Tag: science

India’s Vikram lunar lander: Data suggests there could be more water impregnated in more places on the Moon

12:16 pm

According to scientists analyzing the data sent back from India’s Vikram lunar lander, it appears that water could be impregnated in the upper lunar soil in more places than previously predicted.

You can read their paper here [pdf]. One instrument on the lander measured the temperature of the soil down about four inches, and found the temperature to be 25 degrees Celsius warmer than expected. That location was on a sunward-facing slope, so it was expected to be warmer but not by that amount. From the paper’s abstract:

This demonstrates that local topography at metre scales can alter temperature at high latitudes, unlike equatorial regions. Numerical model calculations using ChaSTE measurements, suggest that larger poleward facing slopes(>14°) at high latitudes can harbour water-ice, making them promising and technically less challenging sites for future lunar exploration and habitation.

In other words, slopes that get much less sunlight near the poles but are not permanently shadowed could still be cold enough only a few inches below the surface to harbor water molecules.

Sounds good, but I am beginning to sense a bit of blarney in these stories, over-pushing the possible existence of water to encourage more government space funding. It might be true that there is more water molecules in more places than predicted, but rarely do these reports say how much, which I expect will be very very little, in the parts per billion range. Nor do these stories ever consider the processing necessary to extract that water. Based on other data obtained from the Shadowcam instrument on South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter, it increasingly seems to me that any water found in polar regions of the Moon could be very slight, or even if in large amounts much more difficult to access than anyone ever mentions.

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Webb captures infrared view of a baby binary star system and its bi-polar jets

9:41 am

A baby binary in formation
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The infrared false-color picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was released today by the science team of the Webb Space Telescope. It shows the bi-polar jets spewing out from a newly formed binary of two very young stars as their interact during their formation process.

The two protostars responsible for this scene are at the center of the hourglass shape, in an opaque horizontal disk of cold gas and dust that fits within a single pixel. Much farther out, above and below the flattened disk where dust is thinner, the bright light from the stars shines through the gas and dust, forming large semi-transparent orange cones.

It’s equally important to notice where the stars’ light is blocked — look for the exceptionally dark, wide V-shapes offset by 90 degrees from the orange cones. These areas may look like there is no material, but it’s actually where the surrounding dust is the densest, and little starlight penetrates it. If you look carefully at these areas, Webb’s sensitive NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) has picked up distant stars as muted orange pinpoints behind this dust. Where the view is free of obscuring dust, stars shine brightly in white and blue.

To put it more simply, the accretion disk for the binary system lies at right angles to the much larger jets. The rotation of that disk as well as the stars causes those jets to flow up and down from the poles, with the existence of two stars producing the complex patterns in those jets.

As this image was focused mostly on studying the upper jet, it does not show the entire lower jet, which extends beyond the lower border.

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Athena sits at an unknown angle on the Moon, hampering operations

2:25 pm

Athena's landing site 100 miles from the Moon's south pole
Yellow cross indicates Athena’s targeted landing site

According to the CEO of Intuitive Machines, Athena is sitting an an unknown angle on the Moon, impacting the possibility of all surface science operations.

The tilt is hampering their ability to use the high gain antenna which they need use to download most of their data. They do not know the angle, or the cause of this issue. It could simply be that the ground slope is too severe. It is also possible the spacecraft, which has a relatively high center of gravity, fell over on its side because of that slope. Moreover, they do not know at the moment exactly where the spacecraft landed, though they know it landed on Mons Mouton as planned. They need to download pictures from the spacecraft, as well as from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in orbit to determine precisely the location and the situation.

It is also unclear what payloads will be impacted by this situation. It could be that most if all could be utilized, but that question cannot be answered until they learn more. I suspect both the mini-rover and the Grace hopper will be affected the most, as the tilt might make it impossible to deploy either.

For Intuitive Machines this situation is very unfortunate. It has sent two unmanned lunar landers, and both have had issues at landing, though it must be emphasized that the issue on today’s second landing might have nothing to do with the company’s engineering at all.

