Tag: science

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

8:37 am

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

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

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

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

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Exploring the canyons and plateaus of Valles Marineris

12:33 pm

Overview map

The canyons inside Valles Marineris
Click for original image.

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

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

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

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

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

Damn! The future is going to so grand!

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All is so far well with Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander

9:27 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lunar exploration is certainly heating up.

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

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Intuitive Machine’s Athena lunar lander to launch later today

12:41 pm

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

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

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

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

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

» Read more

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Juno data proves volcanism on Io involves numerous lava lakes

11:47 am

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

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

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

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

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Lucy takes first picture of its next target asteroid

9:12 am

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

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

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

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

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

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The Europa Clipper team prepares for Mars fly-by

8:52 am

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

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

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

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

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

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Curiosity looks uphill into canyon

1:10 pm

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

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

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

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

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

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

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

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Bumpy frozen lava on Mars

2:50 pm

Bumpy frozen lava on Mars
Click for original image.

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

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

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

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Hubble takes a close look at one tiny part of the Veil Nebula

12:47 pm

A small section of the Veil Nebula
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 just one very tiny section of the supernova remnant known as the Veil Nebula, located about 2,400 light years away.

The white dot on the inset (showing the entire Veil Nebula) marks the area covered by this closeup, focused on the one bright section of nebula in the Veil’s southwest quadrant. From the caption:

This nebula is the remnant of a star roughly 20 times as massive as the Sun that exploded about 10 000 years ago. … This view combines images taken in three different filters by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, highlighting emission from hydrogen, sulphur and oxygen atoms. This image shows just a small fraction of the Veil Nebula; if you could see the entire nebula without the aid of a telescope, it would be as wide as six full Moons placed side by side.

Astronomers have been using Hubble to take periodic pictures of the Veil Nebular since 1994 in order to track changes as these gaseous gossamer strands evolve over time.

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Close-up of Blue Ghost’s landing zone on the Moon

12:26 pm

Close-up of Blue Ghost's landing zone
Click for original image.

The science team for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on February 21, 2025 posted the picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, showing in close-up the March 2, 2025 landing zone for Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander.

The Blue Ghost landing region (image center, 18.56°N, 61.81°E) is heavily cratered due its ancient age (>3 billion years). … The landing region is near a large volcanic cone, Mons Latreille, which formed billions of years ago as part of the massive outpouring of basaltic magma that filled much of the Crisium basin.

Despite the many craters, there are plenty of smooth spots in this landscape. The real challenge for the lander is finding its way to them.

For a map showing this location on the Moon, go here.

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A Martian glacier of dust

3:14 pm

A Martian glacier of dust
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture above, rotated, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 2, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The tiny white dot near the lower center of the overview map below marks the location, on the northern wall of the smaller parallel canyon to the much larger part of Valles Marineris dubbed Coprates Canyon.

The scientists label this a “slope deposit.” What I see is a dust glacier flowing down hill in that long hollow (indicated by the arrows), with the ripple dunes actually acting almost like waves. Nor is this description unreasonable. On Mars the dust will gather in the hollows of these slopes and over time, with no rain and little wind to disturb them, will begin to flow down much like a glacier.

In this case, the descent is gigantic, considering the size of Valles Marineris. From the top to bottom of this image the elevation drop is about 14,000 feet over a distance of 11 miles.

Overview map

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New observations reduce odds of asteroid 2024 YR4’s 2032 Earth impact to practically zero

9:26 am

The uncertainty of science: According to a short update from NASA late yesterday, new ground-based observations have now reduced the odds that asteroid 2024 YR4’s will hit the Earth in 2032 to only 0.28 percent.

Observations made overnight on Feb. 19 – 20 of asteroid 2024 YR4 have further decreased its chance of Earth impact on Dec. 22, 2032, to 0.28%. NASA’s planetary defense teams will continue to monitor the asteroid to improve our predictions of the asteroid’s trajectory. With this new data, the chance of an impact with the Moon increased slightly to 1%.

