Tag: science

A Martian landscape of volcanic pimples

1:17 pm

A Martian landscape of volcanic pimples
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and downloaded on August 3, 2025. Labeled as a “terrain sample,” such images are usually taken not as part of any specific research request but because the camera team needs to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule so as to maintain its proper temperature. When they do this, they always try to pick interesting targets within the time window, and usually succeed.

In this case, the camera team picked a location in the middle of Isidis Planitia, one of Mars’ four biggest basins thought to have been formed from a major impact several billion years ago, focusing on an area covered with these strange knobs that have craterlike depressions at their peaks.

According research published in 2010 [pdf], it is believed these cones — all of which are only a few feet high — are the result of volcanic activity following the impact that formed Isidis four billion years ago. In a sense, they are leftover pimples from that impact and the subsequent volcanic activity within that melted basin.
» Read more

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European engineers develop a tumbling rover design moved by the Martian wind

10:15 am

Tumbleweed being tested on sandy ground
Tumbleweed being tested on sandy ground. Click for video.

European engineers at Aarhus University in Denmark have now developed and tested a tumbling rover design that is propelled solely by the Martian wind. You can read their most recent paper here.

Not surprisingly, they call it “Tumbleweed.” The screen capture to the right comes from a video of a wind tunnel test proving the Martian atmosphere could move a prototype on sandy ground. The engineers also did similar tests successfully on rocky and coarse ground.

In July 2025, Team Tumbleweed conducted a week-long experimental campaign, supported by Europlanet, at Aarhus University’s Planetary Environment Facility. Using scaled prototypes with 30-, 40- and 50-centimetre diameters, the team carried out static and dynamic tests in a wind tunnel with a variety of wind speeds and ground surfaces under a low atmospheric pressure of 17 millibars.

Results showed that wind speeds of 9-10 metres per second were sufficient to set the rover in motion over a range of Mars-like terrains including smooth and rough surfaces, sand, pebbles and boulder fields. Onboard instruments successfully recorded data during tumbling and the rover’s behaviour matched fluid-dynamics modelling, validating simulations. The scale-model prototypes were able to climb up a slope of 11.5 degrees in the chamber – equivalent to approximately 30 degrees on Mars – demonstrating that the rover could traverse even unfavourable slopes.

Their concept is to send a swarm of Tumbleweeds to Mars, where they could cheaply document prevailing wind and speeds globally. More sophisticated versions could act as full weather stations, as well as provide in situ data about the landscapes they traverse.

The concept is still in its development stage. The next stage of testing will see if Tumbleweed will work with some science sensors attached.

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NASA awards orbital servicing startup Katalyst contract to save the Gehrels Swift space telescope

8:04 am

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

NASA today announced that it has awarded the orbital servicing startup Katalyst a $30 million contract to use a robotic servicing satellite to rendezvous and attach itself to the Gehrels Swift space telescope and raise its orbit.

Right now the telescope’s orbit is decaying, and it will burn up sometime in 2029 if something isn’t done. As one of the most successful low-cost astronomy space telescopes ever launched — central to the study of gamma ray bursts — spending this small amount to save Gehrels seems a no-brainer. In mid-August NASA had awarded Katalyst and a second company small contracts to study whether they could do this mission. Today’s announcement means NASA liked Katalyst’s proposal.

Whether this startup can do it however remains unknown. It appears from its own press release today describing this contract award that the company decided to add Gehrels to its already planned first demo servicing mission planned for next year.

The schedule is also unprecedented: while satellite servicing typically takes years to plan, Katalyst must be ready to launch in eight months, with docking operations scheduled for mid-2026, to save Swift before it burns up.

…Katalyst was already on schedule for an in-space demonstration of its rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking technology for June 2026. The demonstration would buy down technical risk ahead of the planned launch of Katalyst’s multi-mission robotic spacecraft, NEXUS, in 2027. When NASA raised the alarm about Swift, Katalyst seized the opportunity to pivot to a live rescue operation which would demonstrate similar capabilities.

The mission is even further risky in that Swift has no grapple or docking port for Katalyst’s satellite to attach to. Instead, it “will rely on a custom-built robotic capture mechanism that will attach to a feature on the satellite’s main structure–without damaging sensitive instruments.”

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Two launches by China and SpaceX

9:10 am

Both China and SpaceX completed launches today. First, China launched another 11 satellites for its Geely internet-of-things constellation, its Smart Dragon-3 rocket lifting off from a ocean platform off the nation’s eastern coast.