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Is a supermassive black hole is hidden in the Large Magellanic Cloud?

11:45 am

Based on the motions of a number of runaway stars on the edge of the Milky Way that are moving so fast they will leave the galaxy, astronomers believe that many were accelerated not by the galaxy’s own central supermassive black hole but a previously undetected supermassive black hole at the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Ways nearby dwarf galaxies.

To make this discovery, researchers traced the paths with ultra-fine precision of 21 stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way. These stars are traveling so fast that they will escape the gravitational clutches of the Milky Way or any nearby galaxy. Astronomers refer to these as “hypervelocity” stars.

Similar to how forensic experts recreate the origin of a bullet based on its trajectory, researchers determined where these hypervelocity stars come from. They found that about half are linked to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. However, the other half originated from somewhere else: a previously-unknown giant black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

You can read the paper here [pdf]. This result was made possible by the very precise location and velocity data of over a billion stars measured by Europe’s Gaia satellite.

Based on the available data, the scientists estimate (with great uncertainty) the mass of this supermassive black hole, which the scientists have dubbed LMC* (pronounced “LMC star”), to be about 600,000 times the mass of the Sun, quite big but significantly less than the mass of the Milky Way’s central black hole, Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”), which is estimated to be about 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun.

The mystery to solve now is why this super massive black hole is so quiet. It has literally emitted no obvious energy in any wavelength in the past seven decades, since ground- and space-based telescopes went into operation capable of detecting such emissions. Even the relatively inactive supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”) emits distinct radio energy that the first radio telescopes were able to detect almost immediately.

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Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander touches down softly; engineers are assessing spacecraft condition

10:55 am

Though Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander has apparently softly landed near the south pole of the Moon, there remains uncertainty about the spacecraft’s status. Engineers have contact with Athena, and are apparently shutting down the landing equipment in order to make Athena safe for surface operations.

Unlike the previous landing, the spacecraft is upright and responding fully as expected. It appears the main issue is the position of Athena relative to the horizon. This is important as it determines the best antenna’s to use to upload and download data to and from Earth.

A full update will be provided at a press conference scheduled for 4 pm (Eastern) today. I have embedded the live stream of that conference below.
» Read more

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Scientists discover the oldest known crater on Earth

10:09 am

Though erosion has made it visibly unnoticeable now, scientists have discovered geological features 3.5 billion years old in northwestern Australia that suggest the location is the oldest impact crater known on Earth.

The crater was discovered by geologists at Curtin University and the Geological Survey of Western Australia in the Pilbara region of northwestern Australia. While it’s hard to see directly as a classic crater shape, due to its age, the team found it through other evidence – namely “shatter cones,” geological features that form only when exposed to extreme pressures, like meteorite impacts or underground nuclear explosions.

The newly discovered crater is estimated to be at least 100 km (62 miles) wide, which suggests the original object that crashed into Earth was traveling at more than 36,000 km/h (22,000 mph), and would have caused destruction on a global scale. The impact appears to have occurred 3.47 billion years ago. “Before our discovery, the oldest impact crater was 2.2 billion years old, so this is by far the oldest known crater ever found on Earth,” said Professor Tim Johnson, co-lead author of the study.

You can read the published paper here. There are many assumptions and uncertainty in this conclusion, but it is likely correct.

The impact likely occurred during a time period scientists call the Late Heavy Bombardment, when the planets in the solar system were beginning to accrete out of the thick disk of dust and rocks that surrounded the Sun. On Earth most of the evidence of this bombardment is gone, destroyed by erosion and plate technoics. We only know about it from the craters on the Moon, Mercury, and Mars, where erosion has left those impacts mostly untouched.

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Future now very dim for Lunar Trailblazer

9:26 am

Though engineers are continuing attempts to re-establish contact with the orbiter Lunar Trailblazer as it flies outward after launch, the situation is becoming increasingly grim.

Based on telemetry before the loss of signal last week and ground-based radar data collected March 2, the team believes the spacecraft is spinning slowly in a low-power state. They will continue to monitor for signals should the spacecraft orientation change to where the solar panels receive more sunlight, increasing their output to support higher-power operations and communication.