Expect these numbers to change again in March, when the Webb telescope tracks the asteroid. And do not assume Webb will confirm these numbers. There remains great uncertainty in all these calculations, especially because there is great uncertainty about the size, mass, and make-up of 2024 YR4. It could be anywhere from 130 feet to 320 feet in diameter, and that difference makes these calculations uncertain.

In other words, it remains essential that work should begin on putting together a mission to visit and study this asteroid, now. Though it isn’t large enough to cause a worldwide extinction, it is big enough to do very significant damage, depending on where it hits.

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The uncertainty of science: Astronomers keep changing the odds of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the Earth in 2032

8:53 am

In the past three days three different reports from both NASA and the European Space Agency have given three different percentages for the chances that asteroid 2024 YR4 will hit the Earth in 2032.

On Tuesday, NASA calculated that the space rock had a 3.1% chance of hitting Earth in 2032, while the European Space Agency’s risk assessment sits at 2.8%.

The narrow difference is due to the two agencies’ use of different tools for determining the asteroid’s orbit and modeling its potential impact. But both percentages rise above the 2.7% chance of collision once associated with an asteroid discovered in 2004 called Apophis, making 2024 YR4 the most significant space rock to be spotted within the past two decades.

However, another update shared by NASA on Wednesday showed that 2024 YR4 has a 1.5% chance of colliding with Earth in December 2032, based on new observations now that the full moon has passed. Astronomers have anticipated that such fluctuations are possible as they gather more observational data.

While the media has generally focused mostly on the higher numbers in their knee-jerk “We’re all gonna die” approach to everything, all these different numbers simply illustrate is the generally limited nature of our data about the asteroid’s orbit and its future path. For example because such asteroids are so small, it isn’t just gravity that influences their flight path through the solar system. The Sun’s light pressure can actually have an impact, but to determine how much you need to know the exact size, shape, and rotation of the object. Right now 2024 YR4’s size is estimated to range from 130 to 320 feet in width, determining this effect is presently impossible. Nor is this the only such variable.

At the same time, the data continues to suggest that the chances of this asteroid hitting the Earth are not trivial. The sooner we can find out everything about it the better. Getting a mission to it quickly would be the best way, but so far I have heard little from NASA or anyone about such an idea.

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The broken edge of Mars’ largest volcanic ash field

12:54 pm

The broken edge of Mars' largest volcanic ash field
Click for original image.

Overview map

Cool image time! The picture above, reduced and rotated to place north to the left, was taken on November 5, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labeled it “Stepped Features in Tartarus Skopulus”. The white dot on the overview map to the right marks the location, right at the equator on the northern edge of the Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash field on Mars, about the size of the subcontinent of India. As I wrote in a post in 2024:

It is believed that most of the planet’s dust comes from this ash field. It is also evident that the ash is a leftover from the time period more than a billion years ago when the giant volcanoes that surround this field were erupting regularly. The eruptions laid down vast flood lava plains that coat the surface for thousands of miles.

The ash either came from the eruptions themselves, or was created as the thin Martian wind eroded those flood lava plains, slowly stripping ash from the top. The ash then gathered within the black-outlined regions on the map.

In that 2024 post the cool image showed another location on the north edge of Medusae. In that case the prevailing wind had carved long parallel ridges as it pulled ash from the field.

Here, the wind appears to play no part, or if it did, it produced a very different terrain. At first glance it appears the stepped terraces formed as the ash field began to slide downhill to the north, spreading to crack along the curved lines. The inset especially suggests this explanation.

A closer look instead suggests these terraces each represent a different layer of ash placed down by a sequence of eruptions. Over time the prevailing winds, which here appear to generally blow to the south, stripped off the top of each layer, creating this stair-step landscape.

I however have no guess as to why the terraces are curved. Regardless, it is all strange, but quite beautiful in its own way.

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New data from Webb shows the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole flares multiple times per day

9:47 am

The magnetic field lines surrounding Sagittarius A*
The magnetic field lines surrounding Sagittarius A*,
published in March 2024. Click for original image.

Though past research had shown that the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, dubbed Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star) is generally quiet and inactive, new data from the Webb Space Telescope gathered over a year’s time now shows that it flares multiple times per day.

