Tag: exploration

Curiosity’s future travels uphill

10:06 am

The view uphill
Click for full resolution. For original images go here and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, assembled from two pictures taken on June 23, 2025 (here and here) by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity, looks to the south and uphill into the canyon that the rover will eventually climb.

The overview map to the right provides context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present location, the white line its past travel route, and the red dotted line its future route. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama.

The science team is presently exploring the boxwork formation on the right, and should spend at least the next month or so there before moving on. As the rover moves up into this canyon we should also expect the science team to spend a great deal of time studying that many layered cliff face to the right.

Eventually the rover will enter those white very hilly regions on the horizon. No route through those hills however has yet been chosen.

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A graceful spiral galaxy

2:35 pm

A graceful spiral galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a project to study galaxies with very active central supermassive black holes.

What sets UGC 11397 apart from a typical spiral lies at its centre, where a supermassive black hole containing 174 million times the mass of the Sun is growing. As a black hole ensnares gas, dust, and even entire stars from its vicinity, this doomed matter heats up and puts on a fantastic cosmic light show. Material trapped by the black hole emits light from gamma rays to radio waves and can brighten and fade without warning. But in some galaxies, including UGC 11397, thick clouds of dust hide much of this energetic activity from view in optical light. Despite this, UGC 11397’s actively growing black hole was revealed through its bright X-ray emission — high-energy light that can pierce the surrounding dust. This led astronomers to classify it as a Type 2 Seyfert galaxy, a category used for active galaxies whose central regions are hidden from view in visible light by a doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas.

To me what sets this galaxy apart is its natural beauty. It also reminds me of the universe’s vastness. Located about 250 million light years away, those hazy spiral arms represent millions of stars, many of which likely harbor planets and maybe even life.

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Scientists discover unexpected mineral in Ryugu asteroid sample

1:21 pm

Scientists analyzing the samples brought back from the rubble pile asteroid Ryugu by Japan’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft have now discovered an unexpected mineral, dubbed djerfisherite, that the formation theories of the asteroid say should not be there.

“Djerfisherite is a mineral that typically forms in very reduced environments, like those found in enstatite chondrites, and has never been reported in CI chondrites or other Ryugu grains,” says first and corresponding author Masaaki Miyahara, associate professor at the Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University. “Its occurrence is like finding a tropical seed in Arctic ice—indicating either an unexpected local environment or long-distance transport in the early solar system.”

At present the scientists propose two hypotheses for explaining the mineral. Either it came from another asteroid as Ryugu was congealing, or it formed in Ryugu when conditions raised its temperature above 350 degrees Celsius. The researchers now favor the latter theory, even though the generally accepted histories of Ryugu’s formation never included such conditions.

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Two lunar orbiters spot the crash site of Ispace’s Resilience lander

2:53 pm

Resilience crash site on the Moon, as seen by Chandrayaan-2

Scientists using both NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and India’s Chandrayaan-2 lunar orbiter have spotted the crash site for the private commercial lunar lander Resilience, built and launched by the Japanese startup Ispace.

The picture to the right was taken by Chandrayaan-2. As noted at the LRO website showing its photo:

The dark smudge (60.4445°N, 355.4120°E, -2431.6 m elevation ) formed as the vehicle excavated and redistributed shallow regolith (soil); the faint bright halo resulted from low-angle regolith particles scouring the delicate surface.

The lander attempted a soft landing on June 5, 2025, but because its laser rangefinder was unable to gather good data as to its elevation, it did not decelerate properly and was going too fast when its engines tried for a soft landing. It instead crashed.

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New nova spotted and now visible to the naked eye

2:39 pm

Astronomers have now spotted a brand new nova in the southern hemisphere that has quickly brightened so that is now just visible to the naked eye.

