Tag: science

Sightseeing near Starship’s candidate Martian landing sites

2:21 pm

An interesting mesa near Starship's Martian landing zone
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image takes us sightseeing in the region on Mars that SpaceX has chosen for its prime landing zone for its Starship spaceship. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 29, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows a 465-foot-high unusually shaped mesa in this region.

The full resolution inset at the bottom of the picture focuses at the strange tilted layers on the southern slope of this mesa. Apparently the layers at this spot were pushed sideways so they lie significantly angled to the horizontal. Though it isn’t clear from this picture, it is possible that the mesa itself is made up of similar tilted layers, hidden below the surface. We can see the tilt only on the mesa’s southern flank because erosion has apparently exposed it.

Note also the black stain that surrounds the mesa. Though this might be caused by wind distributing dust, such stains have also been seen at a location where scientists suspect an inactive hot spring might exist, as well as another location where there may have been relatively recent volcanic activity.

Is this stain caused by any of these processes? In situ exploration would probably be necessary to find out. And we may soon actually have spaceships landing here in the relatively near future with the capability to do this.
» Read more

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Returning to Mars’ glacier country

3:21 pm

Overview map

Returning to Mars' glacier country
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image illustrates again why I rail against those who still claim Mars is dry. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 2, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The picture was labeled simply as a “terrain sample” by the MRO camera team, which almost always signifies that it was taken not as part of any specific science research project or by request by a scientist, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature. When such a gap-filler picture is required, the team tries to pick interesting features in that time frame, but don’t always succeed.

In this case, that time frame placed MRO over the northern mid-latitudes and a region I label “glacier country” because practically every picture taken in this region shows glacial features. This picture is no exception. The white dot in the overview map above marks the location, in the Protonilus Mensae area of the 2,000-mile-long strip of glaciers. The arrow in the picture itself shows the downward grade of the glacial flow. The small 2,000-foot-wide crater appears as if the impact occurred on soft ice, and the stippled terrain surrounding it appears to resemble the feature geologists have labeled “brain terrain”, a surface feature unique to Mars and associated with near surface ice, though its exact formation process is not yet understood.

Nor have I cherry-picked this image to prove my point. Its glacial-like features are very typical for this region of Mars. Note for example the inset with the larger crater to the northeast. It appears almost buried by this glacial material, which has poured through the gap in its southwest quadrant to fill it. A close look at all the low lying terrain shows similar glacial-like flows.

Mars is surely not a paradise. It is bone-chillingly cold almost all the time. Its atmosphere is so thin and lacking in oxygen you would quickly suffocate if you tried to breath it. But the data continues to suggest that the red planet has ample supplies of near-surface ice outside of its dry tropics. All future colonists will need to do is dig a bit and process the water out.

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Astronomers link fast X-ray bursts with gamma ray bursts and supernovae

1:17 pm

Using observations of a fast X-ray burst (FXT) 2.8 billion light years away by a plethora of space- and ground-based telescopes, astronomers now think the burst was caused by a massive star’s supernova explosion that would normally result in a gamma ray burst (GRB), but does not because the star’s outer layers trap the gamma rays from escaping.

Through analysis of EP 250108a’s rapidly evolving signal over the first six days following initial detection, the team found that this FXT is likely a ‘failed’ variation of a gamma-ray burst (GRB). GRBs are the most powerful explosions in the Universe and have been observed preceding supernovae. During these events, violent geysers of high-energy particles burst through a star’s outer layers as it collapses in on itself. These jets flow at nearly the speed of light and are detectable by their gamma-ray emission.

EP 250108a appears similar to a jet-driven explosion, but one in which the jets do not break through the outer layers of the dying star and instead remain trapped inside. As the stifled jets interact with the star’s outer layers, they decelerate and their kinetic energy is converted to the X-rays detected by Einstein Probe.

As always, there are many uncertainties with this conclusion.

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EPA employees who publicly signed letter opposing Trump’s agenda have now been put on leave

1:42 pm

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump in charge

They apparently forgot who the American people elected and who is thus the boss! The 170 EPA employees who publicly signed a letter this week announcing their opposition to Trump’s policies at EPA have now all been put on leave, with the expectation that they will eventually lose their jobs as well.

Staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency who signed a letter of dissent against President Donald Trump have been placed on leave, reports The Hill. “The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch said in a written statement.

The letter, posted on June 30, 2025, made it very clear in its opening paragraph that these employees were willing to defy orders and sabotage the Trump administration.
» Read more

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Mars is not dry!