Throughout the year, the team saw how the black hole’s accretion disk emitted 5 to 6 large flares per day, of varying lengths and brightnesses, plus smaller flares in between. “[Sagittarius A*] is always bubbling with activity and never seems to reach a steady state,” Yusef-Zadeh says. “We observed the black hole multiple times throughout 2023 and 2024, and we noticed changes in every observation. We saw something different each time, which is really remarkable. Nothing ever stayed the same.”

In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team outlines two possible ideas for the processes driving these flares. The faint flickers may be caused by turbulent fluctuations in the accretion disk, which could compress plasma and trigger a burst of radiation. “It’s similar to how the sun’s magnetic field gathers together, compresses and then erupts a solar flare,” Yusef-Zadeh says. “Of course, the processes are more dramatic because the environment around a black hole is much more energetic and much more extreme.”

The larger and brighter flares, on the other hand, may be caused by two fast-moving magnetic fields colliding and releasing accelerated particles. These magnetic reconnection events also have a solar parallel.

You can read their paper here [pdf]. Though this research shows unexpected activity, that activity is still relatively mild compared to other central supermassive black holes in many other galaxies. Why this difference exists remains an unanswered question.

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Blue Ghost lowers its lunar orbit while shooting a movie of the Moon

3:12 pm

The company Firefly announced that its lunar lander Blue Ghost successfully completed 3:18 minute engine burn that tightened its orbit around the Moon.

This maneuver moved the lander from a high elliptical orbit to a much lower elliptical orbit around the Moon. Shortly after the burn, Blue Ghost captured incredible footage of the Moon’s far side, about 120 km above the surface.

I have embedded the movie below. Quite spectacular indeed. The spacecraft is still on target for a March 2, 2025 landing attempt.
» Read more

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Another “What the heck?” image on Mars, this time a mystery on both small and large scales

12:16 pm

What the heck?
Click for the original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

In this case however the camera team picked this spot probably to satisfy their own curiosity. This same location was photographed by MRO back in July 2022, and they were likely wondering if the streaks coming off these dark spots had changed at all in the subsequent years.

As far as I can tell, there has been no significant change, though the highest resolution versions of these images might show more.

The geology in the picture itself is very puzzling. At first glance the dark streaks appear to have been caused by wind blowing the dust from the dark spots. At second glance this doesn’t work, as large dark areas do not appear to be linked to those dark spots.

What is going on here?
» Read more

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Glacial material even in Mars’ Death Valley

12:23 pm

Glacial material even in Mars' Death Valley
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 25, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this a “layered feature,” which is appropriately vague in order to not prematurely push a conclusion that is not yet proven. Extensive orbital imagery and data however strongly suggests the layers inside this crater are glacial in nature, each layer laid down during Mars’ many thousands of climate cycles as the planet’s rotational tilt swung back and forth from 11 degrees to 60 degrees. According to the most popular theory today, when that tilt was high, the mid-latitudes (where this 3,000-foot-wide unnamed crater is located) were actually colder than the planet’s poles. The water ice at the icecaps would then migrate from the poles to the mid-latitudes, causing the glaciers to grow.

When the tilt was low the process would reverse, with the mid-latitudes now warmer than the poles, causing the glaciers to shrink. The wedding cake nature of these layers is likely because, over time, Mars has steadily lost its total budget of water to space, so with each cycle the glacier could not grow as much.

Though many such glacial-filled craters have been found in the mid-latitudes, reinforcing these theories, the location of this crater is even more interesting.
» Read more

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ESA astronaut with no right leg cleared by medical board to fly to ISS

9:47 am

An international medical board has now cleared ESA astronaut John McFall to fly on a future long-duration mission to ISS, despite the fact that his right leg had been lost due to a motorcycle accident when he was nineteen and wears a prosthesis.

He is the first person with such a disability to be medically approved to train for missions to the station. “John is today certified as an astronaut who can fly on a long-duration mission on the International Space Station, and I think this is an incredible step ahead in our ambition to broaden the access to society to space,” Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s director of human and robotic exploration, said at a briefing to announce the certification.