The problem is that, without communications, the spacecraft was not able to do several mid-course corrections that would have sent it on the right path to the Moon. Though it might still be possible to get it to the Moon, communications must be re-established soon to do so.

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Europa Clipper completes Mars fly-by

9:21 am

Data from Europa Clipper has now confirmed that its March 1, 2025 Mars fly-by was successful, putting it on the right trajectory to do a fly-by of Earth in December 2026.

When Europa Clipper launched, navigators deliberately aimed a little away from Mars to avoid any possibility of a launch error turning into a Mars impact. Since then, they’ve performed three deep-space trajectory correction maneuvers to line up for the encounter. Europa Clipper whizzed by Mars at 17:57 UT, only 2 km away from the target height of 884 km. A final maneuver, planned for March 17th, will correct any residual trajectory error.

Only two instruments were activated, mostly as tests to see if they were operating properly. Though the data has not yet been downloaded back to Earth, engineers say that it appears all worked as expected.

If the Earth fly-by in 2026 is successful, Europa Clipper will rendezvous with Jupiter in April 2030, entering an orbit that will fly past Europa numerous times.

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Blue Ghost lunar surface operations proceeding as planned

9:13 am

According to a Firefly update today, all of Blue Ghost’s planned lunar surface operations are working as planned.

Eight out of 10 NASA payloads, including LPV, EDS, NGLR, RAC, RadPC, LuGRE, LISTER, and SCALPSS, have already met their mission objectives with more to come. Lunar PlanetVac for example successfully collected, transferred, and sorted lunar soil from the Moon using pressurized nitrogen gas.

I have embedded below the video posted at the link of Lunar PlanetVac deploying and then blowing that gas to capture surface soil.
» Read more

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Engineers turn off one more instrument on each Voyager spacecraft

3:57 pm

The Voyager missions
The routes the Voyager spacecraft have
taken since launch. Not to scale.

Due to continuing reductions in the power generated by their nuclear energy sources (after a half century of operation) engineers have now turned off one more science instrument on each Voyager spacecraft in order to extend the spacecrafts’ life as long as possible.

Mission engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California turned off the cosmic ray subsystem experiment aboard Voyager 1 on Feb. 25 and will shut off Voyager 2’s low-energy charged particle instrument on March 24. Three science instruments will continue to operate on each spacecraft. The moves are part of an ongoing effort to manage the gradually diminishing power supply of the twin probes.

Even with this action, the future lifespan of both spacecraft is very limited. It is expected the savings in power will allow both to last about a year longer, well into 2026. In order to keep the Voyagers operating as long as into the 2030s mission engineers are now working up a timeline for shutting down the remaining instruments in a step-by-step manner. In that long run the goal won’t be science gathering but engineering. Can humans keep a spacecraft operating for more than a half century at distances billions of miles away?

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Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter snaps picture of Blue Ghost on the Moon

11:21 am

Blue Ghost on the Moon
Click for full image. For original of inset go here.

Shortly after Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down within Mare Crisium on the Moon, the science team for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) used it to capture a picture of lander on the surface of the Moon.

That image is to the right, reduced to post here. The inset was expanded and sharpened to bring out the details, with the arrow showing Blue Ghost, that tiny dot in the center with a shadow to the right.

The Firefly Blue Ghost lunar lander set down on 2nd March 2025. The landing site (arrow) is about 4000 meters from the center of Mons Latreille, a large volcanic cone [seen to the left].

…LRO was 175 kilometers east (19.294°N, 67.956°E) of the landing site when the NACs acquired this dramatic view of the landing site on 02 March 2025 at 17:49 UTC.

Blue Ghost landed shortly after lunar sunrise, and is designed to operate for one full lunar day (fourteen Earth days). Whether it can survive the 14-day-long lunar night won’t be known until the next sunrise.

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Psyche captures Jupiter and Mars on its way to asteroid Psyche

11:02 am

Jupiter and Mars as seen by Psyche
Click for original image.

