psyche spacecraft’s nitrogen cold gas thrusters,” NASA officials wrote in the announcement. 

That weeklong delay was small, though, compared to the mission’s earlier hold-ups. Psyche was first set to launch in October of 2022, but issues with the navigation software developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory forced the agency to delay the mission by a year. 

This mission should be well worth the wait. It could help uncover details about unusual asteroids and our planet. And the pioneering technology and operations it will demonstrate during its nearly six-year mission will influence the design of future spacecraft. 

Psyche to Psyche

The destination of Psyche (a spacecraft) is 16 Psyche (an asteroid)—an object about 140 miles in diameter in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It looks a bit like a cratered potato. 

Remote observations by astronomers have already determined 16 Psyche to be a highly metallic asteroid, rich in iron, and it is believed to be the exposed core of a small planet that never fully formed. Getting up close and personal with 16 Psyche could help scientists better understand Earth’s iron-rich core: It’s easier to send a spacecraft 280 million miles away to study an asteroid than to access Earth’s rocky center, 1,800 miles beneath our feet. Exploring the metallic object in space has implications for our planet’s geomagnetic field, which protects life from space radiation—that field is generated when our planet’s solid inner core spins within liquid metal surroundings. 

Thrusters and lasers

Psyche is one of NASA’s first spacecraft to use solar electric propulsion as its primary means of reaching an asteroid. Rather than relying on traditional chemical rockets, Psyche will use Hall effect thrusters, which use electrostatic fields to accelerate ions—charged particles—and expel them, generating thrust. (These are different machines from the nitrogen thrusters that caused the launch delay.) Such thrusters produce very low thrust—far less than a pound—but do so very efficiently, allowing Psyche to preserve its xenon gas propellant and build up speed over the vast distances it will cover. 

The electric thrusters will use solar power—though the sunlight it absorbs will shrink as Psyche approaches its destination. Still, it’s well prepared. While the spacecraft itself is the size of a large car, its twin solar panels are about the size of tennis courts. They’ll produce 21 kilowatts of energy near Earth and about two kilowatts when at asteroid Psyche. 

[Related on PopSci+: In its visit to Psyche, NASA hopes to glimpse the center of the Earth]

In addition to solar electric propulsion, Psyche will also test a new form of Earth-to-spacecraft transmission system called Deep Space Optical Communication. Deep Space Optical Communication encodes data in infrared lasers, rather than radio waves, and can potentially carry much more information to and from the Psyche spacecraft than can traditional methods. The laser communications are just a demonstration—Psyche will still stay in touch with Earth, and vice versa, using NASA’s radio-based Deep Space Network. 

Research on a metal world

When Psyche arrives at the asteroid 16 Psyche in 2029, it will set to work studying the iron asteroid’s magnetic properties. With the aid of an imager and two kinds of spectrometer, the probe will also use patterns of light absorption to determine what elements and compounds exist on this metal potato. 

But Psyche won’t simply scratch the surface. It will also study the asteroid’s internal structure by measuring the space rock’s gravity field. There’s no specific instrument to pull this off. Instead, scientists on the ground will use radio signals from Psyche to precisely measure the spacecraft’s orbit around the asteroid, measuring any slight perturbations that signal variations in the gravitational field, which in turn can tell scientists about the internal density of 16 Psyche. 

[Related: Smashed asteroid surrounded by a ‘cloud’ of boulders]

And while the Psyche mission has the unique potential to shed light on how planetary bodies are formed and function, it’s also a part of an expanding portfolio of NASA asteroid missions. NASA’s Lucy mission, which launched in 201, is currently on its way to fly by multiple asteroids near Jupiter between 2025 and 2033. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, meanwhile, just dropped pieces of the asteroid Bennu back on Earth on September 24. It’snow headed to visit the asteroid Apophis; the mission has been renamed to OSIRIS-APEX, or Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-APophis EXplorer.

Such missions have multiple goals: they help scientists better understand the formation of the early solar system and how planets like Earth, and they can also tell us about the makeup of asteroids that could one day pose a threat—and how to deflect them if necessary. 

Apophis, for instance, was at one time considered a very hazardous asteroid; though it won’t hit Earth, it will pass within 20,000 miles of our planet on April 13, 2029. 

The people of Earth don’t have to worry about any danger from 16 Psyche, though, as it will continue along in its orbit between Mars and Jupiter indefinitely, hundreds of millions of miles from our planet. 

That is, unless humans make changes to the metallic space rock. Mining asteroids is an old idea. But, as spacecraft improve, the estimated $10 quintillion worth of metal ore on Psyche and asteroids like it might begin to look pretty appetizing to companies that want to capitalize on resources in the heavens.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on October 2.

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Chances are you have heard about this one already. The moon will pass between Earth and the sun and cast a huge shadow on our planet in the process. With the right protective eyewear, it will be a sight to behold—the phenomenon produces a “ring of fire” as if the moon is outlined with flames.  

Astronomers have calculated precisely when the best views will be where you are, so consult this list when scheduling an outing to safely check out the sky. The duration will range from little more than one minute to almost five, depending where you are located in its path. This eclipse has a 125-mile-wide path of annularity that will begin in Oregon at 12:13 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. It will leave the US at about 1:03 p.m. EDT and head southeastward toward Central and South America. 

October 21 and 22 – Orionids Meteor Shower Predicted Peak

The annual Orionid meteor shower is expected to peak on October 22 in a moonless sky, but the wee hours of the morning of October 21 could also yield some meteors. According to EarthSky, under a dark sky with no moon, the Orionids can produce a maximum of about 10 to 20 meteors per hour. On October 22, the moon will be setting around midnight, which means its light shouldn’t interfere with the shower. The best time to try and spot the shower is just after midnight into the early morning hours 

October 23 – Venus at Greatest Elongation

In August, the planet Venus moved between the Earth and the sun and rose in the east. Venus will be farthest from the sunrise on October 23 and should remain visible in the morning sky until May 2024, where it will be a very bright “morning star.” 