This was the sixth launch for this constellation, bringing the number of satellites in orbit to 64, out of a planned 240. The constellation is designed to provide positioning and communications for trucking and other ground-based businesses.

Next, SpaceX successfully placed three government science satellites into orbit (two for NASA and one for NOAA), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The first stage completed its second flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings both completed their first flight.

The two NASA satellites were the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) to study the Sun’s heliosphere at the edge of the solar system and the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory to study the exosphere, the outermost layer of the atmosphere. The NOAA probe, Space Weather Follow On – Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1), will observe the Sun from one million miles from Earth, providing advance knowledge of strong solar flares and eruptions so that utility companies can shield the electric grid appropriately.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

123 SpaceX
55 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 123 to 94.

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Blobby Martian crater filled with ice

12:55 pm

Overview map

A blobby Martian crater filled with ice
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 4, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this a “concentric fill crater,” a term used by planetary scientists for Martian craters that appear to be filled with glacial material. That certainly appears to be the case, but this 3.5-mile-wide unnamed crater also appears to have been warped by the ice that impregnates the ground all around it.

The overview map above explains why. The white dot marks the location, on the eastern end of the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip that I label glacier country, because almost every image in this region shows similar glacial features. Though it is hard to tell from the inset, all the craters here have similar glacial material within them, and the ground surrounding them also appears glacial in nature.

This particular location is at 40 degrees north latitude. While it might be difficult to establish a colony here, on ground that appears so unstable, going 700 to 800 miles to the southeast would put you in what is considered one of Mars’ prime mining regions. Thus, with the right equipment mining operations would have accessible water not that far away.

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A galaxy sunnyside up

9:23 am

A galaxy sunnyside up
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is the Hubble picture of the week. It shows a strange galaxy that defies categorization. From the caption:

The galaxy in question is NGC 2775, which lies 67 million light-years away in the constellation Cancer (The Crab). NGC 2775 sports a smooth, featureless centre that is devoid of gas, resembling an elliptical galaxy. It also has a dusty ring with patchy star clusters, like a spiral galaxy. Which is it, then: spiral or elliptical — or neither?

Because we can only view NGC [2775 from one angle, it’s difficult to say for sure. Some researchers have classified NGC 2775 as a spiral galaxy because of its feathery ring of stars and dust, while others have classified it as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies have features common to both spiral and elliptical galaxies. It’s not yet known exactly how lenticular galaxies come to be, and they might form in a variety of ways.

To me, the galaxy most resembles a fried egg, sunnyside up, though I very strongly doubt that was the process that formed it. The bright center however suggests that something there has in the past emitted a lot of energy and radiation, thus clearing out the gas and dust from that center.

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Blue Origin wins contract to bring NASA’s Viper rover to the Moon

9:12 am

NASA yesterday awarded Blue Origin a contract to use its Blue Moon lunar lander to transport the agency’s troubled Viper rover to the Moon’s south pole region.

The CLPS task order has a total potential value of $190 million. This is the second CLPS lunar delivery awarded to Blue Origin. Their first delivery – using their Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) robotic lander – is targeted for launch later this year to deliver NASA’s Stereo Cameras for Lunar-Plume Surface Studies and Laser Retroreflective Array payloads to the Moon’s South Pole region.

With this new award, Blue Origin will deliver VIPER to the lunar surface in late 2027, using a second Blue Moon MK1 lander, which is in production. NASA previously canceled the VIPER project and has since explored alternative approaches to achieve the agency’s goals of mapping potential off-planet resources, like water.

The contract does not guarantee this mission. NASA has several options along the way to shut things down, depending on the milestones Blue Origin achieves. The first of course is the success of that first lunar lander.

The announcement does not make clear how NASA is going to pay for the work needed to finish Viper. VIPER was originally budgeted at $250 million. When cancelled in 2024 its budget had ballooned to over $600 million, and that wasn’t enough to complete the rover for launch. Moreover, after getting eleven proposals from the private sector companies to finish and launch Viper, in May 2025 NASA canceled that solicitation.

It is very likely Blue Origin is picking up the tab, but if so the press release does not say so.

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Inexplicable very large patterns found in Saturn’s upper atmosphere

9:40 am

Beads and arms in Saturn's upper atmosphere
Click for original image.

Using the Webb Space Telescope’s infrared capabilities, scientists have detected several different and inexplicable large atmospheric structures linked somehow to the gas giant’s north pole aurora.

The two images to the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, show both types of newly discovered features.