ESA selected McFall as part of an astronaut class announced in 2022. That selection process included an effort by ESA to pick what it called at the time a “parastronaut” to see if people with some physical disabilities could safely fly to space.

This is actually a great idea. As one Russia astronaut once said to me, “The legs are mostly useless in weightlessness.” Testing to see how McFall does on a six-month mission will tell us whether the weightlessness environment is a good one for people who can’t walk, as has been theorized for decades.

At the moment McFall has not yet been assigned to any scheduled flight. He joins a class of twelve astronauts selected by ESA in 2022. He is also being considered as a possible astronaut on a proposed all-British tourist flight that Axiom is considering flying.

It is unfortunate that the racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies of the past decade poison this decision. I am certain many will assume McFall’s future flight will be done just for those reasons, and thus will discount it.

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Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander completes lunar flyby in preparation for entering lunar orbit

10:00 am

The Resilience lunar lander, built by the Japanese startup Ispace and launched in January on the same Falcon 9 rocket as Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, has now completed its closest flyby of the Moon as it prepares to enter lunar orbit sometimes in early May.

The spacecraft is actually still in Earth orbit, but with a apogee that is almost 700,000 miles out, or almost three times the distance of the Moon’s orbit. Once Ispace’s engineers have gotten a precise track of this orbit they will then determine the exact parameters of the engine burn in May that will place Resilience in lunar orbit.

This is Ispace’s second attempt to place a lander on the Moon. The first, Hakuto-R1, came close, but crashed in Atlas Crater (see the map in my previous post) when, at an altitude of several kilometers, its software thought it was only a few feet above the surface and shut the engines off.

Most of the instruments on Resilience are either symbolic or engineering experiments to observe the lander’s operations. It is however carrying a small rover, dubbed Tenacious, which will attempt to travel on the surface.

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Blue Ghost enters lunar orbit, targets March 2, 2025 for landing

9:50 am

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

Blue Ghost on February 13, 2025 successfully completed a long four-minute engine burn to complete its transfer from Earth to lunar orbit, with a target date for the actual landing on March 2, 2025.

Now that the lander is in lunar trajectory, over the next 16 days, additional maneuvers will take the lander from an elliptical orbit to a circular orbit around the Moon. Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeted to land Sunday, March 2, at 3:45 a.m. EST.

NASA has also announced the live stream coverage during landing:

Live coverage of the landing, jointly hosted by NASA and Firefly, will air on NASA+ starting at 2:30 a.m. EST, approximately 75 minutes before touchdown on the Moon’s surface. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media. The broadcast will also stream on Firefly’s YouTube channel. Coverage will include live streaming and blog updates as the descent milestones occur.

I will embed the Firefly live stream when it becomes available.

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A rose in space

10:02 am

A rose in space
Click for original image.

Cool image time! Using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers have taken a very beautiful picture, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, of a nebula dubbed LH 88 that surrounds a star cluster and is located 160,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The bright stars seen in the image are widely separated, but their motions through space are similar, indicating that they have a common origin. The layered nebulous structures in LH 88 are the remnants of stars that have already died. The delicate leaves of the rose were formed by both the shockwaves from supernovae and the stellar winds of the O and B stars.

The intense radiation of these super giant O and B stars — that burn fast and explode as supernova after only a few million years of life — not only shapes the nebula, it lights the nebula’s different atoms and molecules in different colors, with red/orange representing hydrogen and blue oxygen. The white areas indicate a mixture of both.

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Astronomers demand more regulations to prevent industry from ruining the Moon’s “environment”

9:33 am

According to two articles yesterday in the British press (here and here), both quoting extensively one astronomer, if strong regulation and control (given to them of course) isn’t imposed immediately, the space tourism of billionaires is going to ruin the Moon’s pristine environment, which on its far side is especially perfect for radio astronomy. From the first link:

“There’s a rush of companies and states who might want to get in on the act on the moon,” said [astronomer Martin Elvis, who added that there were also other concerns. “There’s a desire there from the billionaire class, ‘Oh I would love to spend a week on the moon’. And you don’t need many billionaires to start adding up. If they go without coordination, then it’s a mess. We could well lose these unique opportunities to do science on a scale that we couldn’t possibly imagine.”