During this month’s greatest elongation, Venus will appear higher in the sky from the Northern Hemisphere than from the Southern Hemisphere. This is because of the steep angle of the path of the sun, moon, and planets in the mornings during the autumn months. 

October 28- Full Hunter’s Moon and Partial Lunar Eclipse

The same skygazing rules that apply to pretty much all space-watching activities are key this month: Go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour.

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This article was originally published on Undark.

IN JANUARY 2023, Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier, a 74,000-square-mile mass of frozen water in West Antarctica. She arrived with an international research team to study the glacier’s geology and ice fabric, and how its ice melt might contribute to sea level rise. But while near Earth’s southernmost point, Sweeney kept thinking about the moon.

“It felt every bit of what I think it will feel like being a space explorer,” said Sweeney, a former Air Force officer who’s now working on a doctorate in lunar geology at the University of Texas at El Paso. “You have all of these resources, and you get to be the one to go out and do the exploring and do the science. And that was really spectacular.”

That similarity is why space scientists study the physiology and psychology of people living in Antarctic and other remote outposts: For around 25 years, people have played out what existence might be like on, or en route to, another world. Polar explorers are, in a way, analogous to astronauts who land on alien planets. And while Sweeney wasn’t technically on an “analog astronaut” mission — her primary objective being the geological exploration of Earth — her days played out much the same as a space explorer’s might.

For 16 days, Sweeney and her colleagues lived in tents on the ice, spending half their time trapped inside as storms blew snow against their tents. When the weather permitted, Sweeney snowmobiled to and from seismometer sites, once getting caught in a whiteout that, she said, felt like zooming inside a ping-pong ball.

On the glacier, Sweeney was always cold, sometimes bored, often frustrated. But she was also alive, elated. And she felt a form of focus that eluded her on her home continent. “I had three objectives: to be a good crewmate, to do good science, and to stay alive,” she said. “That’s all I had to do.”

None of that was easy, of course. But it may have been easier than landing back on the earth of El Paso. “My mission ended, and it’s over,” she said. “And how do I process through all these things that I’m feeling?”

Then, in May, she attended the 2023 Analog Astronaut Conference, a gathering of people who simulate long-term space travel from the relative safety and comfort of Earth. Sweeney had learned about the event when she visited an analog facility in the country of Jordan. There, she’d met one of the conference’s founders, Jas Purewal, who invited her to the gathering.

The meeting was held, appropriately, at Biosphere 2, a glass-paneled, self-contained habitat in the Arizona desert that resembles a 1980s sci-fi vision of a space settlement — one of the first facilities built, in part, to understand whether humans could create a habitable environment on a hostile planet.

A speaker at the conference had spent eight months locked inside a simulated space habitat in Moscow, Russia, and she talked about how the post-mission period had been hard for her. The psychological toll of reintegration became a chattering theme throughout the whole meeting. Sweeney, it turned out, wasn’t alone.

Across the world, around 20 analog space facilities host people who volunteer to be study subjects, isolating themselves for weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, or even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. These places are intended to mimic how people might fare on Mars or the moon, or on long-term orbital stations. Such research, scientists say, can help test out medical and software tools, enhance indoor agriculture, and address the difficulties analog astronauts face, including, like Sweeney’s, those that come when their “missions” are over.

Lately, a community of researchers has started to make the field more formalized: laying out standards so that results are comparable; gathering research papers into a single database so investigators can build on previous work; and bringing scientists, participants, and facility directors together to share results and insights.

With that cohesion, a formerly quiet area of research is enhancing its reputation and looking to gain more credibility with space agencies. “I think the analogs are underestimated,” said Jenni Hesterman, a retired Air Force officer who is helping spearhead this formalization. “A lot of people think it’s just space camp.”

ANALOG ASTRONAUT FACILITIES emerged as a way to test drive space missions without the price tag of actually going to space. Scientists, for example, want to make sure tools work properly and so analog astronauts will test out equipment ranging from spacesuits to extreme-environment medical equipment.

Researchers are also interested in how astronauts fare in isolation, and so they will sometimes track characteristics like microbiome changes, stress levels, and immune responses by taking samples of spit, skin, blood, urine, and fecal matter. Analog missions “can give us insights about how a person would react or what kind of team — what kind of mix of people — can react to some challenges,” said Francesco Pagnini, a psychology professor at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Italy, who has researched human behavior and performance in collaboration with the European and Italian space agencies.

Some facilities are run by space agencies, like NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog, or HERA, which is located inside NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The center also houses a 3D-printed habitat called Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, where crews will simulate a year-long mission to Mars. The structure looks like an artificial intelligence created a cosmic living space using IKEA as its source material.

“My mission ended, and it’s over,” Sweeney said. “And how do I process through all these things that I’m feeling?”

Most analog spots, though, are run by private organizations and take research proposals from space agencies, university researchers, and sometimes laypeople with projects that the facilities select through an application process.

Such work has been going on for decades: NASA’s first official analog mission took place in 1997, in Death Valley, when four people spent a week pretending to be Martian geologists. In 2000, the nonprofit Mars Society, a space-exploration advocacy and research organization, built the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station in Nunavut, Canada, and soon after constructed the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. (Both facilities have been used by NASA researchers, too.) But the practice was in place long before those projects, even if the terminology and permanent facilities were not: In the Apollo era, astronauts used to try out their rovers and space walks, along with scientific techniques, in Arizona and Hawaii.

