Tag: exploration

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s high resolution camera takes its 100,000 picture

1:54 pm

Oblique view
Click for original image.

Cool image time! On October 7, 2025, the science team that operates HiRISE, the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), took its 100,000th picture since entering Mars orbit in March 2006.

The objective of this observation is to better resolve sand dunes and the rocky material underneath them. These dark, eroded rocks may be the source for some of these Syrtis Major sand dunes. Our image was suggested by a high school student enrolled in the Jefferson County Executive Internship program in Colorado in 2023, one of many public outreach programs the HiRISE Team engages in.

To celebrate this accomplishment and the fantastic geology of the scene, students and staff in the HiRISE Photogrammetry lab constructed this digital terrain model. This oblique image highlights the hummocky mounds of the plains that border Jezero Crater, which are among the oldest on Mars.

That oblique image, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is to the right. The location is about 50 miles to the southwest of Jezero Crater where the rover Perseverance landed.
» Read more

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Updates on the status of two Mars missions, Maven and Escapade

7:59 pm

NASA today posted two separate updates on the status of two of its missions to or at Mars.

First, it appears there is an issue with one engine on one of the two Escapade orbiters on their way to their parking orbit where they will await the right moment to head to Mars.

During trajectory correction maneuvers for NASA’s twin ESCAPADE spacecraft on Dec. 8 and Dec. 12, the mission operations team noticed low thrust during the burn for one of the spacecraft. The team is working to identify the cause and will attempt a trajectory correction maneuver in the coming weeks.

The other spacecraft has successfully completed its two trajectory correction maneuvers, as planned. Both spacecraft are operating normally otherwise, and currently there are no long-term impacts from the trajectory correction delay.

While not the best news, this issue does not at this moment appear critical.

The second update however was even more negative. It appears engineers have not yet been able to re-establish contact and control of the Mars orbiter Maven.

To date, attempts to reestablish contact with the spacecraft have not been successful. Although no spacecraft telemetry has been received since Dec. 4, the team recovered a brief fragment of tracking data from Dec. 6 as part of an ongoing radio science campaign. Analysis of that signal suggests that the MAVEN spacecraft was rotating in an unexpected manner when it emerged from behind Mars. Further, the frequency of the tracking signal suggests MAVEN’s orbit trajectory may have changed. The team continues to analyze tracking data to understand the most likely scenarios leading to the loss of signal. Efforts to reestablish contact with MAVEN also continue.

It appears the loss of Maven is also impacting communications with the two Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance. While NASA has use of three orbiters at present, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and Europe’s Trace Gas Orbiter, to relay data from the ground to Earth, the loss of Maven reduces that communications network by 25%. Engineers are revising plans to make up some of the loss, but operations for both rovers will be for the time being reduced somewhat.

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The beginnings of a planetary nebula

9:49 am

Calabash Nebula
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope back in 2017 but released this week by NASA’s PR department. It shows what astronomers have nicknamed the Calabash Nebula. From the Wikipedia page:

The Calabash Nebula, also known as the Rotten Egg Nebula or by its technical name OH 231.84 +4.22, is a protoplanetary nebula (PPN) 1.4 light years (13 Pm) long and located some 5,000 light years (47 Em) from Earth in the constellation Puppis. The name “Calabash Nebula” was first proposed in 1989 in an early paper on its expected nebular dynamics, based on the nebula’s appearance.[5] The Calabash is almost certainly a member of the open cluster Messier 46, as it has the same distance, radial velocity, and proper motion.[6] The central star is QX Puppis, a binary composed of a very cool Mira variable and an A-type main-sequence star.

The star in the center is an ancient red giant that is in the initial stages of dying. As it does so it periodically erupts, sending out jets of material from its poles. The result is this elongated shape. According to the release, “the gas shown in yellow is moving close to a million kilometers an hour.”

Over the next few thousand years these eruptions will shape the planetary nebula. Since the central star is actually a binary, those two stars will likely act like the blades in a mixer, adding more interesting forms to the material as it is shot out to form this nebula.

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Scientists map the outside edge of the Sun’s atmosphere

12:22 pm

The mapping of the Sun's atmosphere

Using multiple solar observatories in space, scientists have now been able to map the approximate location of the outside edge of the Sun’s atmosphere, the point “where the speed of the outward solar wind becomes faster than the speed of magnetic waves.”