As part of routine maintenance and calibration, engineers on January 30, 2025 used the cameras on the Psyche asteroid probe to photograph Jupiter, Mars, and several stars, proving all is well with the spacecraft.

Scientists on the imaging team, led by Arizona State University, also took images of the bright stars Vega and Canopus, which have served as standard calibration sources for astronomers for decades. The team is also using the data to assess the effects of minor wiggles or “jitter” in the spacecraft’s pointing system as it points the cameras to different places in the sky. The observations of Jupiter and Mars also help the team determine how the cameras respond to solar system objects that shine by reflected sunlight, just like the Psyche asteroid.

The starfield pictures shown here are long-exposure (five-second) images captured by each camera. By over-exposing Jupiter to bring out some of the background stars in the Taurus constellation, the imagers were able to capture Jupiter’s fainter Galilean moons as well.

The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, might not be much to look at, but it clearly demonstrates the cameras work and the spacecraft can point accurately, and will work as planned when it arrives at the metal asteroid Psyche in August 2029.

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Watch the landing of Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander on the Moon tomorrow

9:21 am

Athena's landing site 100 miles from the Moon's south pole

NASA has now announced its live stream arrangement for the landing of Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander on the Moon tomorrow at 12:32 pm (Eastern).

The live stream will begin about sixty minutes before landing. The NASA live stream is available here. I have also embedded it below.

The map to the right shows the landing site by the yellow “X”, about 100 miles from the Moon’s south pole on a high relatively flat plateau dubbed Mons Mouton. This will be the closest any lander has come to the pole, and was the original site chosen for NASA’s now-canceled VIPER rover. If the landing is successful Athena will land close to a small crater that is believed to have permanently shadowed areas. The plan had been to have VIPER travel into it. Now the small Grace hopper that Athena carries will attempt this instead.

This will also be the second attempt by Intuitive Machines to soft land on the Moon. Its first attempt last year was able to land and communicate back to Earth, but the landing was not completely successful. The lander, named Nova-C as well as Odysseus, was moving too fast sideways when it touched down, thus breaking one leg so that the lander fell on its side.
» Read more

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Blue Ghost: Earth’s GPS constellations work on the Moon

8:50 am

Using an engineering test GPS-type receiver built by the Italian Space Agency, engineers have successfully been able to use the GPS-type satellites from two different constellations to pinpoint the location of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander on the Moon.

The road to the historic milestone began on March 2 when the Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down on the Moon and delivered LuGRE, one of 10 NASA payloads intended to advance lunar science. Soon after landing, LuGRE payload operators at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, began conducting their first science operation on the lunar surface.

With the receiver data flowing in, anticipation mounted. Could a Moon-based mission acquire and track signals from two GNSS constellations, GPS and Galileo, and use those signals for navigation on the lunar surface?

Then, at 2 a.m. EST on March 3, it was official: LuGRE acquired and tracked signals on the lunar surface for the first time ever and achieved a navigation fix — approximately 225,000 miles away from Earth.

Obviously, this is a first-time engineering test. A portable version of LuGRE will now have to be developed. However, this success means that any operation on the near side of the Moon will not need the addition of a new GPS-type constellation in lunar orbit. It also will likely simplify the design of any constellation for providing this capability to the far side.

Meanwhile, Blue Ghost continues to operate as planned on the surface, with all instruments functioning and several already collecting data.

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Scientists: X-rays from the Helix Nebula caused by the destruction of a planet

10:12 am

A composite image of the Helix Nebula
A composite image of the Helix Nebula, combining data
from multiple ground- and space-based telescopes.
Click for original image.

Using data collected by multiple ground-bases and space telescopes over decades, scientists now think the previously unexplained high energy X-rays coming from the white dwarf star at the center of the Helix Nebula are caused by the destruction of a Jupiter-sized exoplanet.