Many facilities, according to Ronita Cromwell, formerly the lead scientist of NASA’s Flight Analogs Project, are located in two types of places: extreme environments or controlled ones. The former include Antarctic or Arctic research stations, which tend to be used to study topics like sleep patterns and team dynamics. The latter — sealed, simulated habitats — are primarily useful for human behavior research, like learning how cognitive ability changes over the course of a mission, or testing out equipment, like software that helps astronauts make decisions without communicating to mission control. That independence becomes necessary as crews travel farther from Earth, because the communication delays increase with distance.

During her work on NASA’s mission simulations, Cromwell saw their value. “What excited me is that we were able to create sort of spaceflight situations on the ground, to study spaceflight changes in the human body,” Cromwell said, “whether they be, you know, psychological, cognitive changes, or physiological changes.”

Psychiatry researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, recently found that members of a crew at HERA performed better on cognition tasks — like clicking on squares that randomly appear on a screen and memorizing three-dimensional objects — as their mission went on. Another recent HERA study, led by scientists at Northwestern and DePaul universities, found that over time, teams got better at executing physical tasks together, but worsened when they tried to work together creatively and intellectually, like brainstorming as many uses as possible for a given object. Those brain and behavioral changes could teach scientists about tight teams deployed in other remote, tedious, stressful situations. “I think space psychology can also speak a lot about everyday life,” said Pagnini.

On the physical side, an international team that included a NASA scientist recently used the Mars Desert Research Station to test whether analog astronauts could be quickly taught how to fix broken bones using a device that could work on Mars — or an earthly site far from medical facilities. Investigations into self-contained, sustainable living reveal how low-resource existence could work on Earth, too. For example, another crew, led by Griffith University medical researchers, performed an experiment extracting water from minerals in case of emergency.

“I think the analogs are underestimated,” said Hesterman. “A lot of people think it’s just space camp.”

While scientific research that actually takes place in space usually gets the spotlight, the ground-testing of all systems, including human ones, is necessary, if not always glamorous or publicly lauded. “I felt like I was in charge of a deep, dark secret,” said Cromwell, jokingly, of her work on the NASA analog program.

In fact, even people who work in adjacent fields sometimes haven’t heard of the field. Purewal, an astrophysicist, only learned about analog space research in 2020. With Covid-19 restrictions in place, though, most facilities had halted new missions. “If I can’t go to an analog, maybe I can bring the analog to me,” Purewal thought.

Amid the drapey willow branches and manicured hedges of her parents’ backyard in Warwick, England, she constructed a geodesic dome out of broomstick handles and tent-like materials. Purewal sequestered inside for a week, leaving only to use the bathroom — and then only while wearing a simulated spacesuit. She communicated with those outside her dome on a synthesized 20-minute delay and ate freeze-dried foods, which she came to hate, and insect protein from mealworms and locusts, which she came to like more than she anticipated.

While Purewal admits her personal analog was “low-fidelity,” it offered a test drive for more rigorous research. By 2021, Purewal had, with SpaceX civilian astronaut Sian Proctor, co-founded the Analog Astronaut Conference that Sweeney attended, along with an associated online community of more than 1,000 people. She also participated in an analog mission in someone else’s backyard — one surrounded by Utah State Trust Lands — in November 2022. Their endeavor was sponsored by the Mars Society and involved research on mental health, geologic research tools, and sustainable food supplies, all of which would be necessary if they were going to Mars.

BUT THEY WEREN’T HEADED to Mars, they were headed to Utah. About five minutes from the small town of Hanksville — home to “Hollow Mountain,” a gas station convenience store dug out of a rock formation — sits the turnoff to the Mars Desert Research Station. Operated by the Mars Society, the facility is 3.4 miles down a dirt track called N Cow Dung Road. The landscape looks otherworldly: mushroom-shaped rock formations; sandy, granular ground; and eroded hills of red rock.

The station sits in a flat spot surrounded by those hills, with a cylindrical living space two stories tall but just 26 feet in diameter. The habitat links out via above-ground “tunnels” to a greenhouse and a geodesic dome that resembles Purewal’s initial backyard creation, and houses a control center and lab.

In November 2022, Purewal brought a team there for two weeks, with Hesterman as commander. In the habitat, an astrobiology student tried to grow edible mushrooms in the crew’s food waste. Another team member wanted to see if they could make yogurt from powdered milk and bacteria. Purewal, meanwhile, was experimenting with an AI companion robot called PARO. Shaped like a baby harp seal, PARO is typically used to relieve stress in medical situations. The crew members interacted with PARO and wore bio-monitoring straps that measured things like heart rate as they did so.

Every day on “Mars” had a set of missions: spacewalks, splinting a broken ankle on a virtual reality headset, a tabletop emergency exercise about evacuating for noxious fumes, a fake pass-out to test emergency response protocol. Their personal protocols were working well, but Purewal and Hesterman, locked in together, had begun to fret about the quality and consistency of the analog enterprise more broadly. They started to think about creating standards: for the research, for the facilities themselves. At their Utah-Mars station, for instance, a pipe broke under their sink. There were electrical issues. A propane monitor was malfunctioning.

After their mission ended, they spoke with others, and heard about issues such as expired fire extinguishers, or the lack of safety training for participants who would be using specialized technologies and life support systems. They consulted Emily Apollonio, a former aircraft accident investigator. In 2022, she traveled to Hawaii to live at HI-SEAS, a 1,200-square-foot analog station located 8,200 feet above sea level on the Mauna Loa volcano. Apollonio thought HI-SEAS had avoidable problems. For one, the bathroom had only a composting toilet, which the mission crew weren’t allowed to pee in, and a urinal, which the women had to use, too.