The panels to the right are a sampling of that mapping, and is figure 3 of the peer-reviewed paper [pdf]. The bulk of the data (black) comes from five spacecraft observing the Sun from the L1 point a million miles from Earth. The blue line is data from Solar Orbiter, while the red line is data from the Parker Solar Probe. From the press release:

Astronomers have produced the first continuous, two-dimensional maps of the outer edge of the Sun’s atmosphere, a shifting, frothy boundary that marks where solar winds escape the Sun’s magnetic grasp. By combining the maps and close-up measurements, scientists from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) showed that the boundary grows larger, rougher and spikier as the Sun becomes more active.

…The boundary in the Sun’s atmosphere where the solar wind’s outward speed becomes faster than the speed of magnetic waves, known as the Alfvén surface, is the “point of no return” for material that escapes the Sun and enters interplanetary space; once material travels beyond this point, it cannot travel back to the Sun. This surface is the effective “edge” of the Sun’s atmosphere, and provides scientists with an active laboratory for studying and understanding how solar activity impacts the rest of the solar system, including life and technology on and around Earth.

This new data further refines the nature of the boundary, as earlier probes had already given scientists a rough idea of its size and nature.

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Abstract art produced by nature within Mars’ north pole ice cap

1:17 pm

Abstract art created by nature on Mars
Click for original

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was taken on October 27, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I have also rotate the image so that north is to the top.

The science team labels this “Exposure of North Polar Layered Deposits,” an apt description of the horizontal red and grey and blue layers that dominate the image and make this geology look more like an abstract painting than a natural landscape. What we are actually looking at is a canyon 800-to-1,200 feet deep within the north polar ice cap of Mars.

The picture was taken in the summer with the Sun about 12 degrees above the horizon to the south. Thus, the northern cliff face is illuminated, revealing its many colored layers, while the south face is mostly in shadow, hiding those layers.
» Read more

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Engineers lose contact with Mars orbiter Maven

8:48 am

NASA announced late yesterday that the engineering team running the Maven Mars orbiter lost contact with the spacecraft on December 6, 2025, and are still trying to figure out what happened and regain communications.

NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft, in orbit around Mars, experienced a loss of signal with ground stations on Earth on Dec. 6. Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the Red Planet. After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.

The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available.

No other information was released.

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A small galaxy with lots of massive stars

9:54 am

A small galaxy with many massive stars
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 and released this week as the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hubble picture of the week.

This dwarf galaxy, 13 million light years away, is called Markarian 178 (Mrk 178). Though much smaller than the Milky Way, it is packed with massive stars. From the caption:

While the bulk of the galaxy is blue owing to an abundance of young, hot stars with little dust shrouding them, Mrk 178 gets a red hue from a collection of massive stars, which are especially concentrated in the brightest, reddish region near the galaxy’s edge. This azure cloud is home to a large number of rare objects called Wolf–Rayet stars. Wolf–Rayet stars are massive stars that are casting off their atmospheres through powerful winds. Because Mrk 178 contains so many Wolf–Rayet stars, the bright emission lines from these stars’ hot stellar winds are etched upon the galaxy’s spectrum. Particularly ionised hydrogen and oxygen appear as a red colour to Mrk 178 in this photo, observed using some of Hubble’s specialised light filters.

Massive stars enter the Wolf–Rayet phase just before they collapse into black holes or neutron stars. Because Wolf–Rayet stars last for only a few million years, researchers know that something must have triggered a recent burst of star formation in Mrk 178. At first glance, it’s not clear what could be the cause — Mrk 178 doesn’t seem to have any close galactic neighbours that could have stirred up its gas to form new stars. Astronomers believe that it was triggered by the interaction with a smaller satellite, as revealed by the presence of low surface brightness tidal features detected around Mrk 178 in deep imaging acquired with the Large Binocular Telescope.

And yet, these observations do not see this small satellite galaxy. It has either been completely absorbed into Mrk 178, or maybe this theory for explaining this dwarf galaxy’s make-up is flawed.

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Perseverance moves west, into the barren hinterlands beyond Jezero Crater

1:56 pm

Perseverance looking west
Click for full resolution. Original images can be found here and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above was created using two pictures taken on December 4, 2025 (here and here) by the navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance. The view I think is looking west, away from the rim of Jezero Crater, which now lies behind the rover to the east.

The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks Perseverance’s position when it took this picture. The yellow lines indicate my rough guess as to the area covered by the panorama. The white dotted line marks the actual route the rover has taken, while the red dotted line the original planned route.

As I noted in my previous Perseverance update in mid-November, the science team has apparently decided to revise the route, abandoning initial plan of going back uphill towards the rim and instead travel downhill into the hills beyond. This is a region that orbital data has suggested might be rich in minerals, making it a prime mining location for future colonists. My guess is that the science team decided they needed to get there, that they had enough data from the rim and that it was now more important to get to the western mineralogy.

