Tag: science

Corroding glacial debris inside Martian crater

11:30 am

Corroding glacial debris inside Martian crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 5, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “irregular cellular structures on crater floor.” Located at 46 degrees south latitude in the Martian southern cratered highlands, we are likely looking at glacial debris that has been significantly corroded, the near surface ice sublimating away in patches because the dirt and dust that protects it has for some reason done a poor job.

In this case however the sublimation has produced these very strange features, very different than corroding subsurface ice features seen elsewhere on Mars. Reminds me of peeling paint, but even that analogy falls short.
» Read more

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ESA finalizes contract for privately built cubesat lander as part of its Ramses mission to Apophis

9:36 am

Apophis' path past the Earth in 2029
A cartoon (not to scale) showing Apophis’s
path in 2029.

The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday announced it has issued the full contract with private startup EMXYS to build its Don Quijote cubesat lander for ESA’s Ramses mission to go to the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it flies by the Earth in April 2029.

EMXYS, a Spanish company, previously built a gravity-measuring instrument for the cubesat Juventas, which is flying on ESA’S Hera mission presently on its way to the binary asteroid Didymos/Dimorphos.

Francesca Ingiosi, overseeing Ramses’ CubeSats, notes: “There won’t be time for sustained human oversight: Don Quijote is going to take itself down on a completely autonomous basis, relying on feature tracking to find a safe place to land. It will be running its gravimeter and magnetometer when it flies, but we have high expectations for its scientific work on the surface.

“It will come down quite slowly, but in the ultra-low gravity of Apophis some bouncing along the surface is possible. The CubeSat is therefore designed to operate from any orientation, although the precise nature of the surface remains a question mark: there is even a small possibility that Don Quijote sinks into the ground, which would not be good!

The launch window for Ramses is in the spring 2028, so the schedule to get this cubesat built is very tight.

Below is a list of the missions going to Apophis in 2029:
» Read more

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Katalyst’s Link rescue spacecraft launched successfully

8:41 am

Katalyst's proposed Swift rescue mission
Katalyst’s proposed Swift rescue mission.
Click for original image.

UPDATE: Katalyst engineers have established communications with Link, so the commissioning process can now begin.

———————–
Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus rocket this morning successfully launched the Link rescue spacecraft built by the startup Katalyst, aimed at rendezvousing and grabbing the Gehrels-Swift telescope and raising its orbit.

A mission to raise the altitude of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is underway after launching at 8:36 p.m. Marshall Islands Time (4:36 a.m. EDT), Friday, July 3, from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean.

LINK, a robotic servicing spacecraft built by Katalyst Space, launched into orbit on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, which was deployed by the company’s Stargazer, a modified L-1011 aircraft, at an altitude of about 40,000 feet.

The actual rescue won’t occur for several weeks, as the Katalyst team will spend several weeks checking out the spacecraft’s systems to make sure all is working as intended. Once this is assured, they will begin to slowly move towards Swift:

As it approaches, LINK will collect and send images of Swift to the ground, where teams at Katalyst and NASA will assess the planned grab points. This rendezvous and capture will be a slow and careful process that could take about a month.

Once its robotic arms are attached to Swift, LINK can begin to slowly push Swift upward. Over the course of a few months, LINK will attempt to return Swift close to its original launch altitude. Then, LINK will detach, leaving Swift in its new orbit.

The Gehrels-Swift team will then return the telescope to its operational status, following the same commissioning procedures used when the telescope was first placed in orbit in 2004.

As for the launch, this was Northrop Grumman’s second launch in 2026, and the last Pegasus launch ever. The air-launched rocket is now retired. It was created in the 1980s by the rocket startup Orbital Sciences with the intent to provide a low cost launch option. It launched a total of 46 times (with three failures in the early years), but in the past two decades it could not compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

79 SpaceX
42 China
10 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
8 Russia

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 79 to 74.

