Tag: science

Europe’s Hera asteroid probe sends back data from Mars fly-by

1:00 pm

Deimos and Mars as seen by Hera
Click to see full movie.

The European Space Agency (ESA) Hera probe, on its way to study the Didymos/Dimorphos asteroid binary, has successfully sent back images and data obtained during its close-by of Mars yesterday.

The infrared image to the right, a screen capture from a short movie assembled from Hera’s first images, shows the Martian moon Deimos with Mars in the background. The mission scientists have compiled all of these first images taken by Hera to create a short movie, that I have embedded below. From the movie’s caption:

The car-sized Hera spacecraft was about 1000 km away from Deimos as these images were acquired. Deimos orbits approximately 23 500 km from the surface of Mars and is tidally locked, so that this side of the moon is rarely seen. Hera’s TIRI – supplied to the mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA – sees in mid-infrared spectral bands to chart surface temperature. Because Deimos lacks an atmosphere, the side of the moon being illuminated by the Sun is considerably warmer than the planet beneath it.

Although it appears as if Deimos is passing in front of Mars from south to north, the image was actually taken as Hera passed very close to Deimos from north to south at high speed.

Deimos appears brighter than Mars. This means that the surface of airless Deimos is hotter than the surface of Mars. The material covering the surface of Deimos has low reflectivity and is pitch black. This allows it to absorb sunlight well and become hotter. In contrast, the surface of Mars is highly reflective, and its atmosphere transports heat from the warm daytime side to the cooler nighttime side. This is why there is a large temperature difference between Mars and Deimos.

These infrared images also tell us the excellent quality of the camera. Note how detailed the features are on the Martian surface. When Hera gets to Didymos/Dimorphos in December 2026 it is going to be able to document those two asteroids in remarkable detail, including the results of the Dart impact on Dimorphos in September 2022.
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Blue Ghost watches the Earth eclipse the Sun from the Moon

10:23 am

Eclipse as seen by Blue Ghost
Click for original image.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander last night successfully recorded images and data as the Earth slowly over hours crossed the face of the Sun, producing an eclipse.

The image to the right, cropped and reduced slightly to post here, is one such image. From the Firefly update page:

Captured at our landing site in the Moon’s Mare Crisium around 3:30 am CDT, the photo shows the sun about to emerge from totality behind Earth. This marks the first time in history a commercial company was actively operating on the Moon and able to observe a total solar eclipse where the Earth blocks the sun and casts a shadow on the lunar surface. This phenomenon occurred simultaneously as the lunar eclipse we witnessed on Earth.

The company has the right to tout its success, since it is the first of five private companies to actually succeed at a landing on the Moon. However, this is not the first such eclipse captured by a lander on the Moon. Surveyor 3 did it in April 1967, while Japan’s Kaguya orbiter did it also in 2009. (Watch this great lecture outlining the entire Surveyor program, presented during the 50th anniversary of its success. Hat tip reader Richard M.)

It is now past noon on the Moon, the temperatures will begin dropping, and Firefly will begin reactivating some instruments for the final week of operations before lunar sunset and shutdown for the long very cold lunar night.

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NASA releases Blue Ghost movie landing while Firefly prepares lander to observe solar eclipse of the Moon by Earth

8:54 am

NASA today released a fantastic movie of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander as it touched down on the Moon on March 2, 2025, taken by four cameras mounted on the underside of its Blue Ghost lunar lander.

I have embedded the movie below.

The compressed, resolution-limited video features a preliminary sequence that NASA researchers stitched together from SCALPSS 1.1’s four short-focal-length cameras, which were capturing photos at 8 frames per second during the descent and landing.

The sequence, using approximate altitude data, begins roughly 91 feet (28 meters) above the surface. The descent images show evidence that the onset of the interaction between Blue Ghost’s reaction control thruster plumes and the surface begins at roughly 49 feet (15 meters). As the descent continues, the interaction becomes increasingly complex, with the plumes vigorously kicking up the lunar dust, soil and rocks — collectively known as regolith. After touchdown, the thrusters shut off and the dust settles. The lander levels a bit and the lunar terrain beneath and immediately around it becomes visible.

Engineers will use this imagery to better anticipate and possibly reduce the amount of dust kicked up during future landings.

Meanwhile, Firefly engineers are preparing the lander to observe tomorrow night’s lunar eclipse, but from a completely different perspective. On Earth we will see the Earth’s shadow slowly over five hours cross the Moon. On the Moon Blue Ghost will see the Earth cross in front of the Sun. Because of our home world’s thick atmosphere, there should be a ring remaining during totality.