Though I am sure they are using the highest resolution orbital images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to guide them, the Perseverance team has not yet upgraded its interactive location map to show those details in this western region. Thus, the map in this area is fuzzy and not as detailed.

The team has also not published its revised planned route, so there is no way to guess where the rover will go next. It does appear however that it is finally leaving Jezero Crater for good.

And as all recent pictures from Perseverance, these images show this Martian landscape to be utterly barren, its hills and valleys softened by dust and eons of erosion from the very thin Martian wind. This is an alien place, though it has the potential with human ingenuity to bloom if we have the courage to try.

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New data strengthens the conflict in the observed value for the universe’s expansion rate

11:49 am

Graphic showing the conflict
Click for original.

The uncertainty of science: New research using a combination of ground- and space-based telescopes has not only failed to resolve the difference between the two values observed for the Hubble constant (the expansion rate of the universe), it actually confirms that conflict.

The graphic to the right nicely illustrates the conflict. Observations from the early universe come up with a value of 67-68 kiloparsecs per second per megaparsec for the Hubble constant. Observations from the present universe, including these new more precise measurements, come up with a value of 73-74. From the press release:

A team of astronomers using a variety of ground and space-based telescopes including the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, have made one of the most precise independent measurements yet of how fast the universe is expanding, further deepening the divide on one of the biggest mysteries in modern cosmology.

Using data gathered from Keck Observatory’s Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) as well as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) researchers have independently confirmed that the universe’s current rate of expansion, known as the Hubble constant (H₀), does not match values predicted from measurements from the universe when it was much younger.

Cosmologists call this conflict “the Hubble Tension”, a absurd fake term expressly designed to hide the fact that they have no idea what’s going on. It isn’t “tension”, it is a perfect example of good observations coming up with contradictory data that no theory can explain.

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New images of interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas

9:56 am

New Hubble image of 3I/Atlas
Click for original.

Juice image of 3I/Atlas
Click for original.

Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday released new photos of the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas.

First, NASA released the image on the right, taken on November 30, 2025 by the Hubble Space Telescope. At the time the comet was about 178 million miles away. It clearly shows the comet’s coma of material, surrounding a bright nucleus at the center. The streaks are background stars.

Next, the mission team for Europe’s Juice probe, on its way to Jupiter, released one small portion of a picture taken by its navigation camera. That picture is the second to the right.

During November 2025, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) used five of its science instruments to observe 3I/ATLAS. The instruments collected information about how the comet is behaving and what it is made of. In addition, Juice snapped the comet with its onboard Navigation Camera (NavCam), designed not as a high-resolution science camera, but to help Juice navigate Jupiter’s icy moons following arrival in 2031.

Though the data from the science instruments won’t arrive on Earth until February 2026, our Juice team couldn’t wait that long. They decided to try downloading just a quarter of a single NavCam image to see what was in store for them. The very clearly visible comet, surrounded by signs of activity, surprised them.

Not only do we clearly see the glowing halo of gas surrounding the comet known as its coma, we also see a hint of two tails. The comet’s ‘plasma tail’ – made up of electrically charged gas, stretches out towards the top of the frame. We may also be able to see a fainter ‘dust tail’ – made up of tiny solid particles – stretching to the lower left of the frame.

The image was taken on 2 November 2025, during Juice’s first slot for observing 3I/ATLAS. It was two days before Juice’s closest approach to the comet, which occurred on 4 November at a distance of about 66 million km.

Because Juice is presently behind the Sun (as seen from Earth), most of the data it collected during its closest approach won’t be downloaded until February. This one partial image is only a fore taste.

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The insane terrain inside Mars’ Death Valley

12:30 pm

taffy terrain
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 27, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this a “twisted surface,” to which I think we all can agree. What we are looking at is a geological feature found only on Mars in only one region that has been labeled “taffy terrain” by scientists. According to a 2014 paper, the scientists posit that this material must be some sort of “a viscous fluid,” naturally flowing downward into “localized depressions.” Because of its weird nature I have posted many cool images of it in the past (see here, here, here, here, here, and here).

In the case of the image to the right, the red dot marks the peak of a small knob, with the green dot on the upper left the low point about 900 feet below. As you can see, the taffy has migrated into the depressions, as some flowing material would.
» Read more

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Ground-based telescope actually photographs an exoplanet

10:51 am

exoplanet imaged directly
Click for original movie.