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Sunspot update: The ramp down to solar minimum continued to stall in June

8:25 am

As I have tried to do every month since I started Behind the Black sixteen years ago, it is time for another sunspot update tracking the Sun’s sunspot activity as it evolves across its eleven year cycle. As always, I use as my basis the monthly update by NOAA of its graph showing the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere but annotated by me with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

As you can see by that graph below, June activity (the green dot) was only slightly less that in May, indicating a continuing stall in the ramp down to solar minimum, a ramp down that NOAA’s panel of solar scientists had predicted had begun in April 2025.

» Read more

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Long term monitoring of the dry-ice cap at the Martian south pole

12:23 pm

Long term monitoring of the dry-ice cap at the Martian south pole
For original images go here and here.

Cool image time! The two pictures to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, were taken more than two decades apart by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The show a specific spot on the Martian south pole ice cap, at a location where there is also a perennial cap of dry ice that is also slowly shrinking in size.

The top picture was taken on May 14, 2007, the first close-up of this location. At the time the science team titled it “Fast Evolution of Landforms on the Southern Residual Caps,” which suggests that even then they had a sense from one earlier MRO picture that these strange forms were changing. As a result, scientist have used MRO to monitor this site repeatedly over the years, taking dozens of images of this location on a regular basis to track changes, both seasonally and over years.

The bottom picture is the most recent, taken on May 3, 2026. If you compare the two pictures closely, you can see that all these depressions have grown in some manner over the past two decades. (The blobs you see are all depressions. Optically your mind might make them appear as humps, but they are actually places where the cap’s top layer of dry ice has sublimated away.)
» Read more

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Academic publisher Springer Nature to divest itself of woke Scientific American

10:14 am

Scientific American logo
About to go the way of the dodo.

As the saying goes, “Go woke, go broke.” The academic publisher Springer Nature has now announced it is selling off its two consumer magazines, Scientific American and the German Spektrum der Wissenschaft, stating that it wishes “to focus on its core global publishing activities across research, health and education.”

I don’t know about the German magazine, but I do know that Scientific American has become a junk and very woke publication in recent years, unreliable for good reporting as its editorial policy has been instead to push a variety of leftists tropes, from queer sex theories to Covid falsehoods. As the article at the link notes,

The low-lights from the magazine’s stack of articles include:

  • Scientific American colluding with other media to normalize “climate emergency” terminology, despite vast swaths of scientific evidence showing the Earth’s climate has continuously changed over 4 billion years.
  • The magazine pushing “birth parent” terminology, which is utter nonsense in the face of real biology.
  • The magazine offering a ridiculous take on football injuries…tying them to racism.
  • Endorsing Kamala Harris for President.

Other examples of the magazine pushing junk science can be seen here and here.

The article above also notes the interesting timing of this announcement, just before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was to approve the union its writer staff has recently overwhelming voted for. The unionization was supposedly about “compensation, workload, job security,” but it also included the demand for “editorial independence”, the typical code words used by the leftist journalists to demand the ability to write whatever they want, even if the magazine’s owners protest.

Well, rather than protest, this magazine’s owners decided to fire the magazine entirely.

Hat tip to reader Gary.

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Launch of Katalyst’s Swift rescue mission scrubbed

8:46 am

The launch early this morning of Katalyst’s Link rescue mission to raise the orbit of the Gehrels-Swift space telescope was scrubbed due to a “launch vehicle issue” with the Northrop Grumman Pegasus rocket.

After takeoff of the L-1011 aircraft carrying the Pegasus XL, a launch vehicle issue temporarily prevented teams from deploying the rocket. The date of the next launch attempt for this mission to boost NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory will be determined after teams have reviewed data from today’s attempt.

NASA provided no further information. This is the last Pegasus rocket existing, as the company ceased its production several years ago, with its last launch in 2021. Overall it had only been launched five times in the past sixteen years, a cadence so slow it means launch crews now are likely inexperienced or very rusty.

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Chandra data finds the Milky Way is bigger in size than previously believed

1:11 pm

The Milky Way is bigger than we thought
Click for original movie.