The international team of researchers, comprising 23 scientists from institutions across the UK, US and France, made the discoveries during a continuous 10-hour observation period on 29 November 2024, as Saturn rotated beneath JWST’s view. The team focused on detecting infrared emissions by a positively charged molecular form of hydrogen, H3+, which plays a key role in reactions in Saturn’s atmosphere and so can provide valuable insights into the chemical and physical processes at work. JWST’s Near Infrared Spectrograph allowed the team to simultaneously observe H₃⁺ ions from the ionosphere, 1,100 kilometres above Saturn’s nominal surface, and methane molecules in the underlying stratosphere, at an altitude of 600 kilometres.

In the electrically-charged plasma of the ionosphere, the team observed a series of dark, bead-like features embedded in bright auroral halos. [top picture] These structures remained stable over hours but appeared to drift slowly over longer periods.

Around 500 kilometres lower, in Saturn’s stratosphere, the team discovered an asymmetric star-shaped feature [bottom picture]. This unusual structure extended out from Saturn’s north pole towards the equator. Only four of the star’s six arms were visible, with two mysteriously missing, creating a lopsided pattern.

A more accurate word for the “beads” I think would be “patches”, as they are not small but major dark regions that appear to rotate with the planet, as do the arms. Both also seem to be related to each other as their rotations match, though one sits about 300 miles lower in the atmosphere. As noted in the press release, “the processes that are driving the patterns may influence a column stretching right through Saturn’s atmosphere.”

All guesses. All we have at this point is a truly intriguing observation.

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Japan closes down its Akatsuki Venus orbiter mission

8:50 am

japan’s space agency JAXA today announced that it has shut down down operations on its Akatsuki orbiter, in orbit around Venus since 2015.

Communication with “Akatsuki” was lost during operations near the end of April 2024, triggered by an incident in a control mode of lower-precision attitude maintenance for a prolonged period. Although recovery operations were conducted to restore communication, there has been no luck so far. Considering the fact that the spacecraft has aged, well exceeding its designed lifetime, and was already in the late-stage operation phase, it has been decided to terminate operations.

Akatsuki has a interesting history. Launched in 2010, it failed to enter Venus orbit as planned in two attempts in 2010 and 2011 because of a failure in its main engine. Engineers then improvised and — after orbiting the Sun for several years — were able to get it into Venus orbit in 2015 using only its attitude thrusters. Its primary mission ended in 2018, but it continued to study Venus’ atmosphere since.

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Russia’s Bion-2 capsule returns to Earth after a month in space

8:44 am

After a month in space carrying a cargo of biological samples, including 1,500 fruit flies and 75 mice, Russia’s Bion-2 capsule was successfully recovered today after landing in southern Russia.

Following the landing, some mice was [sic] to be dissected at the site, followed by further dissections on the 1st, 5th, 15th and 30th days after landing to study the effects of space conditions on live organisms.

While resembling the commercial private returnable capsules, such as Varda’s, that are being developed, the difference is significant. Russia has been flying these capsules for decades, which is actually an upgrade from the very first Vostok capsule which it flew Yuri Gagarin in 1961. However, the research has always been focused not on producing a product for sale on Earth but related to Russia’s manned program. Thus, the results has always been somewhat dead end. Expect the same here.

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Astronomers refine the spin and size of Hayabusa-2’s next target asteroid

10:15 am

Using a number of ground-based telescopes, astronomers have determined that asteroid 1998 KY26, which Japan’s Hayabusa-2 probe will visit in 2031, spins much faster and is much smaller than previously estimated.

The new observations, combined with previous radar data, have revealed that the asteroid, 1998 KY26, is just 11 meters wide. It is also spinning about twice as fast as previously thought: “One day on this asteroid lasts only five minutes!” he says. Previous data indicated that the asteroid was around 30 meters in diameter and completed a rotation in approximately 10 minutes. The smaller size and faster rotation will make the spacecraft’s touchdown maneuver more difficult to perform than anticipated.

The observations also found that 1998 KY26 is bright, suggesting it is a solid object, not a rubble pile. Its fast rotation adds weight to this conclusion.

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Perseverance data suggests multiple past wet periods occurred in Jezero Crater

9:24 am

Perseverance's travels inside Jezero Crater
Figure 1 of the paper, showing Perseverance’s travels inside Jezero Crater. PIXL is an instrument on the rover. The numbers indicate the Martian days since landing. The Three Forks Depot is where Perseverance placed its first cache of sample cores. Click for original.