One of the most exciting possibilities is the use of the far side of the moon for radio astronomy. As all signals from the Earth are blocked, telescopes would, Elvis said, have the sensitivity to see into the so called “dark age” of the universe, after the big bang but before stars had formed.

Elvis is based at Harvard and also co-chairs a working group at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) that wants astronomers to be given full legal control of the Moon, preventing anyone from building anything without their permission so they can instead build their telescopes there instead.

The problem is that the astronomical community has so far shown little interest in building telescopes in space. It has instead focused on building giant Earth-based telescopes while trying to get governments to restrict the launch of satellite constellations that might interfere with those telescopes. Now it wishes to restrict lunar development as well.

Elvis however admits “It’s a sort of first come, first served situation, which encourages people to rush in and do things without thinking too hard.” Let me translate: Everyone else is beating us to the Moon because we haven’t been interested in going, so now that we might be interested we want governments to shut down our competition.

It is long past time for astronomers and the IAU to stop trying to use government to squelch everyone else and get in the game. Initiate the building of telescopes both in space and the Moon. Not only are these better places to build telescopes than on Earth, it will give astronomers some credibility when they ask others to give them their own space.

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The movement to ban smartphones in schools widens

1:39 pm

The smart phone: Bad for kids
The smart phone: Proven very bad for kids

According to a detailed Washington Examiner story earlier this week, the campaign to ban smartphones in schools is expanding rapidly, with widespread bi-partisan support, backed up by studies and school reports that consistently show significant improvements in student behavior and learning when smart phones are banned.

Eight states have banned cellphone use in schools, with Florida being the first to do so when Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a bill into law in 2023. The legislation in the Sunshine State allows teachers to ban cellphone use during classroom instruction and authorizes them to hold a student’s phone if it becomes a distraction.

Florida was followed by Indiana, Louisiana, Virginia, California, Minnesota, South Carolina, and Ohio in passing similar bans that have either been enacted or will be in the coming year. Each of the states that have passed bans has taken different approaches to implementing the policy.

Fifteen other states have proposed a ban, and an additional eight states are either doing test bans in selected regions or have issued recommendations endorsing bans. That makes for a total if 32 states out of 50 that are working to keep smart phones away from kids when they are in school.

The best aspect of this is the generally bi-partisan nature of the movement. While most of the initial action occurred in red states controlled by conservative politicians, blue states like California and Minnesota have also joined in. A Minnesota middle school for example was an early practitioner of the ban in 2023, finding it not only improved classroom participation, but the entire social atmosphere in the school improved. In California meanwhile Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law restricting smartphone that takes effect in July 2026. Even Washington, D.C. is debating legislation to institute a school ban.

The sooner the better. Kids don’t need smart phones. All they really need is a dumb phone to call their parents in case of an emergency. And when they are in school this is even less necessary. Spending their time staring at a screen is the worst way to learn to live with other humans, a learning experience that is probably their number one class assignment.

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Pits formed from sublimating underground ice on Mars?

12:29 pm

Pits formed from sublimating underground ice
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 31, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “Impact Ejecta with Marginal Pits,” though even on the full image I am not sure what the impact ejecta is. The pits themselves appear to have formed when near-surface ice sublimated away during the summer months. The location is at 59 degrees north latitude, deep within the Martian northern lowland plains. Since orbital data suggests much of those plains at this latitude has an ice table of some thickness near the surface, it is very reasonable to assume these pits formed when summer sunlight heated that ice, turning it to gas which eventually pushed out to form the pits.

But what about the impact ejecta? Where is it? And where is the crater from that impact?
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European underwater neutrino telescope detects most powerful neutrino ever

8:53 am

A European underwater neutrino telescope that is still under construction recorded evidence in February 2023 of most powerful neutrino particle ever detected.

KM3NeT’s two neutrino detectors — one off the coast of Sicily, the other near southern France — are still under construction but already collecting data. Both contain cables hundreds of meters tall, which are strung with bundles of light sensors anchored to the seafloor.