With a draft version released this June, they hope to improve conditions for participants — ensuring, for instance, that facilities adhere to building codes and provide adequate medical support. They also want to encourage analog participants to follow research best practices to ensure rigorous outputs. The standards suggest, for instance, that each mission have its research plan pre-validated by the principal investigator and habitat director, a timeline for research completion, and an Institutional Review Board approval in place for human experiments. While projects with federal or institutional grant funding go through these steps anyway, the formality isn’t uniform across the board.

While some analogs already have rigorous protocols in place to protect participants, the safety issues and inclusivity gaps she heard about from colleagues helped inspire Apollonio to start a training and consulting company called Interstellar Performance Labs to help prepare would-be analog astronauts before their missions. She also started to work with Purewal, Hesterman, and others on a document called “International Guidelines and Standards for Space Analogs.”

The standards also detail the creation of a research database, putting all the writeups (peer-reviewed and otherwise) of analog projects in one place. That way, people aren’t duplicating efforts — as the mushroom-grower, it turns out, was — unless they mean to test the replicability of results. They can also better link their studies to space agencies’ established needs to be more directly helpful and relevant to the real world.

“I didn’t know where to look, I didn’t know where to go,” Apollonio said. “I couldn’t hear my thoughts.”

As part of this centralization effort, Purewal, Apollonio, Hesterman, and colleagues are also putting together what they call the World’s Biggest Analog: a simultaneous, month-long mission involving at least 10 isolated bases across the world, which together will simulate a large, cooperative future presence in space.

So far, though, attempts to give the community cohesion and coherency have yet to fully address the aspect of analog life that gives many participants trouble: the end of their mission. “Being in an analog mission was less difficult than coming out an analog mission,” said Apollonio, of her own experience.

Shortly after emerging from HI-SEAS, she walked around the streets of Waikiki with her husband. The lights, the noise — everything was too much. “I didn’t know where to look, I didn’t know where to go,” she said. “I couldn’t hear my thoughts.” After they chose a restaurant for dinner, and the server handed her a menu, she froze. “I have to choose my own food,” she realized. It was overwhelming, and that feeling didn’t abate.

Meanwhile, few other people understood the experience, said Hesterman. “You come home and you’re all excited, like, you want to tell everybody about it,” she continued. “You tell everybody about it once, and then they’re just done. On back to paying the bills and cutting the grass and stuff. You still want to talk about it.”

Purewal missed the team and the sense of shared purpose, and started to seek it outside the simulation. “I need to find this same feeling in my day-to-day life,” she said. “We all kind of need our crew.”

RESEARCH ON THE post-mission experience is scant, said Pagnini. In March 2023, he co-authored a review paper, commissioned by the European Space Agency, which aimed to lay out the state of research on human behavior and performance in space, including gaps in the science. Studying how astronauts react and cope “post-mission,” his research found, has been particularly neglected. The same is true of returning from analog space.

Pagnini says the research isn’t just relevant to analog or actual astronauts. Life in space has similarities to life on Earth — including in its difficulties. Italy’s heavily restrictive and prolonged Covid-19 lockdown, for instance, resembled going away on a mission. “When we got out of the lockdown phase, getting in touch with other people was kind of strange,” he said. Much of living a regular life on Earth was strange.

The strangeness also extends to other experiences, like military deployments and the subsequent return to domestic life. “The expectation is kind of that families will live happily ever after” once they’re reunited, said Leanne Knobloch, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois, who performed a large reintegration study on military couples. “So that’s why reintegration has sometimes been overlooked, but more and more researchers are starting to recognize that it is a challenging period, and it’s not the storybook ending that people make it out to be.”

She noted that her research, like that on the psychology of space travel and the post-mission experience, can apply to other arenas. “Any kind of situation where partners are separated and they come together, this research can help understand that puzzle piece more broadly,” she said.

Knobloch’s work includes suggestions for easing the transition, such as preparing people for the issues they’re likely to experience. “If you’re ready and expect that you might experience some of these problems, it won’t be so stressful,” she said. “Because you’ll recognize that they’re normal.”

Apollonio’s Interstellar Performance Labs, for one, is already planning to include education on “aftercare,” educating people about what she calls the “deorbiting effect” of returning to regular life.

WHEN THE DAY finally came for Sweeney to depart Thwaites Glacier, the aircraft seemed to materialize right out of the sky, as though the remote outpost had transformed into a busy airport. As she was leaving, she looked down at the camp where half her team remained. “You could just see how small our little footprint was,” she said. A speck in the middle of endless white space.

Since she landed in North America, Sweeney has savored time with her family. But the adjustment hasn’t been easy. “Each day that ticks by of being back, I started feeling pulled in different directions,” she said. With numerous projects ongoing — mentoring, speaking, doing her doctoral research — she felt her sense of self splintering. In Antarctica, she had been a smooth, singular whole.

But at the Analog Astronaut Conference in May, hearing about others’ similar readjustment difficulties, Sweeney felt some sense of normalcy. Having a community of support could help with post-mission struggles. Further research — aided by the new database and standardization measures — could help uncover best coping strategies, along with the keys to successful crew dynamics, stress creators and mitigators, and tools and designs that make the practicalities of a mission easier. Maybe someone will look at the database, see this scientific gap, and try to fill it.

Such research might resonate with Sweeney and others having trouble readjusting to their daily lives. “We have to get back to work, we have to go see our families, we want to pick up the projects we were doing before,” she said. “But also, we need to make space for the magnitude of the experience that we just had. And to be able to decompress from that.”