Scientists analyzing data taken by the Mars rover Perseverance while it traversed the floor and delta inside Jezero Crater strongly suggests that the landscape there experienced multiple past wet periods.

In Jezero, the 24 mineral species reveal the volcanic nature of Mars’ surface and its interactions with water over time. The water chemically weathers the rocks and creates salts or clay minerals, and the specific minerals that form depend on environmental conditions. The identified minerals in Jezero reveal three types of fluid interactions, each with different implications for habitability.

The first suite of minerals — including greenalite, hisingerite and ferroaluminoceladonite — indicate localized high-temperature acidic fluids that were only found in rocks on the crater floor, which are interpreted as some of the oldest rocks included in this study. The water involved in this episode is considered the least habitable for life, since research on Earth has shown high temperatures and low pH can damage biological structures.

…The second suite of minerals reflects moderate, neutral fluids that support more favorable conditions for life and were present over a larger area. Minerals like minnesotaite and clinoptilolite formed at lower temperatures and neutral pH with minnesotaite detected in both the crater floor and the upper fan region, while clinoptilolite was restricted to the crater floor.

Finally, the third category represents low-temperature, alkaline fluids and is considered quite habitable from our modern Earth perspective. Sepiolite, a common alteration mineral on Earth, formed under moderate temperatures and alkaline conditions and was found widely distributed across all units the rover has explored. The presence of sepiolite in all of these units reveals a widespread episode of liquid water creating habitable conditions in Jezero crater and infilling sediments.

You can read the peer-reviewed paper here. The uncertainty of these results is important to note. The analysis did not actually look at real samples. It took data obtained by Perseverance and used computer models and AI to analyze it. The research also assumes the minerals formed based on our understanding of such geological processes on Earth. On Mars conditions are very alien, and could result from chemistry we as yet do not understand, or are unaware even exists.

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ISS research suggests weightlessness accelerates aging in stem cells

8:58 am

According to a study that flew stem cells on four separate missions to ISS ranging in length from 32 to 45 days, weightlessness appears to age stem cells significantly.

Researchers from University of California San Diego Sanford Stem Cell Institute have discovered that spaceflight accelerates the aging of human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs), which are vital for blood and immune system health. In a study published in Cell Stem Cell, the team used automated artificial intelligence (AI)-driven stem cell-tracking nanobioreactor systems in four SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services missions to the International Space Station (ISS) to track stem cell changes in real time. The findings show that the cells lost some of their ability to make healthy new cells, became more prone to DNA damage and showed signs of faster aging at the ends of their chromosomes after spaceflight — all signs of accelerated aging.

Upon return to Earth the study also found the cells recovered somewhat.

You can read the peer-reviewed paper here.

In a sense, this study confirms what numerous other research has found, that weightlessness mimics the conditions of old age, and causes the same physical decline seen in the elderly. It also shows that much of that damage in weightlessness is transient, recovering upon return to Earth.

This research once again highlights the imperative need to study the impact on various levels of artificial gravity on the human body. Will producing a 10% g environment — using centrifugal force — mitigate these negative impacts? Or will we have to simulate a full 1 g environment? Or something in between?

The first option is much easier in terms of engineering. The last will be complex and take time to develop.

At the moment almost no research has been done in this area. And it needs to happen soon, if people intend to go to Mars in the near future. Such journeys, six months minimum in weightlessness, are likely to leave the passengers somewhat debilitated upon arrival, no matter how much they exercise along the way. And being debilitated is not a good condition for a pioneer trying to build a new civilization on an alien world.

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Monitoring the largest recent impact detected by InSight’s seismometer

11:51 am

Overview

Cool image time! On December 24, 2021 the seismometer of the Mars lander InSight detected a four magnitude earthquake, the largest detected up until then. Because its nature suggested that it had been caused by an impact, not an internal shifting, the science team for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) immediately started searching for new impact craters in the area of Mars where the data suggested the quake came from.

Two months later they found it, in the northern lowland plains just south of the prime landing zone chosen by SpaceX for its Starship spacecraft. The black cross on the overview map to the right indicates the position. The four red spots are the prime Starship landing sites. The white dots indicate other locations considered. The black dots were images taken for a proposed Dragon landing. This impact is thus only about 100 miles away from the nearest possible Starship landing spot.
» Read more

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Strange unexplained polarization shifts in M87’s supermassive black hole

12:25 pm

The changing magnetic field of M87
Click for original image.

