Tag: science

Baby stars illuminating the dust that surrounds them

10:03 am

Baby stars illuminating dark dust
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 showing the wispy bluish clouds made of dark dust that we can only see because the dust is illuminated by the reflected light from the five red and blue stars nearby. Think of the Moon, lit only by the reflected light of the Sun.

The photo however was not taken to study the clouds, but these baby stars, located in one of the closest star forming regions of the Milky Way.

GN 04.32.8 is a small part of the stellar nursery known as the Taurus Molecular Cloud. At only roughly 480 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus, it’s one of the best locations for studying newly forming stars. This reflection nebula is illuminated by the system of three bright stars in the centre of this image, mainly the variable star V1025 Tauri in the very centre. One of those stars overlaps with part of the nebula: this is another variable star that is named HP Tauri, but is classified as a T Tauri star, for its similarity to yet another variable star elsewhere in the Taurus Molecular Complex. T Tauri stars are very active, chaotic stars at an early stage of their evolution, so it’s no surprise that they appear in a prolific stellar nursery like this one! The three stars are also named HP Tau, HP Tau G2 and HP Tau G3; they’re believed to be gravitationally bound to each other, forming a triple system.

Eagle-eyed viewers might notice the small, squashed, orange spot, just left of centre below the clouds of the nebula, that’s crossed by a dark line. This is a newly-formed protostar, hidden in a protoplanetary disc that obstructs some of its light. Because the disc is edge-on to us, it’s an ideal candidate for study. Astronomers are using Hubble here to examine it closely, seeking to learn about the kinds of exoplanets that might be formed in discs like it.

As beautiful as this image is, it is that tiny protostar near the bottom that likely attracts the most interest from astronomers.

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The sagging flank of one of Mars’ giant volcanoes

1:51 pm

The sagging flank of Elysium Mons
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 1, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels a “chain of pit craters in [a] graben”.

A graben is a surface fissure created when the surface either spreads or two sections shift sideways in opposite directions. The chain of pits suggest that there is a larger void below into which the surface is sinking. It is also likely that a lot of the sinking material is volcanic ash, thrown free in an eruption hundreds of millions of years ago, which over the eons has been blown up to this location to settle in the crack to fill it. It is now trapped there, and sinking.

What caused the ground here to shift and create the fissure? In this case, the cause is quite large and massive, in a way that boggles the mind.
» Read more

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Webb takes infrared image of exoplanet

9:32 am

Webb's image of exoplanet

Using the Webb Space Telescope astronomers have now successfully taken an infrared false-color image of Saturn-sized exoplanet orbiting a young star about half the mass of the Sun and about 111 light years away.

The image is to the right, cropped and reduced to post here. The star, its light blocked out, is indicated by the circle with the star in the middle. The exoplanet is the orange blob to the upper right, sitting inside the blue accretion disk that surrounds the star, photographed in optical light by the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

You can read the paper here. The scientists rejected the possibility that this was a background galaxy after doing computer modeling, based on the data available. From their paper:

Dedicated N-body simulations were conducted for a planet with a mass of 0.34 [mass of Jupiter], located at 52 au [astronomical units] around the 0.46 [solar mass] central star. This value is consistent with the measured projected separation, assuming that the planet and the ≈13°-inclined disk are coplanar. The simulation also included a disk of 200,000 planetesimals, distributed between 20 and 130 au. These parameters were selected to roughly match the boundaries of the observed disk.

Note too that the picture to the right has been significantly enhanced by the press department at JPL, based on the actual data shown in the paper itself. These fact underline the uncertainties involved in this discovery.

Nonetheless, it is a good result, and suggests we are looking at the formation process of a new solar system surrounding a very young baby star.

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Astronomers look at the Andromeda Galaxy in many wavelengths

3:11 pm

Andromeda across many wavelengths
Click for full images.

Astronomers using both old and new and ground- and space-based telescopes have created a full set of observations of the Andromeda Galaxy (also known as M31) across five different wavelengths, producing one of the most complete views of the galaxy so far.

This new composite image contains data of M31 taken by some of the world’s most powerful telescopes in different kinds of light. This image includes X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton (represented in red, green, and blue); ultraviolet data from NASA’s retired GALEX (blue); optical data from astrophotographers using ground based telescopes (Jakob Sahner and Tarun Kottary); infrared data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, the Infrared Astronomy Satellite, COBE, Planck, and Herschel (red, orange, and purple); and radio data from the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (red-orange).