UPDATE: A previous version of this piece incorrectly stated that Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier in November 2022. She arrived to McMurdo Station in Antarctica in November 2022, but did not land on Thwaites Glacier until January 2023. The piece also described a scene in which Sweeney left her camp on Thwaites Glacier, and incorrectly stated that she was departing Antarctica at that time. She remained in Antarctica for several weeks after she left the glacier. Lastly, a previous version stated that storms dumped feet of snow on the landscape. To clarify that the snow was not fresh snowfall, the piece has been updated to reflect that snow blew against the tents.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Solar sails that leverage the sun’s photonic rays for “wind” are no longer the stuff of science fiction—in fact, the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 practical demonstration was deemed a Grand Award Winner for PopSci’s Best of What’s New in 2019. And while countless projects continue to explore what solar sails could hold for the future of space travel, a new study demonstrates just how promising the technology could be for excursions to Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor, and beyond.

According to a paper recently submitted to the journal Acta Astronautica, detailed computer simulations show tiny, incredibly lightweight solar sails made with aerographite could travel to Mars in just 26 days—compare that to conventional rocketry time estimates of between 7-to-9 months. Meanwhile, a journey to the heliopause (the demarcation line for interstellar space where the sun’s magnetic forces cease to influence objects) could take between 4.2 and 5.3 years. For comparison, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes took a respective 35 and 41 years to reach the same boundary.

[Related: This novel solar sail could make it easier for NASA to stare into the sun.]

The key to such speedy trips is the 1 kg solar sails’ 720g of aerographite—an ultra-lightweight material with four times less density than most solar sail designs’ Mylar components. The major caveat to these simulations is that they involved an extremely miniscule payload weight, something that will most often not be the case for major interplanetary and interstellar journeys.

“Solar sail propulsion has the potential for rapid delivery of small payloads (sub-kilogram) throughout the solar system,” René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and study co-author, explained to Universe Today earlier this month. “Compared to conventional chemical propulsion, which can bring hundreds of tons of payload to low-Earth orbit and deliver a large fraction of that to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, this sounds ridiculously small. But the key value of solar sail technology is speed.”

Another issue still that still needs addressing is deceleration methods needed upon actually reaching a destination. Although aerocapture—using a planet’s atmosphere to reduce velocity—is a possible option, researchers concede more investigation will be needed to determine the best, most efficient way to actually stop at a solar sail-equipped spacecraft’s intended endpoint. Regardless, the study only adds even more wind in the sails (so to speak) for the impressive interstellar travel method.

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The dark side of the moon, despite its name, is a perfect vantage point for observing the universe. On Earth, radio signals from the furthest depths of space are obscured by the atmosphere, alongside humanity’s own electronic chatter, but the lunar far side has none of these issues. Because of this, establishing an observation point there could allow for unimpeded views of some of cosmic history’s earliest moments—particularly a 400 million year stretch known as the universe’s Dark Ages when early plasma cooled enough to begin forming the  protons and electrons that eventually made hydrogen.

After years of development and testing, just such an observation station could come online as soon as 2026, in part thanks to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

[Related: Watch a rocket engine ignite in ultra-slow motion.]

The team is currently working alongside NASA, the US Department of Energy, and the University of Minnesota on a pathfinder project called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night). The radio telescope is on track to launch atop Blue Ghost, private space company Firefly Aerospace’s lunar lander, as part of the company’s second moon excursion. Once in position, Blue Ghost will detach from Firefly’s Elytra space vehicle, then travel down to the furthest site ever reached on the moon’s dark side. 

“If you’re on the far side of the moon, you have a pristine, radio-quiet environment from which you can try to detect this signal from the Dark Ages,” Kaja Rotermund, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab, said in a September 26 project update. “LuSEE-Night is a mission showing whether we can make these kinds of observations from a location that we’ve never been in, and also for a frequency range that we’ve never been able to observe.”

More specifically, LuSEE-Night will be equipped with specialized antennae designed by the Berkeley Lab team to listen between 0.5 and 50 megahertz. To accomplish this, both the antennae and its Blue Ghost transport will need to be able to withstand the extreme temperatures experienced on the moon’s far side, which can span between -280 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of its shielded lunar location, however, LuSEE-Night will also need to beam its findings up to an orbiting satellite that will then transfer the information back to Earth.

“The engineering to land a scientific instrument on the far side of the moon alone is a huge accomplishment,” explained Berkeley Lab’s antenna project lead, Aritoki Suzuki, in the recent update. “If we can demonstrate that this is possible—that we can get there, deploy, and survive the night—that can open up the field for the community and future experiments.”

If successful, LuSEE-Night could provide data from the little known Dark Ages, which breaks up other observable eras such as some of the universe’s earliest moments, as well as more recent moments after stars began to form.

According to Berkeley Lab, the team recently completed a successful technical review, and is currently working on constructing the flight model meant for the moon. Once landed, LuSEE-Night will peer out into the Dark Age vastness for about 18 months beginning in 2026. 

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Every year or two, the solar system lines up just right, with the moon casting a shadow over part of Earth’s surface and blocking out the sun—a solar eclipse. In 2017, people across the United States flocked to see the “Great American Total Eclipse”, which was the first one visible in the continental states since 1979. Now, eclipse chasers and citizen scientists across North America are getting ready for the next big events: an annular eclipse on October 14, 2023 and a total eclipse on April 8, 2024. This will be the last eclipse visible in the continental US until August 2045, more than two decades away. 

People love eclipses for the novelty—how cool it is to see the sun disappear in the day. But these phenomena are both showstoppers and opportunities: a group of radio astronomers and citizen scientists called Radio JOVE is aiming to capitalize on the upcoming eclipses for science, part of NASA’s “Helio Big Year.”

Radio JOVE “initially started as an education and outreach project to help students, teachers, and the general public get involved in science,” explains project co-founder Chuck Higgins, an astronomer at Middle Tennessee State University. The project has been running since the late 1990s, when it began at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We now focus on science and try to inspire people to become citizen scientists.” 