The besieged planet could have initially been a considerable distance from the white dwarf but then migrated inwards by interacting with the gravity of other planets in the system. Once it approached close enough to the white dwarf, the gravity of the star would have partially or completely torn the planet apart. “The mysterious signal we’ve been seeing could be caused by the debris from the shattered planet falling onto the white dwarf’s surface, and being heated to glow in X-rays,” said co-author Martin Guerrero of The Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain. “If confirmed, this would be the first case of a planet seen to be destroyed by the central star in a planetary nebula.”

The study shows that the X-ray signal from the white dwarf has remained approximately constant in brightness between 1992, 1999, and 2002 (with observations by ROSAT, Chandra and XMM respectively). The data, however, suggests there may be a subtle, regular change in the X-ray signal every 2.9 hours, providing evidence for the remains of a planet exceptionally close to the white dwarf.

You can read the original paper here. The Helix Nebula is about 650 light years away, and is one of the most studied planetary nebula, believed to have formed when the central star collapsed into a white dwarf.

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Ispace targets June 6, 2025 for the Moon landing its Resilience commercial lander

8:31 am

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

The Japanese startup Ispace announced today that its Resilience commercial lunar lander will attempt its touch down inside the Mare Frigoris region on the Moon on June 6, 2025, as shown on the map to the right.

Should conditions change, there are three alternative landing sites that are being considered with different landing dates and times for each. A decision about landing will be made in advance, but the window for landing is open from June 6 through June 8, 2025.

The company also reports that the spacecraft is healthy and operating exactly as expected.

Though Resilience was launched on the same Falcon 9 rocket that launched Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, it has taken a longer route to the Moon, which is why its landing will take place three months later.

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Sunspot update: Sunspot activity remains high but stable

3:02 pm

The uncertainty of science Time for my monthly update on our Sun’s sunspot cycle, based on NOAA’s monthly graph of the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Sun, but annotated by me with additional information.

The graph below shows that the number of sunspots in February continued the trend during this solar maximum of being significantly higher than the consensus prediction by a panel of NOAA solar scientists, as indicated by the red curve. At the same time, the count in February was well below the high point during the summer of 2024. Instead, though it went up slightly in February it remains at about the same level we have seen since September.
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A galaxy surrounded by clusters of hot massive stars

8:44 am

A galaxy surrounded by hot massive stars
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 of the galaxy NGC 5042, located about 48 million light years away. The picture combines data from all of Hubble’s available wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the infrared. From the caption:

Perhaps NGC 5042’s most striking feature is its collection of brilliant pink gas clouds that are studded throughout its spiral arms. These flashy clouds are called H II (pronounced “H-two”) regions, and they get their distinctive colour from hydrogen atoms that have been ionised by ultraviolet light. If you look closely at this image, you’ll see that many of these reddish clouds are associated with clumps of blue stars, often appearing to form a shell around the stars.

H II regions arise in expansive clouds of hydrogen gas, and only hot and massive stars [indicated by blue] produce enough high-energy light to create an H II region. Because the stars capable of creating H II regions only live for a few million years — just a blink of an eye in galactic terms — this image represents a fleeting snapshot of life in this galaxy.

The image also includes one star (distinguished by its four diffraction spikes) and a few background galaxies in yellow, the most obvious found in the upper and lower right.

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Blue Ghost successfully completes a soft landing

1:46 am

Blue Ghost's shadow on the Moon, with the Earth in the background
Blue Ghost’s shadow on the Moon,
with the Earth in the background.

Firefly tonight became the second private commercial company to land a spacecraft softly on the Moon, its Blue Ghost successfully touching down within Mare Crisium on the northwest quadrant of the visible near side.

At this moment we do not have details about the spacecraft’s condition. Nonetheless NASA bigwigs have come out of hiding to celebrate (if the landing failed they would have likely quietly disappeared). Lots of blather about “important scientific research” but the most important data from this mission is the engineering.

I think the viewers would much rather stay with mission control to hear details about Blue Ghost’s condition. One big unknown is that, of the four landing leg pads, one did not register contact with the ground, though this appears to simply be a failure of the sensor. Just after landing one engineer in mission controler announced the spacecraft was stable, but more information would be of more useful than listening to upper managers from NASA puff themselves. (It is also getting tiresome that the announcers seem incapable of asking anything but “How do you feel?”, one of the most useless questions a journalist can ever ask.)