When cosmic neutrinos interact with matter in or near a KM3NeT detector, they spawn charged particles such as muons. As those muons careen through water, they give off feeble flashes of bluish light that KM3NeT’s sensors can pick up. Clocking when different sensors spot this light can reveal a particle’s path; the brightness of the blue hue reflects the particle’s energy.

On February 13, 2023, the detector near Sicily was run through by an extremely energetic muon traveling nearly parallel to the horizon. At the time, only 21 of the planned 230 sensor cables were in place. Based on the muon’s energy and trajectory, KM3NeT scientists determined it must have been spawned by a neutrino from space rather than a particle from the atmosphere.

Simulations suggest the neutrino’s energy was around 220 petaelectron volts. The previous record holder boasted around 10 petaelectron volts.

Tracking that trajectory backwards, astronomers say the particle came from a region of space where there are a lot of active galaxies, any one of which could be the source of the neutrino. It is also possible the neutrino came instead from an interaction of high energy cosmic rays and the photons from the faint microwave background left over from the Big Bang.

As noted very correctly by one scientist, “At this point, it’s very difficult to make conclusions about the origins,” says Kohta Murase, a theoretical physicist at Penn State not involved in the research. “It’s dangerous to rely on one event.”

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Astronomers catalog large ring systems surrounding 74 stars

11:32 am

74 rings surrounding stars
Click for original image.

Using a variety of ground-based telescopes in many wavelengths, astronomers have now produced a detailed catalog of 74 stars with large dust rings similar to the Oort cloud that is believed to exist at the very outer fringes of our own solar system.

The image to the right, reduced to post here, shows all 74 stars.

The new gallery shows a remarkable diversity of structure in the belts. Some are narrow rings, while others are wider and could be categorized more as “disks” than “belts”. Moreover, some of the 74 exocomet systems have multiple rings or disks and some of those are “eccentric,” meaning not a circular orbit but more like an oval. This provides evidence that yet undetectable planets or perhaps moons are present and their gravity affects the distribution of pebbles in these systems.

You can read the paper here [pdf].

The press release implies the discovery of “exocomets” but that is not true. The belts and rings mapped are likely to have comets in them, but no such comets have been found.

The scientists say that this database can be used to better understand the formation of solar systems, though they also admit that the “limited (although much improved) size of our sample” makes any conclusions based on it very uncertain. They hope however that over time that sample size will grow.

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Blue Ghost leaves Earth orbit

9:06 am

Artist rending of Blue Ghost on the Moon
Artist rending of Blue Ghost on the Moon

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander has successfully completed the mid-course correction engine burn that has taken it out of Earth orbit and into a transfer orbit to the Moon.

After a successful Trans Lunar Injection burn on Saturday, Feb. 8, Firefly’s spacecraft carrying NASA science and tech to the Moon has departed Earth’s orbit and begun its four-day transit to the Moon’s orbit. Blue Ghost will then spend approximately 16 days in lunar orbit before beginning its descent operations. Since launching more than three weeks ago, Blue Ghost has performed dozens of health tests generating 13 gigabytes of data. All 10 NASA payloads onboard are currently healthy and ready for surface operations on the Moon.

I post the artist’s rendering of Blue Ghost to the right to contrast its design with Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander that fell over when it landed last year. Note how much lower to the ground Blue Ghost is. This will certainly reduce the chances it will have the same problem as Odysseus, even if one leg breaks upon landing.

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A pimple on Mars

3:44 pm

A pimple on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 1, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was likely not taken as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature. When the camera team does this they try to pick something interesting, and sometimes succeed.

I think they succeeded in this case. At first glance this appears to be a crater, but on closer inspection it is instead a small mound. The picture was taken in the winter, at the high latitude of 55 degrees north. The featureless white surface surrounding this dark mound is almost certainly the mantle of dry ice that falls as snow and covers the poles during the winter. If not that, it is then likely to be a water ice sheet that orbital data suggests covers much of Mars’ high latitudes.
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