As its name suggests, Radio JOVE originally focused on the Jovian planet, Jupiter. “Serendipitously, it turns out that the same radio wavelengths we use for observing Jupiter are also useful for observing the sun,” says Thomas Ashcraft, a citizen scientist from New Mexico who has been observing with Radio JOVE since 2001. After the 2017 Great American Eclipse, its members became more involved with heliophysics, the study of the sun.

[Related: Total eclipses aren’t that rare—and you’ve probably missed a bunch of them]

As energy spews from the sun and travels to Earth, it interacts with our planet’s atmosphere; in particular, the sun’s rays create a layer of ionized particles, known as the ionosphere. Any radio waves coming from the sun have to pass through these particles above us. Communication technology takes advantage of this layer, bouncing radio waves off it to travel long distances.

The ionosphere’s plasma changes a lot between day and night. When the sun shines on this layer, particles break into ions. When the sun is absent, those ions calm down. During eclipses, when most of the sun’s light is blocked, similar changes happen in the short term change. By measuring those fluctuations precisely with a fleet of amateur observers, Radio JOVE hopes to improve our understanding of the ionosphere.

To do so, Radio JOVE is equipping citizen scientists across the country with small radio receivers and training them to observe radio waves from Earth’s ionosphere. The project offers some-assembly-required starter kits for around $200, and a whole team of experts and experienced observers are around to support new volunteers. 

[Related: The best US parks for eclipse chasers to see October’s annularity]

Right now, they’re prepping participants for a full day of observing during the October annular eclipse. Project members are already gathering data to have a baseline of the sun’s influence on a normal day, which they’ll compare to the upcoming eclipse data. And this is only a small taste before the big event: next year’s total eclipse. “The 2023 annular eclipse will be used as a training, learning, and testing experience in an effort to achieve the highest quality data for the 2024 total eclipse,” Higgins wrote in a summary for an American Geophysical Union conference.

Citizen science projects such as Radio JOVE not only collect valuable data, but they also involve a new crowd in NASA’s scientific community. Anyone interested in science can join in, and if Radio JOVE doesn’t suit your interests, NASA has a long list of other opportunities. For example, if you’re a ham radio operator, you can get involved with HamSCI, which also plans to observe the upcoming eclipse.

“NASA’s Radio JOVE Citizen Science Project allows me to further explore my lifelong interest in astronomy,” said John Cox, a Radio JOVE citizen scientist from South Carolina, in a NASA press release. “A whole new portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is now open to me.”

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On the morning of September 24, a space capsule containing a pristine sample of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu entered Earth’s atmosphere wreathed in fire. During a 10 minute descent, the craft used its heat shield to dissipate speed through friction. It safely touched down on a military range in Utah, marking the end of NASA’s seven-year-long Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer—the OSIRIS-REx mission. The roughly 9 ounces of asteroid bits, doused in nitrogen to keep out any contaminants, are now in a clean room.

For more than half a decade, the members of this mission faced multiple technical challenges: building, testing, and launching the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2016; rendezvousing with asteroid Bennu in 2018 about 207 million miles from Earth; using a robotic arm to grab half a cup’s worth of Bennu in 2020; and setting a course back to Earth in 2021. 

The scope of the OSIRIS-ReX mission stretches from the distant past into the relatively closer future. Nearly two decades ago, astronomers set out to not only get up close and personal with an ancient asteroid, but actually bring some home. And its scientific observations dip billions of years into the past. Samples from this more than 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid are likely to provide clues to the origin of life itself. It will also help prepare us for a moment, centuries from now, when Bennu could threaten to strike Earth. 

The power of a pristine asteroid 

The OSIRIS-REx sample is a chance to thoroughly examine what compounds may have been present in the early solar system. By bringing pieces of the space rock to Earth, researchers can use the most powerful laboratory techniques available—not just what tools can fit on a spacecraft. 

”It’s tremendously powerful to be able to get something back in the laboratory,” says Jason Dworkin is a biochemist and astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He’s been the project scientist for OSIRIS-REx since NASA accepted the mission proposal in 2011, and has been involved in the mission’s planning since its conception in 2004. “You can change your mind about what you’re looking for. As new discoveries come in, you can adjust your instrumentation. You can have devices that are not only too large to get on the spacecraft, but for us, even larger than the launch pad.” 

[Related: The asteroid that created Earth’s largest crater may have been way bigger than we thought]

Dworkin has long been interested in the ways interstellar chemistry can shed light on how the early Earth’s organic compounds combined to form life as we know it. It’s possible that material from asteroids, made of similar stuff as Bennu, helped deliver some necessary ingredients when they struck our planet.

We know the strikes happened, Dworkin says, but we don’t know how relevant the “asteroidal input” from objects like Bennu was.

Rapidly recovering the sample

Before scientists like Dworkin can probe the bits of rock for data, they have to get the samples safely into the lab. Sample collection teams—NASA experts and academic mission scientists, US military representatives, and scientists and engineers from Lockheed Martin, which built the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft—have spent the summer practicing to recover the Bennu sample as quickly as possible. 

As the capsule neared Earth’s atmosphere, the recovery teams boarded helicopters, using infrared imaging to track the capsule as it descended. They swiftly arrived to where the capsule came to rest, within a 36-mile by 8.5-mile area of the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City. The reason for the haste is to limit the chances that anything Earthly would contaminate the 8.8 ounces of pristine Bennu material. 

To further guard against this, the team recovering the capsule also took samples of soil and material from around the landing site. That way, if scientists detect something “extraordinary,” Dworkin says, “we can make sure that it cannot be explained by contamination or by something else from the environment.”

The capsule, which slowed from 27,650 mph when it entered Earth’s atmosphere to 11 mph when it landed, was taken to a temporary clean room at the military range. There, it will be disassembled and on Monday packaged for a flight to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the space agency has built a specialized clean room environment. This will be Bennu’s home on Earth.