Using X-ray data from both the X-ray space telescopes Chandra and XMM-Newton, scientist now think the Milky Way is bigger in size than previously believed, with its three outer arms winding around the galactic center at a greater distance.

The two artist conceptions to the right show the difference before and after. The top image shows the previously conceived positions of the three outer arms on the right. The bottom image shows the new position as estimated by this data, about 10% farther out from the Milky Way’s center with the arms more widely spaced.

The researchers used three different gamma-ray bursts to determine the distances to three spiral arms in the Milky Way. In order of increasing distances from the Galactic Center, they are the Perseus, the Outer, and the Outer Scutum-Centaurus arms. Along the direction of one of the bursts, they found that both the Outer and Outer Scutum-Centaurus arms are about 10% more distant than astronomers previously thought.

“The differences are small, but any revision of these distances is important because they are so fundamental for understanding our galaxy,” said co-author Ilaria Fornasiero, who was a PhD student in the same program as the leading author. “For example, this could mean that astronomers have to revise estimates of the mass of the galaxy, because that affects how wide the arms stretch.”

There is a lot of uncertainty in this result. Because we are inside the Milky Way, we really cannot see what it looks like. In fact, though they know it is a spiral galaxy, astronomers are not even sure what classification it falls into. Many studies say it is a barred spiral, but the size and magnitude of that bar is unconfirmed. In this study it appears they considered the bar less prominent.

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The rocky surface of Gediz Vallis on Mars came from landslides and water-induced debris flows from above

12:46 pm

Looking south inside Gediz Vallis
Looking uphill into Gediz Vallis, in 2024, when this research was being done.

Overview map
This map from 2024 provides the context for the panorama above.
Click for interactive map.

Using the data the rover Curiosity gathered during its exploration of the canyon dubbed Gediz Vallis on the lower flanks of Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons) inside Gale Crater on Mars, scientists have concluded that the rocky material came from above, flowing downhill in the far past in major boulder landslides and water-induced debris flows.

The panorama above was taken when Curiosity was in Gediz Vallis. The overview map to the right provides the context, with the white dotted line showing Curiosity’s actual travels, and the yellow lines indicating the approximate area covered by the panorama. From the paper’s abstract:

Curiosity investigated Gediz Vallis, a canyon within Aeolis Mons, indicating that it must have formed late in Gale’s history. At the center of Gediz Vallis is a topographic ridge, comprised of sedimentary rocks. In the region where Curiosity crossed the ridge, Arc Pass, the rover investigated the processes that formed the ridge.

Curiosity found that rocks in Arc Pass were formed by water flows rich in debris, and landslides, which originated from higher up Aeolis Mons. These transport processes were separated by episodes of wind erosion and alteration of the rocks by groundwater. These observations indicate that liquid water continued to be available for brief periods late in the history of both Gale crater and Mars. [emphasis mine]

As noted by the highlighted sentence, the geology once again says that water in some form shaped the surface. As the scientists add in the paper, however, “Any surface water was likely only intermittently available, interspersed with significant hiatuses of aeolian erosion and dry granular transport processes.” It remains to be seen exactly what state that water was in, whether liquid or ice, considering that Mars has always been too cold with too thin an atmosphere for liquid water to exist on the surface.

Curiosity spent more than a year in this part of Gediz Vallis, then traversed west into the parallel canyon, dubbed Valle Grande, that it has been climbing for the past two years.

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New research on ISS shows weightlessness causes significant harm to mice babies and their descendents

12:59 pm

A recent 42-day experiment on ISS, where mice were allowed to reproduce in weightlessness and produce offspring, has found that the weightlessness environment not only causes significant harm to mice conceived and born under these conditions, it appears to carry that harm down to at least the next generation.

From the abstract, which labels the first generation offspring as F1 and the next generation F2:

In the NASA Rodent Research 20 mission, we examined the impact of a 42-d spaceflight on the female reproductive axis including ovulatory capacity, implantation rate, and fecundity as well as behavioral, metabolic, and functional outcomes in F1 and F2 offspring. Females bred 5 d after return to Earth became pregnant but only exhibited a slight decline in fecundity compared to ground controls.