The first photos are expected shortly. I will update when available.

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Perseverance looks to the far west

12:43 pm

Panorama taken by Perservance, February 28, 2025
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, rotated, cropped, and enhanced to post here, was taken today by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance. It gives us the first really good high elevation view of the mountainous terrain to the west of Jezero Crater

The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks the rover’s present position, with the white dotted line its past travels and the red dotted line its future planned route. The yellow lines are my approximate guess as to the area covered by the panorama above.

Neither the rover team nor the team running Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) that provides the high resolution images of this region have as yet updated the interactive map to show this western region in high resolution. My guess as to why is that the planned route is not yet heading that way (as indicated by the red dotted line). When Perseverance has finished its exploration of the outer slopes of the rim of Jezero Crater and heads west, this fuzzy area on this map will likely be replaced with high resolution data, similar to the rest of the map.

Nonetheless, if you look close, you can distinguish several geological features seen in the panorama, such as the large crater to the right and the ridge line to the left. Beyond are mountain chains and valleys, as well as many additional craters. This is truly a barren and alien place, though it has enormous potential for eventually becoming a friendlier environment.

All that is required is for humans to live there, with the natural desire to make it so.

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Varda’s successfully returns its 2nd capsule from orbit

8:58 am

The startup Varda yesterday successfully returned its second capsule from orbit, with the capsule re-entering the atmosphere and touching down in Australia after spending six weeks in space.

The W-2 capsule carried a spectrometer built by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and employed a heatshield developed in collaboration with NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. The capsule also carried internal research that will expand Varda’s pharmaceutical processing capacity and capability.

The capsule landed at the Koomibba Test Range, operated by the spaceport startup Southern Range and located on the southern coast of Australia. Varda had arranged this landing location after it had absurd regulatory delays getting permission to land its first capsule at the Air Force test range in Utah.

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NASA’s newly launched Lunar Trailblazer orbiter having power and communications problems

8:37 am

It appears that engineers are having serious problems with NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter, launched on February 26, 2025 on the same Falcon 9 rocket that sent Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander on the way to the Moon.

Following the successful deployment of NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer … mission operators at Caltech’s IPAC in Pasadena, California, established communications with the small satellite at 5:13 p.m. PST, as expected. The team subsequently received engineering data, or telemetry, indicating intermittent power system issues. They lost communication with the spacecraft Thursday morning at about 4:30 a.m. PST.

Several hours later, the spacecraft turned on its transmitter, and the team now is working with NASA ground stations to reestablish telemetry and commanding to better assess the power system issues and develop potential solutions.

The spacecraft does not appear to be lost, at least at this moment, but based on this short report, things do not look good. The orbiter’s mission was to globally map the Moon’s potential water deposits.

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Exploring the canyons and plateaus of Valles Marineris

12:33 pm

Overview map

The canyons inside Valles Marineris
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 2, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows just one small section of a ridge that descends deep into the giant canyon Valles Marineris, the largest known canyon in the solar system.

On the overview map above, the white dot inside the rectangle marks the location, in the westernmost section of the part of Valles Marineris dubbed Ius Chasma.

For scale, the nose of this ridge descends about 7,300 feet from the top to the bottom, about half the total descent from the small isolated plateau shown in the inset. That plateau, located in the mountainous region between Ius Chasma and Tithonium Chasma, rises to approximately the same elevation as the canyon’s rims to the north and south.

What this picture shows us is that Valles Marineris on its western end is both more shallow and broken up, forming several canyons and plateaus. As the catastrophic floods that are theorized to have carved this canyon pushed their way east, they carved a deeper gorge, so that about 1,500 miles to the east the canyon walls are considerable higher, from 20,000 to 30,000 feet in some places.