“The sample comes back and is studied by the science team for two years,” Dworkin says. “Within six months, we produce a catalog of what we’ve observed based on how to describe the sample without damaging the sample using non-invasive techniques.”

What an asteroid on Earth can tell us

The science team has 12 major hypotheses and 54 sub-hypotheses to test, according to Dworkin, which fall into four broad categories. 

The first category is testing the observations that OSIRIS-REx made of Bennu while in space. NASA wants to know: If the results of remote instrument measurements of, say, the asteroid’s mineralogy hold up when tested on the ground? If so, this will be a baseline for additional remote studies of other asteroids NASA won’t send a spacecraft to sample. 

The second category, Dworkin’s favorite, is examining what organic compounds might exist in the sample. It may contain amino acids, sugars, and aldehydes. These are potentially some of the same ingredients that were present on Earth when life began. Studying how they exist on Bennu can reveal the chemical changes they’ve undergone over the eons in space. 

The history of the solar system is the third category. This is the tale, told by the sample, of our solar neighborhood: all the way “from the protosolar nebula to the formation of the crater out of which we collected the sample,” Dworkin says. In this view, as Bennu traveled in the frigid space, it was as if material from the solar system’s early days was held in cold storage.

[Related: Local asteroid Bennu used to be filled with tiny rivers]

And the fourth category of study will be analyzing if and how bringing a piece of Bennu home changes the sample. ”We saw images of it before we stowed it; is that the same, or did it change on the reentry into Earth’s atmosphere?” Dworkin says. “Do we have evidence of contamination from the spacecraft, from the sample processing and handling? 

Some of the answers to questions across all four categories could come within months to a few years. But NASA is preparing for the long haul. Today’s scientists will only have immediate access to about a quarter of the sample. The rest will be held in cold storage for decades, on the assumption that later generations will have better tools and more knowledge to bring to bear. 

NASA wants to avoid repeating mistakes the agency made with some of the Apollo-era moon samples, when tests weren’t as conservative with lunar material. “ “That’s arming the future, and making sure that future generations thank us instead of curse us,” Dworkin says.

There’s one final forward-looking aspect to the OSIRIS-REx mission. In the late 22nd century, sometime between 2170 and 2200, Bennu has a slim chance of hitting Earth. It’s “a small percentage, but not nothing,” Dworkin notes. Information gathered by OSIRIS-REx and subsequent sample studies could help scientists and political leaders decide, with decades of preparation, whether they need to take action to deflect Bennu to prevent a disastrous impact. 

”That’s a wonderful feeling to be able to work on a mission for so long, and have it pay off scientifically for the future, and perhaps planetary defense for the future,” Dworkin says. ”That happens when you start thinking about what happened four and a half billion years ago. You start thinking about the future too.”

Back in space, 20 minutes after this mission came to an end, the spacecraft’s new task began: OSIRIS is now headed for the 1,000-foot-wide asteroid Apophis.

This post was updated after the capsule’s successful landing.

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On October 14, the moon will cruise between Earth and the sun during an annular solar eclipse, casting an immense shadow on our planet. It will be a sight to behold, though you’ll want to wear protective glasses or glimpse it indirectly to avoid frying your eyeballs. Unlike 2017’s total eclipse, the sun won’t vanish completely; instead, the moon will be positioned far enough from our planet to leave the star’s brilliant edges visible. The result is a “ring of fire,” as though the moon has been outlined with a blowtorch. Every continental state will have at least a partial view of this event, but spotting this celestial circle could be well worth the travel. 

The eclipse’s 125-mile-wide path of annularity begins in the US in Oregon at 12:13 p.m. Eastern (9:13 a.m. Pacific). It will loom over the country until it leaves Texas at 1:03 p.m. (12:03 Central), continuing its southeastward journey to Central and South America. The best viewing conditions will be in places with low fog and high aridity, like Nevada and Utah, the two driest states in the country. “The place with the lowest chance of cloud cover is Albuquerque, New Mexico—but most of the path of annularity looks pretty good,” says University of Texas at San Antonio astrophysics professor Angela Speck, who co-chairs the American Astronomical Society’s Solar Eclipse Task Force.  

If you can, schedule an eclipse viewing break in your day: Astronomers have calculated precisely when the best views occur in your neighborhood. Depending on where you are in the path, the annularity’s duration ranges from a little more than a minute to nearly five.

The phenomenon will also sweep through several public land areas, including 29 national park sites and dozens of state-owned ones. When visiting these spots—which offer skies unobstructed by city and suburb infrastructure—please don’t stop your car mid-traffic to gawk at the moon passing overhead, says Justina Parsons-Bernstein, who works at the Utah Department of Natural Resources as its heritage, interpretation, and ADA resources manager. Camping may be an option; Parsons-Bernstein recommends checking the website ReserveAmerica for availability. Some campsites are already filling up—diehard eclipse chasers have planned this out months in advance—but others, such as Utah’s Fremont Indian State Park, have opened extra lots specifically for the October happening. There are a bounty of destinations to consider.

Oregon

The first US national park that the eclipse will pass over is Crater Lake, where water has filled a collapsed volcano, Mount Mazama. All of the park is in the annularity’s path, so prepare for crowds as well as limited parking and lodging.

Other Oregon parks in the path:
Shore Acres State Park

[Related: We’ve been predicting eclipses for over 2,000 years. Here’s how.]

California

Bat-filled caves, battlefields, and basaltic flows make up Lava Beds National Monument, a desert landscape that is the product of thousands of years of volcanic activity. Only the northeast sliver of this California park is directly in the annularity’s path, but the section just outside it may be a good vantage for another fascinating feature of the eclipse: Baily’s beads, short-lived bright dots caused when sunbeams stream through the crags and valleys of the lunar surface.