Each type of light reveals new information about this close galactic relative to the Milky Way. For example, Chandra’s X-rays reveal the high-energy radiation around the supermassive black hole at the center of M31 as well as many other smaller compact and dense objects strewn across the galaxy.

The contrast in emissions between different wavelengths is certainly striking. The radio, infrared, and ultraviolet data clearly delineate the galaxy’s arms where star formation is occurring. The X-ray highlights the galaxy’s central black hole.

This press release is clearly intended to lobby against the cuts at NASA, especially considering that several of these images (Galax, Spitzer) are not new. At the same time, it does demonstrate the need to look at the heavens across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. It seems to me that the astronomical community should begin to consider other methods of funding for this work, other than just the federal government, and in fact they prove this point themselves by the use of images above from some smaller ground-based telescopes not funded by American tax dollars.

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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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Another permanently shadowed crater on the Moon shows no obvious ice

11:40 am

The permanently shadowed floor of Hermes-A crater, as seen by Shadowcam
Note that the bright areas are not ice but simply overexposed

The science team operating the Shadowcam camera on South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter — designed to take images in places with little light — yesterday released a new image taken of the floor of a permanently shadowed crater on the Moon, Hermes-A, located near the north pole.

That picture is to the right. The rectangle indicates the area discussed by the release, focusing entirely on describing its geological features, such as impact melt and the numerous secondary smaller impacts and ejecta within the crater floor. The inset gives the context, showing the crater’s location near the north pole. The blue areas in the inset are those areas thought to be permanently shadowed, such as the entire floor of Hermes-A.

What the release fails to mention is the most important detail lacking in this picture. Though the floor of Hermes-A crater is considered permanently shadowed, the low light image taken by Shadowcam shows no obvious ice features, at all. If there is a higher content of water here, it is locked within the soil, and would require processing to access. Even so, the picture suggests that any such moisture is of extremely low concentration, likely in the parts per billion, and hardly enough to build a lunar base.

This is the same result found by previous Shadowcam pictures. Increasingly it appears that the hope of finding large quantities of easily accessible water ice in these permanently shadowed craters is proving false.

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Ispace: Resilience’s failure was due to a hardware issue in laser range finder

8:34 pm

In a press conference today, officials of the Japanese startup Ispace explained that the failure of its second lunar lander, Resilience, to land softly on the Moon on June 5, 2025 was due to a hardware issue in its laser range finder that prevented it from providing correct altitude data.

At the same time, they have not yet been able to pin down precisely what caused the failure. It could have been because of unexpected degradation during flight, or possibly a technical fault with the range finder in gathering data at the speeds and altitudes experienced.

The company is forming a task force in partnership with Japan’s space agency JAXA as well as NASA to try to figure out the issue. It is also going to add lidar instrumentation to future missions to provide a backup to the laser range finder. These actions will add about $11 million in additional costs, an amount Ispace says it can absorb.

Ispace is building two more lunar landers, one for NASA in partnership with the American company Draper, and the second for JAXA. It appears both missions are still moving forward.

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Parker completes its 24th close fly-by of the Sun

10:13 am

The Parker Solar Probe has successfully completed its 24th close fly-by of the Sun, the last of its initial primary mission, matching the distance and speed record set during two previous fly-bys.

Parker Solar Probe checked in with mission operators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland — where it was also designed and built — on Sunday, June 22, reporting that all systems are healthy and operating normally. The spacecraft was out of contact with Earth and operating autonomously during the close approach.

During this flyby, the spacecraft also equaled its record-setting speed of 430,000 miles per hour (687,000 km per hour) — a mark that, like the distance, was set and subsequently matched during close approaches on Dec. 24, 2024, and March 22, 2025.

The data obtained during this fly-by will be beamed back to Earth in the coming months, as Parker moves to the outer part of its orbit, farther from the Sun.

Though this completes the planned orbits of the mission’s primary mission, the proposed Trump budget continues to fund the spacecraft’s operation for the next five years, allowing it to monitor changes in the Sun as it ramps down from solar maximum to solar minimum.

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The new Rubin telescope releases its first images

9:34 am

Section of the Virgo cluster, as seen by Rubin
Click to see all first look images.

The new Vera Rubin telescope, located in Chile and designed to provide a high resolution survey of the southern sky every three nights, has now released its first images.