As always, the tourist in me can’t help look at this terrain and envision inns and hiking trails. Imagine homesteading that plateau where you build a hotel and trails. Since I expect much transportation on Mars will be by air, your guests would fly in, land at a heliport, and spend their visit hiking down into the canyons that surround them.

Damn! The future is going to so grand!

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All is so far well with Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander

9:27 am

The Moon's South Pole with landers indicated
The Moon’s South Pole with landers indicated.
Click for interactive map.

According to a tweet yesterday from Intuitive Machines, its Athena lunar lander is operating as expected since its launch last night.

The lander is in excellent health, sending selfies, and preparing for a series of planned main engine firings to refine her trajectory ahead of lunar orbit insertion, planned on March 3. Intuitive Machines is targeting a lunar landing opportunity on March 6.

If all goes as planned, Athena will land only 100 miles from the Moon’s south pole, as shown on the map to the right. This location had originally been picked for NASA’s now canceled VIPER rover, because the terrain would have allowed the rover to travel down into some permanently shadowed regions. NASA now hopes to use the Grace hopper on Athena to accomplish the same task.

Next week will also see a second privately built rover land on the Moon, though several days before Athena. Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander is scheduled to land on March 2, 2025 in Mare Crisium on the eastern edge of the Moon’s visible hemisphere. Furthermore, there is presently a third private lander on its way to the Moon, built by Japan’s Ispace. It is taking a longer route there, with its landing occurring in May.

There is also a fourth commercial lander, Astrobotic’s Griffin, that is presently targeting a launch by the end of 2025. It was originally supposed to carry VIPER, but has now replaced that with the commercial test prototype rover being built by the startup Venturi Astrolab, which is competing to get the contract to build the manned rover for NASA’s Artemis program.

Lunar exploration is certainly heating up.

Hat tip to reader Richard M for the Athena tweet update.

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Intuitive Machine’s Athena lunar lander to launch later today

12:41 pm

The second attempt by the startup Intuitive Machines to soft land a spacecraft on the Moon is scheduled to launch today at 7:16 pm (Eastern) time on a Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

I have embedded the Space Affairs live stream feed below, because it starts only 45 minutes before launch. If you want to watch an extra hour of pre-launch blather and propaganda from NASA, the official live steam can be found here. Be warned however. All the live feeds are being produced by NASA, which tends to make believe it made everything happen, when in truth both the rocket and lander are privately owned and built. NASA is contributing most of the science instruments, but without SpaceX and Intuitive Machines, none of those instruments would go anywhere.

A very good description of the mission and the science instruments on board, including a hopper, and a drill, can be found here.

Secondary payloads on the rocket include a low cost NASA lunar orbiter and the first interplanetary probe of a private company.

The first, Lunar Trailblazer, has two instruments for mapping the existence of water on the lunar surface. The second, Astroforge’s Odin spacecraft, will attempt a close fly-by of the asteroid 2022 OB5, thought to be made up mostly of nickel-iron and thus potentially very valuable resource for mining.

» Read more

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Juno data proves volcanism on Io involves numerous lava lakes

11:47 am

The lava lakes of Io
A global map of Io’s lava lakes. Click for original figure.

Based on data and imagery produced by the Jupiter orbiter Juno as it made a series of fly-bys of the moon Io from 2022 to 2024, scientists have now mapped at least 40 lava lakes amid the numerous volcanoes on the planet. The map above, figure 2 of the paper, shows their location and approximate relative size across Io’s surface. From the paper’s abstract:

Recent observations from the Juno spacecraft have revealed at least 40 lava lakes on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, using the JIRAM (Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper) imager. Most of the large depressions on Io, known as paterae, show signs of heat, indicating that lava lakes are common. The lava lakes vary in size from 10 to 100 km in diameter and have a thin crust, about 5–10 m thick, that appears to be a few years old. The heat observed mainly comes from the larger crust, not the small exposed lava, so it is hard to measure the total heat output from just the thermal data. Additionally, eight of these lava lakes are new discoveries and were not previously known as active hotspots.