Nevada

The southern edge of the US path of annularity cuts through Great Basin National Park, where park staff will be available to guide viewers, according to the National Park Service. The agency also notes that, while the park tends to be less busy in October, eclipse watchers should be prepared for the event to bring out crowds.

Utah

Parsons-Bernstein ordered 20,000 eclipse glasses that will be distributed across Utah’s state parks on a first come, first serve basis. “In the entire state, there’s no less than 83 percent view of the annularity,” she says. But several areas are “dead-on 100 percent,” including 13 parks that are directly in the eclipse’s path. One of those is Goblin Valley State Park, which boasts rocky scenery so otherworldly that the movie Galaxy Quest used it as an alien planet.

Other Utah parks in the path:
Bryce Canyon National Park
Capitol Reef National Park
Canyonlands National Park
Escalante Petrified Forest State Park
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area
Goosenecks State Park
Kodachrome Basin State Park
Hovenweep National Monument
Natural Bridges National Monument
Rainbow Bridge National Monument
Territorial Statehouse State Park Museum

Arizona 

The moon’s shadow will zip into Arizona at speeds of around 3,150 mph, slowing to 2,626 mph as it leaves. It will pass through Navajo National Monument, where, for hundreds of years, Hopi, Navajo, and other Native Americans lived in the canyons. However, visitors to the Hopi Reservation and Navajo Nation should be aware that, in some traditions, eclipses are sacred times to pray or meditate indoors. 

Other Arizona parks in the path:
Canyon De Chelly National Monument

[Related: 7 US parks where you can get stunning nightsky views]

Colorado

Celebrating its remarkable Ancestral Pueblo cliff settlements, Mesa Verde National Park became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978. Go for the eclipse, but stick around after nightfall on campgrounds and scenic overlooks: The park has one of the darkest skies in the continental US, and boasts stellar views of the Milky Way.

Other Colorado parks in the path:
Yucca House National Monument

New Mexico

The Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Los Alamos was once the secret city where physicists developed the atomic bomb. Now, certain areas are open to the public (many of the buildings are within an area secured by the Energy Department that’s only occasionally available by guided tour). But hikers can take the trail loop on Kwage Mesa, which will offer views of the annularity.

Other New Mexico parks in the path:
Aztec Ruins National Monument
Bandelier National Monument
Chaco Culture National Historical Park
Pecos National Historical Park
Petroglyph National Monument
Rio Grande Nature Center State Park
Salinas Pueblo Mission National Monument
Valles Caldera National Preserve

Texas

As the eclipse falls over the Lone Star State, it will darken 17 state parks as well as San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. Just after noon, it will depart the US for the Gulf of Mexico, but not before touching one last bit of public American land: the Padre Island National Seashore, which is just a quick drive from Corpus Christi and famous for its unique, biodiverse mudflats.

Other Texas parks in the path:
Big Spring State Park
Choke Canyon State Park
Goose Island State Park
Kickapoo Cavern State Park
Lake Corpus Christi State Park
Mustang Island State Park

The post The best US parks for eclipse chasers to see October’s ‘Ring of Fire’ appeared first on Popular Science.

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An unexpected and astonishing find located more than 2.5 million light-years from Earth took top honors at the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year awards this week. Amateur astronomers Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, and Yann Sainty captured an image of a massive plasma arc near the Andromeda Galaxy, a discovery that has resulted in scientists looking closer into the giant gas cloud.

“This astrophoto is as spectacular as [it is] valuable,” judge and astrophotographer László Francsics said in a press release. “It not only presents Andromeda in a new way, but also raises the quality of astrophotography to a higher level.”

[Related: How to get a great nightsky shot]

While “Andromeda, Unexpected” captured the prestigious overall winner title, other category winners also dazzled with photos of dancing auroras, neon sprites raining down from the night’s sky, and stunning far-off nebulas that might make you feel like a tiny earthling floating through space.

Sit back and scroll in awe at all the category winners, runners-up, and highly commended images from the 2023 Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year honorees.

Galaxy

Overall winner: Andromeda, Unexpected

Runner-Up: The Eyes Galaxies

Highly Commended: Neighbors

Aurora

Winner: Brushstroke

Runner-up: Circle of Light

Highly Commended: Fire on the Horizon

Our Moon

Winner: Mars-Set

Runner-Up: Sundown on the Terminator

Highly Commended: Last Full Moon of the Year Featuring a Colourful Corona During a Close Encounter with Mars

Our Sun

Winner: A Sun Question

Runner-Up: Dark Star

Highly Commended: The Great Solar Flare 

People & Space

Winner: Zeila

Runner-Up: A Visit to Tycho

Highly Commended: Close Encounters of The Haslingden Kind

Planets, Comets & Asteroids

Winner: Suspended in a Sunbeam

Runner-Up: Jupiter Close to Opposition

Highly Commended: Uranus with Umbriel, Ariel, Miranda, Oberon and Titania

Skyscapes

Winner: Grand Cosmic Fireworks

Runner-Up: Celestial Equator Above First World War Trench Memorial

Highly Commended: Noctilucent Night

Stars & Nebulae

Winner: New Class of Galactic Nebulae Around the Star YY Hya

Runner-Up: LDN 1448 et al.

Highly Commended: The Dark Wolf – Fenrir

The Sir Patrick Moore Prize for Best Newcomer

Winner: Sh2-132: Blinded by the Light

Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year

Winner: The Running Chicken Nebula

Runner-Up: Blue Spirit Drifting in the Clouds

Highly Commended: Lunar Occultation of Mars

Highly Commended: Roses Blooming in the Dark: NGC 2337

Highly Commended: Moon at Nightfall

Annie Maunder Prize for Image Innovation

Winner: Black Echo

The post 31 award-winning astronomy photos: From fiery horizons to whimsical auroras appeared first on Popular Science.

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