Rubin Observatory will … be the most efficient and effective Solar System discovery machine ever built. Rubin will take about a thousand images of the Southern Hemisphere sky every night, allowing it to cover the entire visible Southern sky every three to four nights. In doing so, it will find millions of unseen asteroids, comets and interstellar objects. Rubin will be a game changer for planetary defense by spotting far more asteroids than ever before, potentially identifying some that might impact the Earth or Moon.

The image to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, shows a small section of the Virgo cluster of galaxies, about 50 million light years away.

The telescope’s vast survey data of the sky will also be used to attempt to determine the nature of both dark matter and dark energy.

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Isaacman hints of future space plans

9:11 am

In receiving an award from a space advocacy group on June 21, 2025, billionaire Jared Isaacman hinted that his future space-related plans could include working with science organizations to finance scientific probes.

[Had he become NASA administrator he had wanted] NASA to partner with academic organizations on missions where such organizations would have had a bigger role in funding. “My priorities would have been leadership in space and the orbital economy,” he said, “and trying to introduce a concept where NASA could help enable others to conduct interesting scientific missions, getting academic organizations to contribute.”

That was something he said he might be interested in pursuing outside the agency. “I wouldn’t mind maybe trying to put that to a test and see if you could fund an interesting robotic mission, just to show that it can be done, and try and get some of the top tier academic institutions who want to perform. So that’s on my mind.”

He also indicated that he generally has no problem with the Trump administration’s proposed NASA cuts, noting that such academic organizations need to figure out how to work with less money.

Despite this statement, it appears he is still unsure of what he will do next in space. He has not restarted his Polaris Dawn manned program — suspended when he was nominated to become NASA administrator — and has said that right now he is more focused taking advantage of this unexpected break from work to spend more time with his family.

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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.
» Read more

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Astronomers claim radio data detects much of the universe’s “missing mass”

10:55 am

The uncertainty of science: Using radio data from 60 fast radio bursts scattered across the sky, astronomers think they have detected the signature of much of the universe’s “missing mass” that has until now been ascribed to some unknown material dubbed dark matter but in fact is mostly ordinary matter that was previously unobserved.

The results show that about 76% of baryonic matter is in the intergalactic medium, 15% is in the halos around galaxies and the rest is inside stars or cold galactic gas.

From the paper’s abstract:

Approximately half of the Universe’s dark matter resides in collapsed halos; significantly less than half of the baryonic matter (protons and neutrons) remains confined to halos. A small fraction of baryons are in stars and the interstellar medium within galaxies. The majority are diffuse (<10−3 cm−3) and ionized (neutral fraction <10−4), located in the intergalactic medium (IGM) and in the halos of galaxy clusters, groups and galaxies.

In other words, the dark matter is simply ordinary matter made up of ionized “diffuse ionized gas” that ” is notoriously difficult to measure.”

One major uncertainty of this result is its dependence on fast radio bursts. The scientists claim the sixty bursts they used came from distances ranging from 12 million to 9 billion light years, but it is unclear how they determined those distances. We do not currently know the source of fast radio bursts, which means we also do not really know exactly where they occur or how distant they are from us. This research however relies on that uncertain knowledge, because it measures the changes to each burst’s radio emissions as it travels through intergalactic space.

Nonetheless, if confirmed this result shouldn’t surprise us. The universe is gigantic and mostly hard to observe. For there to be a gigantic amount of undetected ordinary matter scattered between the galaxies is perfectly reasonable. Inventing something extraordinary — dark matter — is actually a far more unreasonable scientific strategy.

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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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China launches science satellite to study Earth’s electromagnetic fields

9:34 am

China today successfully launched a science satellite built in partnership with Italy and designed to study the interaction of the Earth’s atmosphere with its electromagnetic fields, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China. As for the satellite:

With a designed lifespan of six years, the satellite is equipped with nine payloads, including an electric field detector co-developed by China and Italy, as well as a high-energy particle detector developed by Italy. It will carry out quasi-real-time monitoring of global electromagnetic fields, electromagnetic waves, the ionosphere and the neutral atmosphere, detecting electromagnetic anomalies caused by geological and human activities, as well as monitoring thunderstorm and lightning activity, according to CNSA.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

74 SpaceX
34 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 74 to 55.

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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.
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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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Sunspot update: The Sun confounds the predictions again!

11:27 am

It is time for my monthly update of the Sun’s ongoing sunspot activity, using the update that NOAA posts each month to its own graph of sunspot activity but annotated by me with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

The activity in May was shocking in that it completely contradicted all expectations by everyone in the solar science community, with the Sun’s sunspot count changing in a way that was somewhat unprecedented. The graph below makes this very clear:

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