Because the Moon will be in shadow during the eclipse, the challenge will be power management, operating the spacecraft solely on its batteries.
» Read more

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Graceful isolated dunes at the edge of the sea of dunes that surrounds Mars’ north ice cap

12:44 pm

Graceful isolated dunes on the edge of the dune sea that surrounds Mars' north pole
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 29, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I have also rotated it so north is up. Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research request but to fill a gap in the schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

In this case the timing allowed the camera team to capture this breath-taking picture of these graceful arching dunes sitting in what is likely the near-surface ice sheet that covers much of the red planet’s high latitudes. That sheet is not pure ice, but a complex mixture of ice, dirt, dust, and sand, covered during the winter by a thin mantle of dry ice.

The isolated dunes appear to be ridges sticking up from that flat terrain, but this impression is probably incorrect, based on the location.
» Read more

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Astronomers discover 128 more moons around Saturn

9:01 am

Using a ground-based telescope, astronomers have now identified 128 new moons circling Saturn, bringing its moon count to 274, more than the total moons around all the other planets in the solar system combined.

Edward Ashton at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, and his colleagues found the new moons with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, revealing dozens that have previously evaded astronomers. They took hours of images of Saturn, adjusted them for the planet’s movement through the sky and stacked them on top of each other to reveal objects that would otherwise be too dim to see.

All the new moons are between 2 and 4 kilometres in diameter and are likely to have been formed hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago in collisions between larger moons, says Ashton.

That Saturn has so many moons should surprise no one. Saturn actually has possibly millions, maybe even billions, of moons, if you count every particle in its rings. In fact, the gas giant poses a problem for astronomers in defining what a moon actually is. How small must an object be before you stop calling it a moon?

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SpaceX launches NASA space telescope plus four solar satellites; China launches 18 communication satellites

8:43 am

Two launches to report: First, China yesterday successfully completed its first Long March 8 launch from its new launchpad at its coastal Wenchang spaceport, placing 18 satellites for SpaceSail internet constellation, the fifth group so far launched.

China’s state run press noted that the launchpad is designed to allow the Long March 8 rocket to launch every seven days, a pace needed to place these giant Chinese satellite constellations into orbit.

Next, in the early morning hours today SpaceX successfully launched two different NASA science missions, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The prime payload was SPHEREx, a space telescope designed to make an all-sky survey. The secondary payload was PUNCH, four satellites forming a constellation to study the Sun.

The rocket’s first stage completed its third flight, landing back at Vandenberg.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

27 SpaceX
11 China
3 Russia
2 Rocket Lab

As happened last year, SpaceX handily leads the rest of the world, including American companies, in total launches, 27 to 20. This lead will be extended tonight should the company’s next manned Dragon launch to ISS go off as planned.

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Athena located from lunar orbit

3:12 pm

Athena on the Moon
Click for original master image.

Using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scientists have now located and photographed Intuitive Machines lunar lander Athena where it sits on its side on the Moon.

The picture to the right, reduced to post here, shows that location with the small arrow. This is definitely on Mons Mouton, the intended landing zone about 100 miles from the Moon’s south pole. However at the best magnification provided by the LRO science team, the rover is not visible. Reader James Fincannon was puzzled by this and downloaded the highest resolution version of this image and sent it to me. I have added it to the picture as the inset. Athena is the little white dot in the center of a small 65-foot-wide crater. Note that its shadow falls in the opposite direction of all the shadows in the craters, as the lander projects upward from the surface while the craters descend downward.

One can’t help questioning the quality of the lander’s landing software, if it ended up picking the center of this small crater to touch down, especially considering there appear to be large relatively clear flat areas all around.

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Astronomers have discovered four sub-Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting Barnard’s Star

10:44 am

Based on data from several ground-based telescopes, astronomers now believe that Barnard’s Star, the nearest single star to our Sun at a distance of about six light years away, has a solar system of at least four sub-Earth-sized planets.

After rigorously calibrating and analyzing data taken during 112 nights over a period of three years, the team found solid evidence for three exoplanets around Barnard’s Star, two of which were previously classified as candidates. The team also combined data from MAROON-X with data from a 2024 study done with the ESPRESSO instrument at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to confirm the existence of a fourth planet, elevating it as well from candidate to bona fide exoplanet.

You can read the paper here. The scientists estimate the minimum masses of these exoplanets to range from 19% to 34% that of the Earth, with their maximum mass not exceeding 57% of the Earth. All are believed to be rocky planets orbiting just inside the star’s habitable zone.