One aspect of these lakes found repeatedly in this new data is that their lava appears to rise and fall as a unit, as if the lake’s floor bed acts like a huge piston pushing the whole lake up and down from below, rather than lava entering in or draining out from a central vent. This conclusion appears to settle the debate between these models for explaining why the lava almost never rises high enough to pour out from the lake. Instead, the lakes themselves appear to be stable features, not volcanic calderas from which lava flows to build a mountain.

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Lucy takes first picture of its next target asteroid

9:12 am

Lucy's future route through the solar system
Lucy’s route to the asteroids. Click for original blink animation.

The asteroid probe Lucy, on its way to the orbit of Jupiter to study numerous Trojan asteroids, has taken its first picture of the the main asteroid belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, which it will pass within 600 miles on April 20, 2025.

The map to the right shows the spacecraft’s looping route to get to the Trojans, with that image of Donaldjohanson in the lower right. Though the asteroid is about two miles side, it will remain an unresolved point of light until the day of the fly-by. This image was taken from a distance of 45 million miles. As for the asteroid’s name:

Asteroid Donaldjohanson is named for anthropologist Donald Johanson, who discovered the fossilized skeleton — called “Lucy” — of a human ancestor. NASA’s Lucy mission is named for the fossil.

After this encounter, Lucy will head to the Trojans, where it will visit its first six asteroids (including two binaries) in 2027-2028.

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The Europa Clipper team prepares for Mars fly-by

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Europa Clipper's route to Jupiter
Click for original image.

As planned, Europa Clipper is set to do a very close fly-by of Mars on March 1, 2025, zipping past the red planet at a speed of 15.2 miles per second only 550 miles above its surface. The graphic to the right shows the spacecraft’s planned route to Jupiter, including an additional fly-by of Earth in 2026.

During this first fly-by the science team will test two of Europa Clipper’s instruments.

About a day prior to the closest approach, the mission will calibrate the thermal imager, resulting in a multicolored image of Mars in the months following as the data is returned and scientists process the data. And near closest approach, they’ll have the radar instrument perform a test of its operations — the first time all its components will be tested together. The radar antennas are so massive, and the wavelengths they produce so long that it wasn’t possible for engineers to test them on Earth before launch.

The spacecraft launched with transistors not properly hardened for the hostile environment around Jupiter. Engineers claimed these would “heal” themselves once in Jupiter orbit. No word on whether there has been any issue from these components since launch.

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Curiosity looks uphill into canyon

1:10 pm

Panorama taken on February 23, 2025
Click for full resolution. For original images, go here and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

The panorama above, reduced and sharpened to post here, was created by me from two photographs taken on February 23, 2025 (here and here) by the left navigation camera on the Curiosity rover on Mars.

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

Several things to note. The boxwork indicated on lower left of the overview map is the rover’s next major geological target. Though the rover team has made no announcement of a major route change, they have clearly diverged from that route by heading south and uphill into this canyon.

In reviewing the interactive map, I have not found any really good route up to the boxwork, other than this canyon. My guess is that the rover team is scouting it out as a possible new route. The panorama above is part of that scouting, and it certainly suggests that the canyon would be a good way to go.

They might also be considering this change because the old route would take them downhill, which would only have them studying geological layers they have already seen up close in Curiosity’s earlier travels. The team might have decided to forego the old route because it would not only look at geology already documented, it would add stress to Curiosity’s already stressed wheels. Since it appears the terrain up hill is going to continue to be this rough for as far as the eye can see, they likely decided it was better to move into unexplored geology now rather than later.

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Bumpy frozen lava on Mars

2:50 pm

Bumpy frozen lava on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool picture time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 30, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was most likely taken not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the schedule in order to maintain the camera’s temperature.

The image is fascinating nonetheless, as the landscape is typically alien for Mars. What caused the many random ridges and knobs? Why are there oblong areas that are smooth and have no ridges? And why is there dark material inside that crater that appears to have been blown out to the northeast? If you click on the image to see the full image, not all the craters look this way. One has a similar dark feature, but others are as bland as the entire terrain.

The overview map below only increases these mysteries, even if it does provide some further data.
» Read more

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