Using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), astronomers have detected unexpected and so far unexplained polarization shifts in the supermassive black hole that resides at the center of the galaxy M87, located 55 million light years away.

That black hole is estimated to have a mass six billion times that of our Sun, and was the first ever imaged by EHT. By using observations made in 2017, 2018, and 2021, as shown in the images to the right, found its magnetic field changing in unexpected ways.

Between 2017 and 2021, the polarization pattern flipped direction. In 2017, the magnetic fields appeared to spiral one way; by 2018, they settled; and in 2021, they reversed, spiraling the opposite direction. Some of these apparent changes in the polarization’s rotational direction may be influenced by a combination of internal magnetic structure and external effects, such as a Faraday screen. The cumulative effects of how this polarization changes over time suggests an evolving, turbulent environment where magnetic fields play a vital role in governing how matter falls into the black hole and how energy is launched outward.

The changes were more puzzling in that the size of the black hole’s event horizon, the ring surrounding it, did not change. According to the scientists, this suggests “magnetized plasma swirling near the event horizon is far from static; it’s dynamic and complex, pushing our theoretical models to the limit.”

That the magnetic field flipped polarity however should not be surprising to scientists. Consider the same polarity flips we see in our own Sun every eleven years. It should be expected that the magnetic field around a super massive black hole would be equally variable, if not more so.

The problem is that there remains no understanding about why such changes happen. We know the magnetic field exists. We know it flips polarity. With the Sun we know it does so regularly every eleven years. Why it does so however remains unknown, though there are theories. With M87 the data is far less certain.

Tracking the changes at M87 however should help us build our knowledge base so that someday we might finally grasp those fundamentals.

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Lucy scientists name the features on asteroid Donaldjohanson

10:16 am

The named features on Donaldjohanson
Click for original.

The science team for the asteroid probe Lucy have now released their names for the features they discovered on the main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson when the spacecraft flew past in April 2025.

The smaller lobe is called Afar Lobus, after the Ethiopian region where Lucy and other hominin fossils were found. The larger lobe is named Olduvai Lobus, after the Tanzanian river gorge that has also yielded many important hominin discoveries.

The asteroid’s neck, Windover Collum, which joins those two lobes, is named after the Windover Archeological Site near Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida — where NASA’s Lucy mission launched in 2021. Human remains and artifacts recovered from that site revolutionized our understanding of the people who lived in Florida around 7,300 years ago.

Two smooth areas on the asteroid’s neck are named Hadar Regio, marking the specific site of Johanson’s discovery of the Lucy fossil, and Minatogawa Regio, after the location where the oldest known hominins in Japan were found. Select boulders and craters on Donaldjohanson are named after notable fossils ranging from pre-Homo sapiens hominins to ancient modern humans.

These names were “approved” by the International Astronautical Union (IAU), which claims the authority over the naming of every rock, boulder, pebble in space. The truth is, however, that future spacefarers are going to accept these names no matter what the IAU had said, simply because these scientists did the first exploration of this asteroid. They get to choose, not the IAU.

The spacecraft is now on its long coast out of the main belt and on to the orbit of Jupiter, where it will make fly-bys of ten different asteroids.

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Scientists at JPL now predict a major long term uptick in sunspot activity

9:59 am

The solar science community's failed predictions
The many failed recent predictions of the
solar science community

The uncertainty of science: According to a NASA press release today, scientists at JPL now predict that the Sun will see a major increase in sunspot activity in the coming decades, ending the relatively quiet period seen in the two past solar maximums.

In their paper, the scientists say they come to this conclusion due to changes seen in solar wind activity since 2008. From their abstract:

Over the course of two decades until 2008, the solar wind became significantly weaker with a constant declining trend in many important solar wind parameters, and solar cycle 24 being the weakest on record since the start of the space age. Here we show that since 2008, the Sun has reversed this long-term weakening trend with a steady increase in various solar wind proton parameters observed at 1 au. Furthermore, comparison of values from a fitted trend to data between 2008 and 2025 show the following increases in solar wind proton parameters: speed (~6%), density (~26%), temperature (~29%), thermal pressure (~45%), mass flux (~27%), momentum flux or dynamic pressure (~34%), energy flux (~40%), interplanetary magnetic field magnitude (~31%), and the radial component of the magnetic field (~33%).

This has important implications on long-term solar trends, implying that the exceptional weakness of solar cycle 24 was most likely a recent outlier and that the Sun is not entering a modern era Maunder/Dalton-like minimum phase in its solar variation, but is instead recovering from a ~20 yr decline.