On June 12th (June 12.9 UT), the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) discovered a new 8.7-magnitude stellar object in Lupus. Not long after, Yusuke Tampo, with the South African Astronomical Observatory (University of Cape Town), obtained a spectrum of the “new star” and identified it as a classical nova based on its spectral features and dramatic increase in brightness.

The nova went through a slew of temporary names — AT 2025nlr, ASASSN-25cm, and N Lup 2025 — until receiving its official designation V462 Lupi on June 16th. Since discovery, the nova has brightened rapidly. As of 3 p.m. Eastern Time June 17th, it’s at magnitude 6.1, and visible without optical aid from a dark-sky location. Its rise has been phenomenal when you consider that prior to the explosion, the progenitor star was approximately magnitude 22.3 (in the blue band) according to American Association for Variable Stars (AAVSO) observer Sebastián Otero, who dug up an older image from a photographic plate.

Though in the southern hemisphere, this nova star is also visible in the northern hemisphere to the mid-latitudes. The article at the link provides some details if you wish to try spotting it.

Novae occur when a central heavy white dwarf star robs enough material from its closely orbiting stellar companion. When enough material piles up on the surface of the white dwarf it goes critical, resulting in a thermonuclear explosion strong enough to produce the nova.

Whether the nova will continue to brighten remains unknown, but I guarantee that a plethora of amateur astronomers will watching to find out.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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The source of a Martian glacial canyon 750 miles long

2:21 pm

The source of a Martian glacial canyon 750-miles-long
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and brightened to post here, was taken on May 1, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The scientists label this very simply as a “wall on Ausonia Cavis”. Ausonia Cavis — 31 miles long and 20 miles wide at its widest — is one of the many gigantic sinks found in many places on Mars. This particular cliff wall is about 2,000 feet high, though from rim to floor of the sink is closer to 3,000 feet.

The image was likely taken to get a closer look at those gullies flowing down the cliff wall. Previous research of similar cliff walls in this region has found what appears to be seasonal water frost in such gullies, and this image was likely taken to see if more such frost could be spotted here as well.
» Read more

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Sublimating ice in the Martian dry tropics?

2:31 pm

Sublimated ice in the Martian dry tropics?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 3, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely as a “terrain sample,” it was likely snapped not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule so as to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

When the MRO camera team does this, they try to pick features of interest at the time required, and I think succeed more often than not. In this case, they captured this one-mile-wide unnamed crater that appears to be filled with sublimating glacial debris. Similarly, the plateau surrounding the crater seems to also show signs that some sublimation is occurring of ice just below the surface, producing the areas that appear filled with pockmarks.

The location however suggests that if near surface ice here is sublimating away, it hints at a find of some significance.
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Mars will be mystery until we can walk its surface

1:43 pm

A Martian mystery
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image illustrates starkly the limitations of orbital imagery. The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on March 30, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows flow features inside a depression that strongly resemble glacial features, with the downhill grade roughly heading south.

Such features are seen in many places on Mars, almost always in the 30 to 60 degree mid-latitude bands in both the northern and southern hemispheres (see here, here, and here for just three examples. For many more simply search this website using “glacier” or “glacial feature” as search terms).

The problem is that this location is not within that 30 to 60 degree latitude band. In fact, at this location no near surface ice should exist at all.
» Read more

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The mad mountains of Mars

10:34 am

The mad mountains of Mars
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map

Cool image time! The picture above, cropped to post here, was taken on June 10, 2025 by the high resolution camera on the Mars rover Curiosity, and shows some of the stranger terrain found higher up the flanks of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater.

The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks Curiosity’s present position, where it is doing another drilling campaign into the first boxwork geology it has encountered. The white line marks its past travels, while the green dotted line its planned route.

The yellow lines indicate the area seen in the picture above. The wild mountain peaks on the horizon are part of the sulfate-bearing unit that appears very bright in the overview map. The material that makes up this terrain appears to be very easily eroded, based on its features as seen from orbit, as well as Curiosity’s distant view. Whether that erosion was wind, water, or ice, remains undetermined, and is the main question Curiosity will attempt to answer once it gets there, likely in a year or so.