11:11 am

Global map of glaciers found on Mars

I once again feel compelled to rant against the shallow ignorance of too many people in both the journalism field as well as academia about the most recent data we now have of Mars. Two articles today once again show this ignorance, assuming blandly that Mars is a dry planet with little water on it anywhere, when orbital data over the past decade has unequivocally shown that — except for its equatorial regions — the planet is covered with a LOT of near-surface ice.

The headlines make this ignorance quite clear:

In both cases, the articles assume that the data obtained from rovers and landers in the dry Martian tropics applies to the entire planet. It does not. This evidence of a dry planet carries a bias that comes from the decision by the planetary community as well as NASA to send every rover to that dry equatorial region. Only one lander, Phoenix, has ever been successfully dropped far from the Martian equator, and it was purposely sent to a very high latitude, where it proved there was ice present just below the surface.

Orbital data in the past decade from both Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Express has clearly shown that there is a lot of near surface ice on Mars, as shown by the map above. In the mid-latitudes the terrain is dominated by glaciers, as this is the region where the vast ice sheets in the high latitudes begin to fade away.

Only the equatorial region, indicated by the white lines on the map, is dry and barren. And yet, even here, orbital data has detected evidence that suggests underground ice still exists.

It seems to me that journalists and academic PR departments should know these facts, and include them in any reports about the dry nature of Mars’ equatorial regions.

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New data: the ozone hole occurs mostly because of the sunspot cycle and cosmic rays, not CFC pollution

1:18 pm

The ozone hole linked to the solar cycle

The uncertainty of science: A science paper released yesterday suggests that the ozone hole over Antarctica that scientists have been tracking for almost a half century is caused mostly by the solar cycle and the accompanying fluctuations in cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere, not the release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that used to be used in aerosol spray cans.

The graph to the right, from figure 2 of the paper, illustrates the data. The red line is the ozone hole fluctuations predicted by the paper’s model, labeled “CRE Theory”, based on the increase of cosmic ray radiation during solar minimum. The blue, black, and green lines indicate the actual fluctuations of ozone and temperature in the lower stratosphere where the ozone layer exists. As you can see, the model and actual fluctuations match quite closely. From the paper’s abstract:
» Read more

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Sunspot update: Sunspot activity rebounds somewhat in June

12:13 pm

As I have done since I started this website fifteen years ago, I post at the start of every month an 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.

Below is that graph, showing that in June sunspot activity rebounded upward somewhat from the shocking drop in activity that occurred in May.

» Read more

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Another interstellar object identified entering the solar system

11:44 am

A11pl3Z's path through the solar system

Astronomers think they have identified another interstellar object that is now entering the solar system.

The dim space rock is currently at about magnitude 18.8. Our new visitor, A11pl3Z, will get its closest to the sun – at about 2 astronomical units (AU), or twice as far as Earth is from the sun – in October. As it reaches perihelion – its closest point to the sun – it should be moving at about 68 km/s relative to the sun, or at about 152,000 miles per hour.

The object’s calculated path through the solar system, shown by the blue line in the graphic to the right, as well as the object’s high speed, are why the astronomers think it is interstellar in origin. Both facts suggest it is coming from beyond the Oort cloud.

This is the third such object discovered, after Oumuamua (whose nature remains somewhat unknown), followed by Comet 21/Borisov.

UPDATE: The object has now been renamed 3I/Atlas. The “3I” indicates it is the third interstellar object discovered, and “Atlas” refers to the discovering telescope survey.

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Astronomers discover supernovae that apparently exploded twice

10:55 am

Double detonation supernova
Click for original picture.

Using the ground-based Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, astronomers have discovered evidence suggesting a star apparently exploded twice went it went supernova several hundred years ago.

They detected this possibility by looking at the remnant of that blast, shown to the right. It shows a double halo, indicated by the blue and orange colors. The blue however is seen in both shells. As noted by the VLT’s press notice:

Calcium is shown in blue, and it is arranged in two concentric shells. These two layers indicate that the now-dead star exploded with a double-detonation.

This type of supernova, dubbed type 1a, occurs when a white dwarf sucks matter from its closely orbiting stellar companion. That material piles up on the surface of the star until it reaches critical mass and explodes, causing the supernova.

The two shells, suggesting a double detonation, fits a theory proposed for this process. From the paper’s abstract:

Our analysis reveals that the outer calcium shell originates from the helium detonation at the base of the outer envelope, while the inner shell is associated with the carbon–oxygen core detonation. This morphological distribution of intermediate-mass elements agrees qualitatively with the predicted signature of the double detonation of a sub-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf from a hydrodynamical explosion simulation.

In other words, the outer shell resulted from the explosion caused by the helium ripped from the companion star, with the resulting shockwave detonating the second explosion inside the white dwarf’s core.