In contrast, F1 offspring from spaceflight dams exhibited marked growth, functional, and behavioral differences compared to F1 offspring from control dams. Moreover, F1 female offspring from spaceflight dams exhibited decreased ovarian reserves as evidenced by reduced anti-Mullerian hormone levels early in life (21 d of age) and premature ovarian failure or an early loss in fertility, as indicated by reduced numbers of litters and total number of pups born to females over a 9-mo period.

Strikingly, transgenerational metabolic and reproductive disturbances were also observed in F2 pups of spaceflight granddams, including persistent reductions in ovarian reserve, suggesting germline-level effects.

In other words, mice babies conceived and born in space exhibited serious issues that were also carried over into the next generation.

Though a number of similar studies have been done previously on ISS, the research is generally limited and inconclusive. Experiments on Earth duplicating lower or zero gravity suggest it has no effect on reproduction. This study however tested actual weightlessness, and found it decidedly harmful for newborn mice and later generations.

The results strongly argue that no woman should allow herself to become pregnant while in space. This conclusion might change given time, but I have my doubts. This result is what most people assume about the consequences of conception in weightlessness.

It also argues strongly for the need of some form of artificial gravity on future long term interplanetary space vessels. Without it, space travel will be significantly limited.

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Study: Seventeen days in space does little to change brain power

10:31 am

According to a new study testing the vital brain signs of two astronauts before and after the seventeen day Axiom tourist mission to ISS in 2022, weightlessness and the space environment resulted in no sign of cognitive decline or changes in brain function.

You can read the paper here. From the abstract:

This study is a methodological demonstration of comparing cognitive performance and electroencephalography (EEG) brain vital signs in 2 astronauts before, shortly after, and 5 months following a 17-d mission to the International Space Station. Cognitive task performance remained consistent between pre- and post-spaceflight measures. Similarly, EEG brain vital signs revealed minimal change in the time-frequency domain. These findings suggest that short-duration spaceflight, combined with sufficient Earth adaptation time, showed no major decrements in cognitive and neurophysiological function.

Though it has been evident now since the 1960s that two- to three-week missions cause no lasting impact on the body or brain, this study documents a baseline technique for measuring the changes that might occur on longer flights.

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New Horizons confirms: the solar wind slows as you travel outward

9:25 am

Figure 6 from the paper.
Figure 6 from the paper. Click for full resolution.

The science team for the New Horizons spacecraft, presently zipping outward towards the edge of the solar system, has confirmed earlier data from the Voyager spacecraft that the solar winds speed slows gradually as you move outward from the Sun.

You can read the paper here [pdf]. The distances are measured using astronomical units (AU), each equivalent to the distance from the Sun to the Earth, about 93 million miles.

Previously, New Horizons and Voyager 2 measurements between 30 and 43 AU indicated the solar wind was 5 to 10% slower than at 1 AU near Earth. Now, New Horizons researchers found at 58 AU that the solar wind is 13 to 15% slower than the wind at 1 AU. This gradual slowdown aligns with previous models of how interstellar material enters the heliosphere and affects the solar wind. It also demonstrates how the Sun’s influence decreases over long distances.

The scientists postulate that the slowing is caused by interaction with “interstellar neutral gas particles” that have managed to slip into the solar system. Their interaction with solar wind particles acts to slow the particles down.

New Horizons has not yet reached the termination shock that delineates the edge of the solar system. When it does, entering interstellar space, the wind speed will plummet significantly more, based on data from both Voyagers.

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We’re all gonna die! Seismologists model the San Andreas fault, and find it about to blow!

9:37 am

Chicken Little rules!
Chicken Little rules!

According to computer simulations based on known but very limited earthquake data during the past 1,000 years, scientists now claim that the San Andreas fault in California is now “critically stressed,” suggesting a big quake is coming soon.