Regardless, the landscape appears almost like it soft sand being washed away.

Where the rover will go next the science team has not yet decided. It will definitely continue uphill, but they do not yet know the route they will take through that sulfate-bearing unit.

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Europe’s Solar Orbiter takes first images of the Sun’s south pole

9:27 am

The south pole of the Sun
Click for original image.

Because its orbit has now dropped 17 degrees below the ecliptic plane of the solar system, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter probe has been able to snap the first images of the Sun’s south pole, as shown by the two pictures to the right.

The [two images show] the Sun’s south pole as recorded on 16–17 March 2025, when Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from an angle of 15° below the solar equator. This was the mission’s first high-angle observation campaign, a few days before reaching its current maximum viewing angle of 17°.

The instruments each observe the Sun in a different way. PHI images the Sun in visible light (left) and maps the Sun’s surface magnetic field (right).

The magnetic field data on the right has revealed that at present the field at the pole is “a mess,” because the Sun is presently at solar maximum.

While a normal magnet has a clear north and south pole, the PHI instrument’s magnetic field measurements show that both north and south polarity magnetic fields are present at the Sun’s south pole. This happens only for a short time during each solar cycle, at solar maximum, when the Sun’s magnetic field flips and is at its most active. After the field flip, a single polarity should slowly build up and take over at the Sun’s poles. In 5–6 years from now, the Sun will reach its next solar minimum, during which its magnetic field is at its most orderly and the Sun displays its lowest levels of activity.

Solar Orbiter is now well positioned to observe the expected changes in the Sun’s magnetic field as sunspot activity ramps down to solar minimum.

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The dusky mountains of Mars

10:10 am

The dusky mountains of Mars
Click for high resolution. For the original images, go here, here, and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, created from three images taken on June 7, 2025 (here, here, and here) by the high resolution camera on top of the Mars rover Curiosity, looks south and uphill into the Gediz Vallis canyon that the rover had been traveling previously.

The overview map to the right provides context. The blue dot Curiosity’s present position, where it is about to begin a drilling campaign into the first boxwork structures the rover has reached. The white dotted line marks its past travels, while the green dotted line its planned future route. The red dotted line marks a planned route that has been abandoned.

The yellow lines indicate approximately the area covered by the panorama. Because this used the rover’s high resolution camera, the view gives us a detailed look at the mountains on the distant horizon. Though we are looking uphill, the peaks in the distance are merely higher ridges and hills on the flanks of Mount Sharp. The mountain’s peak is out of view, about 25 miles away and about 15,000 feet higher up.

Note the dusty and what appears to be a softened nature of the terrain on these higher peaks. Since entering the foothills of Mount Sharp several years ago, the surface has been extremely rocky and rough, every inch covered in boulders of all sizes. This distant view suggests the ground might become easier to traverse at those higher altitudes. It also appears there will be a lot more dust, coating everything.

The lighting I think is close to natural. Because Mars is farther from the Sun, it doesn’t get as much light. Even during mid-day the light to our Earth-borne eyes would more resemble dusk on Earth.

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Ispace confirms that its Resilience lunar lander has failed, apparently crashing on the Moon

8:41 pm

According to an update issued several hours after the planned landing, the Japanese lunar lander startup confirmed that its Resilience lunar lander apparently crashed in its attempt to soft land on the Moon.

Ispace engineers at the HAKUTO-R Mission Control Center in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, transmitted commands to execute the landing sequence at 3:13 a.m. on June 6, 2025. The RESILIENCE lander then began the descent phase. The lander descended from an altitude of approximately 100 km to approximately 20 km, and then successfully fired its main engine as planned to begin deceleration. While the lander’s attitude was confirmed to be nearly vertical, telemetry was lost thereafter, and no data indicating a successful landing was received, even after the scheduled landing time had passed.