That’s the theory at least. This data supports it, but it certainly doesn’t prove it.

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Methane climate satellite fails

10:07 am

Fifteen months into a five year mission it appears the methane climate satellite MethaneSat has apparently failed prematurely.

From the press release by the environmental activist organization Environmental Defense Fund that operated the satellite:

On Friday, June 20, the MethaneSAT mission operations lost contact with MethaneSAT. After pursuing all options to restore communications, we learned this morning that the satellite has lost power, and that it is likely not recoverable.

The satellite was unusual in that it was developed and built by this activist organization, not a government or academic institution. Its failure is especially unfortunate at this time, because this non-governmental approach to science research is exactly what the science community needs to pursue faced as it is with major cuts in federal funding.

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Webb detects unexpected “little red dots” in the early universe

11:52 am

The uncertainty of science: Using the Webb Space Telescope astronomers have begun to compile a small catalog of what they call “little red dots” [LRDs], objects in the very early universe that are very small, too small to be galaxies and are thus a mystery.

A team of astronomers recently compiled one of the largest samples of LRDs to date, nearly all of which existed during the first 1.5 billion years after the big bang. They found that a large fraction of the LRDs in their sample showed signs of containing growing supermassive black holes.

“We’re confounded by this new population of objects that Webb has found. We don’t see analogs of them at lower redshifts, which is why we haven’t seen them prior to Webb,” said Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and lead author of the study. “There’s a substantial amount of work being done to try to determine the nature of these little red dots and whether their light is dominated by accreting black holes.”

The present most popular theory to explain the dots, based on the available data, is that the dots are newly formed black holes, their red light caused by material falling into the hole at millions of miles per hour. That theory has of course problems. For example, it doesn’t explain why we don’t see these dots in more recent times. Nor does it explain why the dots are dim in X-rays, a radiation expected from accreting black holes.

As always, the press release claims that this discovery does not “break” the present cosmological theories for the formation of the universe, but at the same time, it does illustrate our overall lack of knowledge about that early universe. We really don’t know very much, which means any theories we have are likely wrong simply due to our present ignorance.

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China releases images of Earth and Moon, taken by its Tianwen-2 asteroid probe

9:40 am

Tianwen-2 images of the Earth and the Moon
For original images go here and here.

According to a report today in China’s state-run press, its Tianwen-2 asteroid sample return spacecraft is operating normally, and has successfully taken pictures of both the Earth and the Moon to test its instrumentation.

Those images are to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here.

The CNSA [China National Space Administration] said that the narrow-field-of-view navigation sensor equipped on the probe recently captured the images of Earth and the moon, demonstrating good functional performance.

The images released include a photograph of Earth obtained by Tianwen-2 when it was approximately 590,000 kilometers away from the planet, as well as a new photograph of the moon captured when it was about the same distance from the moon. After the images were transmitted back to the ground, they were processed and produced by scientific researchers.

The Tianwen-2 probe has currently been in orbit for over 33 days, at a distance from Earth exceeding 12 million kilometers, and it is in good working condition, the CNSA said.

The probe will take about a year to reach asteroid Kamo’oalewa, where it will fly in formation studying it for another year, during which time it will attempt to grab samples by two methods. One method is a copy of the touch-and-go technique used by OSIRIS-REx on Bennu. The second method, dubbed “anchor and attach,” is untried, and involves using four robot arms, each with their own drill.

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NASA still hoping to save its Lunar Trailblazer mission

8:59 am

Though the odds of success are very dim, NASA has decided to give engineers another few weeks to try to activate its Lunar Trailblazer orbiter, that stopped communicating with Earth the day after it was launched in late February.

NASA has extended recovery efforts of its Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft from mid-June to early July. Updated modeling of the spacecraft’s trajectory by the mission team indicates lighting conditions will continue to be favorable and may provide enough sunlight for the spacecraft’s solar panels to recharge its batteries to an operational state and turn on its radio.

…Should enough sunlight reach Lunar Trailblazer’s solar panels, the batteries may charge to a level that allows the spacecraft’s radio system to boot up. But as Lunar Trailblazer travels farther away, it will soon be too distant to recover because its telecommunications signals to Earth will be too weak for the mission to receive telemetry and command.

The mission team has determined that if they can regain command of the spacecraft, the propulsion system isn’t frozen, and the instruments remain operable, the spacecraft may be able to achieve an elliptical lunar orbit and complete its lunar science objectives.

As I said, the chance of success are not good.

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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.
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Sublimating ice in the Martian dry tropics?

2:31 pm

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

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

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

The location however suggests that if near surface ice here is sublimating away, it hints at a find of some significance.
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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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