Using a new instrument on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii astronomers have not only discovered a massive exoplanet orbiting a star, they have been able to actually photograph the planet itself.

The arrow in the picture to the right shows that planet. That picture is a screen capture from a short movie complied from five observations taken over several months earlier this year, showing the planet as it orbited the star, the light of which is blocked out so as to not blind the camera. From the press release:

The newly discovered planet, HIP 54515 b, orbits a star 271 light-years away in the constellation Leo. With nearly 18 times Jupiter’s mass, it circles its star at about Neptune’s distance from our Sun. But the star and planet appear very close when seen from Earth; roughly the size that a baseball seen 100 km away would appear. The SCExAO system produced extremely sharp images allowing us to see the planet.

The astronomers also used this new instrument to image a brown dwarf star with a mass equivalent to sixty Jupiters about 169 light years away.

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Weird mottled terrain in the dry tropics of Mars

1:11 pm

Mottled ridges
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on October 28, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled by the science team as “mottled ridged terrain,” it shows a relatively flat area of scattered broken-up flat-topped ridges and knobs, following no clear pattern of formation.

In trying to research this, I could only find one paper [pdf] discussing this kind of mottled ridges that did a survey of similar features across a large region to the northwest. That paper could not determine what caused such features, but came up with hypothesis. From the abstract:

While it is not possible to determine the precise formation mechanism of these polygonal ridge networks from our new data, their formation can be assessed in terms of three possibly separate processes: (1) polygonal fracture formation, (2) fracture filling and (3) exhumation. We find that polygonal
fracture formation by impact cratering and/or desiccation of sedimentary host deposits is consistent with our results and previous spectral studies. Once the polygonal fractures have formed, fracture filling by clastic dikes and/or mineral precipitation from aqueous circulation is most consistent with our results. Exhumation, probably by aeolian processes that eroded much of these ancient Noachian terrains where the ridges are present caused the filled fractures to lie in relief as ridges today.

To put this in plain terms, the initial polygon-patterned cracks were formed by either an impact or the drying out of the surface (similar to the cracks seen on dried mud here on Earth). Both could have contributed. Then material welled up from below, either lava or mud, that hardened to fill the cracks. Later erosion by wind stripped away the surface, leaving behind these broken ridges.

As always, the location adds some very interesting context.
» Read more

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Sunspot update: Sunspot activity again crashes far below predictions

11:17 am

It is the start of another month, so it is time again to post my monthly update of the never-ending sunspot cycle on the Sun, using NOAA’s own monthly update of its graph of sunspot activity and annotating it with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

The green dot on the graph below indicates the level of sunspot activity on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere during the month of November. And once again, the Sun surprised us, producing far less sunspots than expected, based on the April 2025 prediction by NOAA’s panel of solar scientists (as indicated by the purple/magenta line).
» Read more

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New data from VLT uncovers numerous debris disks around stars

9:01 am

A sampling of debris disks
Click for original

Using a new instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, astronomers have compiled a catalog of 51 potential exoplanet solar systems, all with intriguing debris disks surround the stars with features suggesting the existence of asteroids and comets.

The image to the right shows a sampling of those systems. From the press release:

“To obtain this collection, we processed data from observations of 161 nearby young stars whose infrared emission strongly indicates the presence of a debris disk,” says Natalia Engler (ETH Zurich), the lead author of the study. “The resulting images show 51 debris disks with a variety of properties — some smaller, some larger, some seen from the side and some nearly face-on – and a considerable diversity of disk structures. Four of the disks had never been imaged before.”

Comparisons within a larger sample are crucial for discovering the systematics behind object properties. In this case, an analysis of the 51 debris disks and their stars confirmed several systematic trends: When a young star is more massive, its debris disk tends to have more mass as well. The same is true for debris disks where the majority of the material is located at a greater distance from the central star.

Arguably the most interesting feature of the SPHERE debris disks are the structures within the disks themselves. In many of the images, disks have a concentric ring- or band-like structure, with disk material predominantly found at specific distances from the central star. The distribution of small bodies in our own solar system has a similar structure, with small bodies concentrated in the asteroid belt (asteroids) and the Kuiper belt (comets).

The data from various telescopes both on the ground and in space is increasingly telling us that our solar system is not unique, and that the galaxy is filled with millions of similar systems, all in different states of formation. This hypothesis is further strengthened by the appearance of interstellar comet 3I/Atlas, which despite coming from outside our solar system is remarkably similar to the comets formed here.

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Astronomers detect another galaxy that shouldn’t be there, so soon after the Big Bang

11:38 am

A spiral galaxy too early in the universe
Click for original.