Based on the currently available data, the Mission Control Center has been able to confirm the following: The laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values. As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing. Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface.

After communication with the lander was lost, a command was sent to reboot the lander, but communication was unable to be re-established.

This explanation fits with the very high velocity numbers seen as the spacecraft approached the surface, much higher than intended.

Ispace has now attempted to land on the Moon twice, with both landers crashing upon approach. In this sense its record is not quite as good as the American startup Intuitive Machines, which had two landers touch down but immediately tip over, causing both to fail.

Ispace presently has three contracts to build landers with NASA, JAXA (Japan’s space agency), and the European Space Agency. The American lander is being built in partnership with the company Draper. Whether this second failure today will impact any of those contracts is uncertain at this time.

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Landing of Ispace’s Resilience lander uncertain

12:49 pm

Resilence landing

The landing of Ispace’s Resilience lander on the Moon at present appears uncertain, and could be a failure. Though the announcers of the live stream had warned beforehand that it might take awhile after the planned touchdown time to confirm a successful landing, the circumstances just before landing did not appear to go as expected.

At T-1:45 minutes, with the spacecraft at an altitude of 32 feet and still moving at a speed of 116 miles per minute, all telemetry disappeared from the broadcast. Mission controllers did then indicate the spacecraft was “pitching up”, which means it was re-orienting itself for landing. At that point however no further updates were provided. Moments later we could see the engineer in mission control in the lower left of the screen capture to the right, obviously disturbed by something.

In ending the live stream a few minutes later, with no further information, the announcers added that a full report will be made during a press conference later today.

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Scientists discover another exoplanet that theories say should not exist

10:20 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists using telescopes both in orbit and on the ground have discovered a small red dwarf star with only 20% the mass of our Sun with a gas giant exoplanet with about half the mass of Saturn but a bit larger in size.

The problem is that the theory for the formation of such gas giants predicts that they should not form around small red dwarfs such as this star.

The most widely held theory of planet formation is called the core accretion theory. A planetary core forms first through accretion (gradual accumulation of material) and as the core becomes more massive, it eventually attracts gases that form an atmosphere. It then gets massive enough to enter a runaway gas accretion process to become a gas giant.

In this theory, the formation of gas giants is harder around low-mass stars because the amount of gas and dust in a protoplanetary disc around the star (the raw material of planet formation) is too limited to allow a massive enough core to form, and the runaway process to occur.

Yet the existence of TOI-6894b (a giant planet orbiting an extremely low-mass star) suggests this model cannot be completely accurate and alternative theories are needed.

You can read the paper here. The exoplanet orbits the star every 3.37 days, and each transit across the face of the star has been easily detected by numerous telescopes. Further spectroscopic observations using the Webb Space Telescope will be able to characterize the exoplanet’s atmosphere more fully.

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Scientists release the first year’s data from the Pace orbiter

10:07 am

Pace global data, August 2024
Click for original movie.

Launched in early 2024, the Pace orbiter was designed to track the evolution of the leaves of trees globally throughout the entire year. NASA has now released the data from the first twelve months, showing the seasonal changes of trees as the Earth rotates the Sun and the seasons change globally.

The map to the right is a screen capture from one of many videos showing these changes. The green indicates the global spread of tree cover in the middle of August in the northern hemisphere as well as in the equatorial regions of South America and Africa. Other movies focusing on North America, South America, Europe, India, etc, can be viewed here.

PACE measurements have allowed NASA scientists and visualizers to show a complete year of global vegetation data using three pigments: chlorophyll, anthocyanins, and carotenoids. That multicolor imagery tells a clearer story about the health of land vegetation by detecting the smallest of variations in leaf colors.