You can read their paper here. The news article at the first link above is typical of most mainstream reports, very much focused on expressing certain doom based on the certainty of this research:

The volatile seismic zone along the roughly 750-mile (1,200-km) San Andreas Fault and the smaller San Jacinto Fault are now “critically stressed” – reaching a 1,000-year high level of pressure – increasing the likelihood of a big earthquake hitting the US West Coast.

Using physics-based modeling and 1,000 years of earthquake data, Earth scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa demonstrated how the build-up of stress throughout these two fault systems and at the juncture of the Cajon Pass is at an all-time high.

The “1,000 years of earthquake data” however is extremely limited, with only the last 100 years reasonably covered. That sparse data is then used to create computer models and simulations, from which these Chicken Little conclusions are drawn.

In other words, garbage in, garbage out.

Without doubt a large quake along the San Andreas fault is eventually going to happen. In fact, scientists have been making this same exact prediction now for almost a half century. That no such quake has happened doesn’t make the prediction false, but the endless predictions of doom by the seismology community for a half century has made them sound increasingly like the little boy who cried wolf. They simply don’t have sufficient knowledge to predict when the quake will happen, but their endless cries of doom has blunted the impact of their words.

Meanwhile, the uncertainty and limitations of their knowledge are too often ignored by the press. To this press: “They are SCIENTISTS, so they KNOW!”

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Hayabusa-2 to fly past asteroid July 5, 2026

9:13 am

Ryugu's northern hemisphere
Ryugu as seen by Hayabusa-2 shortly before it grabbed
samples from the surface in 2019. Arrow indicates planned touchdown
site.

Despite having only one working ion engine, Japan’s Hayabusa-2 asteroid probe will do a fast and extremely close fly-by of the asteroid Torifune on July 5, 2026.

The flyby will see Hayabusa2 get within 1 to 10 kilometers (0.62 to 6.2 miles) of Torifune, using its instrument suite to study the roughly 450-meter-wide (1,476 feet) asteroid as it whizzes past at 5.3 kilometers per second (3.3 miles per second).

Not much is known about Torifune, so a fly-by this close carries risk. In addition, three of Hayabusa’s four ion engines no longer work, and the fourth is starting to degrade.

If successful, however, the fly-by will not only tell us something more about Torifune, it will increase the chances Hayabusa-2 can reach asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031. That asteroid is small, only about 35 feet across. The plan would be for Hayabusa- to fly in formation for a period, and even attempt a touch down.

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Tiny polygon ridges on Mars

9:19 am

Tiny polygon ridges on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced slightly to post here, was taken on June 21, 2026 by the high resolution camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. It looks down to provide a close-up of the ground the rover is presently parked over, a surface covered with thousands of these tiny polygon ridges, all of which appear less than three inches across.

For a wider view and the overall context, see my post from June 24, 2026. While from a distance the ground at this point looked smoother than anything the rover has seen in more than five years since it entered the foothills of Mount Sharp, once it got close it discovered the ground was completely covered with these small polygons.

The picture to the right is part of a close-up mosaic of these polygons the science team is gathering using the high resolution camera.

The geology here is certainly puzzling. Polygon cracks are not unusual on both Earth and Mars, in places where the ground was once wet and then dried. In drying the material shrinks, producing polygon-configured cracks. On Earth those cracks often fill later with material that is more resistant, such as lava, which remains to form ridges when the surrounding dirt erodes away. Whether this was the process here on Mars however is not known. For one thing, why are these polygons so small? And why so uniform in size?

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Firefly buys the AI navigation technology used on its Blue Ghost lunar landing

8:45 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,
after its 2025 touchdown.

Firefly has now acquired Space-ng, the company that makes the AI navigation technology and software that Firefly used on its successful Blue Ghost lunar landing in 2025.

Space-ng’s vision navigation software was utilized during Firefly’s historic Blue Ghost Mission 1 to determine position and attitude, detect hazardous lunar terrain, and autonomously redirect Blue Ghost in real-time, enabling a safe, precise touchdown within the Moon’s Mare Crisium.