This analysis and conclusion is most intriguing, but we must also remember that every prediction by the solar science community in the past two decades has turned out to be wrong, as illustrated by the graph above. This prediction is just like all those others, in that it is based not on any fundamental understanding of why these changes in the solar wind are occurring, but simply extrapolating this past behavior into the future, a very unreliable method of prediction.

These scientists might be correct, but I would not bet any money on it.

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The central star-forming cauldron of M82, the most well known star-forming galaxy

12:40 pm

The central star-forming region of M82
Click for original. For original of inset go here.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was released today by the Hubble Science team. It shows the central star-forming core of the galaxy M82, only about 12 million light years away and long known as a “peculiar” galaxy by earlier research from the 20th century. For this reason I used the 1963 optical image taken by the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar in California as the inset, showing the entire galaxy. At the time the data only suggested some major energetic events were occurring in the galaxy’s core, as indicated by what looked like filaments shooting out from that core at right angles to the plane of the galaxy.

Data since then, from Hubble and Webb and other space telescopes, have revealed that this galaxy, which some have nicknamed the “Cigar Galaxy”, is forming stars at a prolific rate.

Forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way, the Cigar Galaxy is what astronomers call a starburst galaxy. The intense starburst period that grips this galaxy has given rise to super star clusters in the galaxy’s heart. Each of these super star clusters contains hundreds of thousands of stars and is more luminous than a typical star cluster.

The red indicates the dust that permeates the galaxy. The blue comes from the radiation emitted from the clusters near the center, illuminating and ionizing that dust.

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Bubbling lava frozen in a Martian crater

11:24 am

Bubbling lava frozen in a 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 23, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This one-mile-wide unnamed crater was a featured image last week by the science team. As noted in the caption, written by Chris Okubo of the U.S. Geological Survey:

This area was covered by a large flood of lava, which we see as the generally flat areas surrounding the crater. As the lava flowed across, some of it flowed into this crater through a low spot along the crater rim.

Once in the crater, the lava heated ground water or ground ice in the floor, causing the water to boil and turn into steam. This steam then exploded through the overlying lava and created small, ring-shaped formations. These are called ”rootless cones,” and they record the presence of ground water or ground ice in the crater floor at the time of the lava eruptions.

In other words, when this crater was flooded with hot lava, it was filled with ice or water. That fact is significant because of the crater’s location, as shown in the overview map below.
» Read more

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House committee support for threatened NASA missions is actually quite questionable

9:26 am

According to a House appropriations committee spending bill that it approved this week, it appears on the surface that it is canceling the proposed 24% cut by Trump to NASA’s budget as well as endorsing continued funding for some threatened missions. A close look however suggests this congressional support for NASA is somewhat superficial, and might actually be ephemeral.

The key is the language of the bill. From the link above:

The bill was largely unchanged from what the CJS [commerce, justice and science] subcommittee approved July 14. It includes $24.838 billion for NASA, nearly the same as the $24.875 billion the agency received in fiscal 2024 and 2025, and far above the $18.8 billion the administration proposed for fiscal 2026 in May.

Members adopted a manager’s amendment, a package of noncontroversial changes and corrections, on a voice vote. That amendment also made additions to the report accompanying the bill. The report includes language expressing support for several NASA missions targeted for cancellation, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Juno mission at Jupiter and the New Horizons mission in the Kuiper Belt.

The report does not specify funding levels for those missions, but the “continues support” language signals to NASA that it should fund continue operations within the agency’s science budget. [emphasis mine]

It is the vagueness of this language that suggests the support is ephemeral. The courts recently have consistently ruled that if Congress doesn’t specifically mandate spending on a project, the White House is free to move money around as it sees fit. By not expressly outlining funding for Chandra, Juno, and New Horizons, these congressmen are playing a shell game, whereby to their constituents they can point to this vote and claim they wholeheartedly supported NASA and these missions. At the same time, they also appear to be allowing Trump the freedom to go ahead and shut the missions down, as his budget has already proposed.

None of this is yet real. The bill still must be passed by the full House, as well as the Senate. It then has to be signed by Trump. A lot of changes would happen in that process.

Either way, it appears that within the House at least, there is some movement to at least make some budget cuts possible. The sad thing is that the House is not actually cutting the budget, even as it is allowing Trump a way to cut these relatively inexpensive on-going missions. Considering the debt, it would have been much better had the committee actually trimmed NASA’s budget, even a little, while at the same time allocating specific funds to keep these very cost-effective missions alive.

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