Astronomers have been trying to detect exoplanets around Barnard’s Star for more a century. Several previous “discoveries” were later retracted. This result however appears somewhat firm though of course there are a lot of uncertainties in the result.

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Europe’s Hera probe to fly past Mars tomorrow

10:22 am

As part of its journey to the binary asteroid Didymos/Dimorphos, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hera probe will slingshot past Mars tomorrow, obtaining images and data of both the red planet and its moon Deimos.

Three instruments will gather data, a navigational camera, and infrared camera, and a spectral camera, with the goal mostly to calibrate the instruments and make sure they are working as designed. The data won’t be available until the next day, when the ESA will hold a webcast unveiling the images.

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Blue Ghost activates NASA drill, prepares for hot lunar noon

9:16 am

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

More than a week after landing in Mare Crisium, ground controllers have prepared Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander for surviving the very hot lunar noon while also activating NASA’s LISTER drill, which proceeded to successfully drill down into the lunar surface below the lander.

Mounted below Blue Ghost’s lower deck, NASA’s Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) payload is a pneumatic, gas-powered drill developed by Texas Tech University and Honeybee Robotics that measures the temperature and flow of heat from the Moon’s interior.

I have embedded below the video of this drilling operation. At this moment it appears that nine of the lander’s payloads have completed their tasks successfully, with no indication yet that the tenth playload will have problems. All in all, Firefly has succeeded in establishing itself now as the leading private company capable of launching spacecraft to other worlds.
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Blue Ghost landed almost dead center within its target zone

10:55 am

Blue Ghost on the Moon
Click for before and after blink animation

The picture to the right, taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) prior to the successful landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, shows its entire landing region. The inset in the lower left is a picture taken by LRO on March 3, 2025, after landing.

The full picture was taken near sunset, with sunlight coming from the left. The inset was taken at sunrise, with sunlight coming from the right. This explains the difference in shadows between the two. Blue Ghost is the white dot in the inset with its long shadow, the black streak, cutting through the nearby crater. The first picture taken from the lander after landing looked down that shadow, looking across the crater.

The new picture tells us that Blue Ghost landed almost dead center in its target zone, indicating that the engineering worked as planned. The lander also used its computer brain to pick a good landing spot and avoid the nearby craters.

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A galactic ball and spiral interact

9:55 am

A galactic ball and spiral interact
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 study of the star populations in these two interacting galaxies. From the caption:

Arp 105 is a dazzling ongoing merger between an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy drawn together by gravity, characterized by a long, drawn out tidal tail of stars and gas more than 362,000 light-years long. The immense tail, which extends beyond this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, was pulled from the two galaxies by their gravitational interactions and is embedded with star clusters and dwarf galaxies.

The three blue objects on the outskirts of both galaxies are thought to be active star-forming regions. Whether all three are part of this collision is unclear, as the object on the lower right might simply be a foreground object based on the available data.

What makes this galactic pair so intriguing is that the two galaxies are so different with very different theorized histories. Elliptical galaxies (“the ball”) are thought to be very old, the result of the long term evolution of spirals. You would therefore not think an elliptical would normally interact with a spiral, as their ages are likely so dissimilar.

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

12:16 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

9:41 am

A baby binary in formation
Click for original image.

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

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

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

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

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

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

2:25 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

11:45 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:55 am

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

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

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

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Scientists discover the oldest known crater on Earth

10:09 am

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

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

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

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

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

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Future now very dim for Lunar Trailblazer

9:26 am

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

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

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

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Europa Clipper completes Mars fly-by

9:21 am

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

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

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

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

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Blue Ghost lunar surface operations proceeding as planned

9:13 am

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

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

I have embedded below the video posted at the link of Lunar PlanetVac deploying and then blowing that gas to capture surface soil.
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Engineers turn off one more instrument on each Voyager spacecraft

3:57 pm

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

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

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

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

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Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter snaps picture of Blue Ghost on the Moon

11:21 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Psyche captures Jupiter and Mars on its way to asteroid Psyche

11:02 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

9:21 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

8:50 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:12 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

8:31 am

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

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

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

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

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

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Sunspot update: Sunspot activity remains high but stable

3:02 pm

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

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

8:44 am

A galaxy surrounded by hot massive stars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the galaxy NGC 5042, located about 48 million light years away. The picture combines data from all of Hubble’s available wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the infrared. From the caption:

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

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

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

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