…In addition to vision navigation software, Space-ng brings high-resolution spacecraft cameras and AI compute hardware to enable advanced space domain awareness, onboard optical navigation, rendezvous and proximity operations, and docking without requiring GPS or GNSS. Firefly plans to integrate Space-ng’s technologies across its fleet of lunar landers and orbital vehicles to support its growing mission manifest, including three additional lunar missions under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, another lunar mission supporting NASA MoonFall, and a space domain awareness mission for the Defense Innovation Unit.

Of all the recent attempts by commercial companies to land on the Moon, Firefly is the only one to have a complete success. While Space-ng’s technology worked perfectly to guide Blue Ghost to a safe touch down, the guidance technology used by Intuitive Machines (twice), Ispace (twice), Beresheet, and the first Vikram lander for India all failed close to landing. No wonder Firefly decided to buy it.

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Astronomers: We might be experiencing a shower of comets from the distant Oort cloud due to a close pass of another star 2.5 million years ago

1:18 pm

The uncertainty of science: Using computer models and the somewhat sparse data about the distant Oort cloud on the outer fringes of our solar system (from 2,000 to 200,000 astronomical units [au] away) and combining that with the data from the Gaia space telescope that mapped precisely the motions and distances of billions of Milky Way stars, astronomers now posit that the close pass of another star about 2.5 million years ago perturbed the Oort cloud and thus produced the shower of comets that humanity has been experiencing for the last few thousand years.

HD 7977 is a still nearby Sun-like star in the constellation Cassiopeia whose close passage was discovered by the Gaia mission. Approximately 2.5 million years ago, the orbits of the Sun and HD 7977 brought the two stars close together, but exactly how close is still an open question. Gaia data suggest they passed within 4000-25000 astronomical units of one another. Now, Kaib and Raymond have shown that the orbits of long-period comets suggest HD 7977 came within 6000-10000 AU of our Sun, setting off a major shower of new comets into the inner solar system.

You can read the preprint paper here [pdf].

These results are filled with many uncertainties of course. For one, the actual distance for HD 7977’s close pass is not well constrained. The margin of error is large, so that the star might have not done anything at all. Second, our map of the Oort cloud is very uncertain. In fact, it exists at this time only in theory, as it has never been directly observed. Astronomers hypothesize its existence based on the orbits of the long period comets that they have documented for the past few centuries, all coming from that distant region. So while it appears to exist, that existence remains unproven.

These uncertainties thus make the conclusions of this paper interesting but unconfirmed. Nonetheless, they are fascinating, because they are strongly suggestive, and hint at the impact of the galaxy and its stars on the evolution of our solar system itself. That impact is real, though tracing its history is difficult because of the vast time scales and distances. It appears the Gaia data and computers are giving us a first glimpse into that past history.

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Astronomers discover two exoplanets as dense as cotton candy

9:40 am

The observed transits of TOI-791 c.
The observed transits of TOI-791 c by different telescopes
during its 232 day orbit. Figure 9 from the paper.

Using a combination of ground- and space-based telescopes, astronomers have now discovered two exoplanets in the same solar system that have a deas dense as cotton candy.

You can read their paper here. From the NASA press release:

Data from NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission has revealed two new “super-puff” planets, giant worlds so light that their density is comparable to cotton candy. Scientists calculate that these Jupiter-sized planets—named TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c—are the “puffiest” worlds ever found.

The planets orbit a Sun-like star named TOI-791 that is approximately 1,113 light years away from Earth. The TESS mission first detected the planets by watching for repeated dips in TOI-791’s brightness, a telltale sign that a planet is transiting, or passing in front of, a star. Further study revealed two large planets with unusual features.

TOI-791 b is nearly the same size as Jupiter but contains just 3.0 percent of Jupiter’s mass. TOI-791 c is even larger than Jupiter but contains just 5.9 percent of Jupiter’s mass.