…Anthocyanins are the red pigments in leaves, while carotenoids are the yellow pigments – both of which we see when autumn changes the colors of trees. Plants use these pigments to protect themselves from fluctuations in the weather, adapting to the environment through chemical changes in their leaves. For example, leaves can turn more yellow when they have too much sunlight but not enough of the other necessities, like water and nutrients. If they didn’t adjust their color, it would damage the mechanisms they have to perform photosynthesis.

In the visualization, the data is highlighted in bright colors: magenta represents anthocyanins, green represents chlorophyll, and cyan represents carotenoids. The brighter the colors are, the more leaves there are in that area. The movement of these colors across the land areas show the seasonal changes over time.

You can read the full paper describing the first year’s data here.

The Trump budget presently funds Pace for two more years of observations, at about $26 million per year. This is an obvious example of a satellite whose life should be extended for as long as possible. This long term data would likely confirm other data that indicates the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is greening the Earth, helping plant life that provides us oxygen to breath and food to eat.

To do so, however, other cuts in NASA will have to be found to pay for that extension. I once again wonder about the half a billion NASA spends for its “Mission Enabling Services”, which covers NASA’s human resources division, public relations department, and its equal opportunity division, as well as other more useful departments. Surely some money from these bureaucratic divisions could be found to finance this actual useful research.

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Watch the landing attempt of Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander

9:34 am

Map of lunar landing sites
Landing sites for both Firefly’s Blue Ghost and
Ispace’s Resilience

I have embedded the live stream below of the landing of the Japanese startup Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander, presently scheduled to occur at 3:17 pm (Eastern) today (June 6, 2025 in Japan).

The live stream goes live at about 2:00 pm (Eastern).

Resilience will attempt to land on the near side of the Moon at 60.5 degrees north latitude and 4.6 degrees west longitude, in the region dubbed Mare Frigoris (Latin for “the Sea of Cold”), as shown on the map to the right. That map also shows a number of other landings on this quadrant of the Moon, including Ispace’s previous failed attempt with its first lander, Hakuto-R1, in Atlas Crater in 2023.

For Ispace, today’s landing is critical for its future. It has contracts for future three landers with NASA, with Japan’s space agency JAXA, and with the European Space Agency, but a failure today could impact whether those contracts proceed to completion.
» Read more

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Two giant clusters of galaxies on target for second collision

3:55 pm

Colliding galaxy clusters
Click for full image.

Using telescopes both on Earth and in space, astronomers now think two giant clusters of galaxies that had collided previously have now stopping flying from each other and are on target for second collision.

The annotated image to the right shows what we can see today. The two blue blobs near the center are the two galaxy clusters.

The galaxy cluster PSZ2 G181.06+48.47 (PSZ2 G181 for short) is about 2.8 billion light-years from Earth. Previously, radio observations from the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR), an antenna network in the Netherlands, spotted parentheses-shaped structures on the outside of the system. In this new composite image, X-rays from Chandra (represented in purple) and ESA’s XMM-Newton (blue) have been combined with LOFAR data (red) and an optical image from the Pan-STARRS telescope of the stars in the field of view.

These structures are probably shock fronts — similar to those created by jets that have broken the sound barrier — likely caused by disruption of gas from the initial collision about a billion years ago. Since the collision they have continued traveling outwards and are currently separated by about 11 million light-years, the largest separation of these kinds of structures that astronomers have ever seen.

Now, data from NASA’s Chandra and ESA’s XMM-Newton, a mission with NASA contributions, is providing evidence that PSZ2 G181 is poised for another collision. Having a first pass at ramming each other, the two clusters have slowed down and begun heading back toward a second crash.

When such giant object collide what really interacts the most is the gas and dust between the stars. The motions of the stars and galaxies of course get distorted by the pull of gravity, but there are almost never any crashes.