Using the Webb Space Telescopes astronomers have detected another galaxy that shouldn’t be there, so soon after the Big Bang.

The image to the right comes from figure 1 of the peer-reviewed paper. The galaxy’s two spiral arms form a backward “S” emanating out from the galaxy’s nucleus. From the press release:

Using JWST, researchers Rashi Jain and Yogesh Wadadekar spotted a galaxy remarkably similar to our own Milky Way. Yet this system formed when the cosmos was barely 1.5 billion years old—roughly a tenth of its present age. They named it Alaknanda, after the Himalayan river that is a twin headstream of the Ganga alongside the Mandakini—fittingly, the Hindi name for the Milky Way.

…It already has two sweeping spiral arms wrapped around a bright, rounded central region (the galaxy’s ‘bulge’), spanning about 30,000 light-years across. Even more impressively, it is annually churning out new stars, their combined mass roughly equivalent to 60 times the mass of our Sun. This rate is about 20 times that of the present-day Milky Way! About half of Alaknanda’s stars appear to have formed in only 200 million years—a blink in cosmic time.

This galaxy underlines the difficulty for cosmologists by much of Webb’s data of the early universe. Present theories of galaxy formation say it should take billions of years to form such a spiral galaxy, meaning it shouldn’t exist as yet so soon, only 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

Either the theories have to be revised substantially, or they are simply wrong entirely. Or we are missing or lacking in some fundamental information about the early universe that skews all our theories.

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Three new papers find sugars, “gum,” and lots of stardust in the samples brought back from the asteroid Bennu

10:24 am

Bennu
The asteroid Bennu

Three new papers published this week have found that the samples brought back by OSIRIS-REx from the asteroid Bennu contained some unexpected or unusual materials, including sugars that are important for biology, a gumlike material never seen before, and a much higher amount of stardust than expected.

The papers can be read here, here, and here.

As the press release notes, describing the sugar discovery:

The five-carbon sugar ribose and, for the first time in an extraterrestrial sample, six-carbon glucose were found. Although these sugars are not evidence of life, their detection, along with previous detections of amino acids, nucleobases, and carboxylic acids in Bennu samples, show building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the solar system.

The stardust results found six-times the abundance previously found in other samples.

As for the “gum”, this was possibly the strangest discovery of all, coming from the solar system’s earliest time period.
» Read more

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More glaciers on Mars

12:41 pm

Overview map

More glaciers on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 26, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The scientists label this image “Moraine-like assemblage exposed by ice retreat.” I say: If anyone still doubts the extensive presence of near-surface ice on Mars, this picture should put that doubt to rest.

The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, deep within the 2,000-mile-long strip in the Martian northern mid-latitudes that I label “glacier country,” because practically every picture taken there shows glacial features. This picture is just one more example. As the inset in the overview above shows, this flow is coming down from the exterior rim of an unnamed, partly obscured ancient 17-mile-wide crater, dropping about 7,000 feet from the rim’s peak. This particular section shows the last 3,000 feet of that descent, as the glacier worked its way through a gap in a ridge paralleling that rim.

The image label refers to the flow features that appear to be corroding away. It appears the full data set suggests that corrosion is exposing the material pushed downward by that glacier, what on Earth we call a moraine.

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Predicting dust storms in the Starship candidate landing zone on Mars

1:30 pm

View of dust storm one
Click for original figure.

Scientists using the UAE’s Al-Amal Mars orbiter were able to track two near-identical dust storms that occurred in the northern lowland plains of Mars and near the candidate landing zone for SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft.

The image to the right comes from figure 2 of the paper, and was taken by Al-Amal approximately 25,000 miles above the red planet’s surface. By comparing the growth and evolution of both storms, the scientists now think they have a method for predicting when such storms occur in this region. From their abstract:

Our observational case study constrains scenarios presented by Ogohara (2025). We show the first scenario, summarized in Section 5 of Ogohara (2025), [explains] dust storms 1 and 2. This scenario is as follows. Dust storms form in the later morning hours through combined effects of the warm sector of a low-pressure system and daytime phenomena. The low-pressure system is associated with wavenumber 3 baroclinic waves.

There is no doubt that dust storms 1 and 2 start to form and develop in the late morning hours, in or near the warm sector of a low-pressure system. Also, combined effects of this low-pressure system and daytime convection are possible. This is supported by evidence for daytime convection, such as the dust devil number in MY 28 and planetary boundary layer height estimates from the Mars Climate Database.

In other words, future SpaceX colonists should be prepared for late morning dust storms when a low-pressure system moves in.

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