The data for determining both planet’s density came from follow-up observations using a telescope based in Antarctica. Both planets have long orbits, 139 and 232 days respectively, so these observations took place over a period of eight years, in order to capture multiple orbital transits.

One interesting tidbit: Though the data suggests both planets are spherical, this is not confirmed with certainty. Overall, the nature of such puffy planets is not really understood at this time.

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Smooth on Mars is apparently not so smooth

11:00 am

Panorama on June 17, 2026
Click for full resolution. For original images, go here and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Last week I noted how the terrain that stood ahead of Curiosity in its travels on Mount Sharp on Mars appeared to be the smoothest the rover had seen in years.

This week it turns out that upon closer inspection, smooth on Mars is not as smooth as it seems. The panorama above, created from two pictures taken by the rover’s left navigation camera on June 17, 2026 (here and here), provides a much closer view of that smooth ground, and revealed that it isn’t actually smooth at all, but covered with small polygons. The inset on the left shows the area in the white rectangle at full resolution, making the patterned nature of the ground very obvious. From today’s update by the science team:

From up close, the parking spot looks anything but smooth. … There are polygons, veins, lamination, and probably more, once we inspect the higher-resolution images taken today. “Higher-resolution” is the key for why we were in for such a surprise! The features are quite small, a few centimeters across, and therefore we could not see them in the orbital images or from a distance in our navigation and mast camera images. The camera resolution from a distance just isn’t enough to see them. But up close, the terrain revealed all its beauty!

The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks Curiosity’s present position, the white dotted line its actual travels, the red dotted line its planned route. The yellow lines indicate roughly the area covered by the panorama above. The rim of Gale Crater can dimly be seen through the dusty atmosphere 20 to 30 miles away.

Explaining the geological process that caused this patterned surface is beyond my pay grade. My first guess would be it is related to the past presence of water, in the form of liquid or ice, but no one should take that guess very seriously.

As I have said many times, Mars is strange, Mars is wonderful, but above all, Mars is alien.

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Scientists: Interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas is very old, as much as 12 billion years old

12:51 pm

Webb data
Click for original image.

Based on spectroscopic data obtained by the Webb Space Telescope in the past year as interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas zipped through our solar system, a team of scientists have now concluded that its make-up suggests it is extremely old, as much as 12 billion years old, which means it was formed in the very early universe not that long after the Big Bang.

You can read their paper here [pdf]. The graph to the right was published by NASA of the infrared spectroscopic data produced by the Webb Space Telescope that supports this conclusion. That data shows the comet was lacking in isotopes commonly found today, while enriched in isotopes expected only in the early universe. From the paper’s abstract:

[W]e report isotopic measurements of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which reveal an elemental composition unlike any Solar System body. The water in 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium, at a level of D/H = (0.98 ± 0.06)%, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than in known comets, while its range of 12[Carbon]/13[Carbon] ratios (141–191 for CO2 and 123–172 for CO) exceeds typical values found in the Solar System, as well as nearby interstellar clouds and protoplanetary disks.

Such extreme isotopic signatures indicate formation at temperatures ≲ 30 K in a relatively metal-poor environment. When interpreted with respect to models for Galactic chemical evolution, the carbon isotopic composition implies that 3I/ATLAS may have accreted as long ago as 12 billion years, following a period of intense, early star formation. 3I/ATLAS thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system.

As the scientists add in what I think is an understatement, “Its distant origin in space and time makes 3I/ATLAS a uniquely-valuable object studies tool for Galactic archaeology.”

That the comet is still remarkable similar in many other ways to comets in our solar system also tells us that the formation processes that form all solar systems are somewhat common. The solar system in which Comet 3I/Atlas formed was different from ours only that it formed when the universe was young, and thus somewhat different in make-up. Otherwise the processes were the same.

At the same time, Comet 3I/Atlas has given us a window into the early universe, and suggests future interstellar comets will do the same. And there will be future interstellar comets, because we are now developing the observational tools to see them as they routinely fly past on a regular basis.

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