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New calculations suggest Andromeda might not collide with Milky Way

9:00 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists using new data from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as Europe’s Gaia space telescope, combined with many computer models, have determined that the 2012 prediction that the Andromeda galaxy would collide with Milky Way in five billion years was much more uncertain. From the abstract of the paper:

[W]e consider the latest and most accurate observations by the Gaia and Hubble space telescopes, along with recent consensus mass estimates, to derive possible future scenarios and identify the main sources of uncertainty in the evolution of the Local Group over the next 10 billion years. We found that the next most massive Local Group member galaxies — namely, M33 and the Large Magellanic Cloud—distinctly and radically affect the Milky Way — Andromeda orbit. Although including M33 increases the merger probability, the orbit of the Large Magellanic Cloud runs perpendicular to the Milky Way–Andromeda orbit and makes their merger less probable.

In the full system, we found that uncertainties in the present positions, motions and masses of all galaxies leave room for drastically different outcomes and a probability of close to 50% that there will be no Milky Way–Andromeda merger during the next 10 billion years. Based on the best available data, the fate of our Galaxy is still completely open.

The press release at the first link above makes it sounds as the previous prediction of a collision had been fully accepted as certain by the entire astronomical community, and that is balder-dash. It was simply the best guess at the time, highly uncertain. This new prediction — that we really don’t know what will happen based on the data available — is simply the newest best guess.

This new analysis however is certainly more robust and honest.

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Elon Musk’s presentation “The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary”

2:51 pm

The Musk game plan for Mars exploration over the next few years
The Musk game plan for Mars exploration over the next few years.

It appears Elon Musk finally gave his public presentation to SpaceX employees today, entitled “The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary”, and had it posted on X.

I have embedded that presentation below.

After reviewing the present development program for Starship/Superheavy (without mentioning anything about this week’s flight), Musk then outlined the game plan for the the next few years, as shown in the graphic above. If all goes as planned (not to be expected), the first Starships will head to Mars in about eighteen months, at the next launch window near the end of 2026. These flights will be unmanned, and will require that by then SpaceX will have also developed orbital refueling capability.

Musk hopes the first manned missions will take place at the next launch window in 2028-29, with the number of ships increased from 5 to 20. Later windows will see 300 and then 500 ships launched. For those flights a lot of work will need to be done to make Starships function as interplanetary spaceships, something it appears SpaceX and Musk have not yet devoted much energy to.

As always, Musk’s target goals are ambitious and not likely to be met. But as always, his targets are not unreasonable, which means SpaceX will likely eventually get all this done but late by only one or several launch windows.

Musk also noted that this entire program is presently being funded by Starlink revenues. The government for SpaceX and Musk’s space exploration plans is largely now irrelevant. This fact is possibly the most historically significant revelation in his presentation.

I strongly recommend you watch his whole speech, if only to enjoy the “Wow!” factor.

The future is going to be exciting for sure.

Hat tip to reader Gary.
» Read more

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Scientists believe they have detected the actual process in which Mars loses its atmosphere

10:13 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists using three different instruments on the Mars orbiter MAVEN now believe they have detected evidence of the actual process in which Mars loses its atmosphere, dubbed “sputtering”.

To observe sputtering, the team needed simultaneous measurements in the right place at the right time from three instruments aboard the MAVEN spacecraft: the Solar Wind Ion Analyzer, the Magnetometer, and the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer. Additionally, the team needed measurements across the dayside and the nightside of the planet at low altitudes, which takes years to observe.

The combination of data from these instruments allowed scientists to make a new kind of map of sputtered argon in relation to the solar wind. This map revealed the presence of argon at high altitudes in the exact locations that the energetic particles crashed into the atmosphere and splashed out argon, showing sputtering in real time. The researchers also found that this process is happening at a rate four times higher than previously predicted and that this rate increases during solar storms.

This sputtering is believed to be the process in which Mars lost the thick atmosphere that scientists believe must have existed in the past so that liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. When MAVEN arrived in Mars orbit ten years ago the scientists actually thought the spacecraft would detect it relatively quickly. That it took ten years to finally find some evidence it is occurring suggests something is not quite right with their theories.

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