Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists have found that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was built from tiny grains of ice mixed with dust that are quite different from the solar system’s comets.

These ice grains do, however, bear striking similarities to some icy bodies located at the edge of the solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune, so-called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).

3I/ATLAS was discovered entering the solar system in the summer of 2025. It was only the third object found entering the solar system from farther afield in the Milky Way after 1I/'Oumuamua, seen in 2017, and 2I/Borisov, detected in 2019. This meant the interstellar comet offered a rare chance to glimpse the conditions under which such bodies form in other star systems. Thus, the JWST was quickly on the trail of 3I/ATLAS.

"We designed [JWST] to be ready the moment an active interstellar comet was found and to follow it over time," Martin Cordiner of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America said in a statement.

Cordiner leads the JWST program to study objects such as 3I/ATLAS, and he is a co-author on a new research paper describing some of the findings.

The unclear origins of 3I/ATLAS

Researchers know that 3I/ATLAS wasn't born in the solar system, but nobody knows around which star 3I/ATLAS formed. What scientists are more sure of is the fact that this interstellar comet was produced within a planet-forming disk of gas and dust around a young star, possibly as long ago as 10 to 12 billion years. That's over twice the age of our solar system. It was then ejected from its home system somehow and left to wander interstellar space before encountering our solar system.

Like the familiar comets in our solar system, 3I/ATLAS is composed of grains of ice less than a micron – a millionth of a meter – in size. When the surface of the comet is warmed by the sun, gas erupts outwards, carrying ice grains into the cloud of ice and dust surrounding the comet, its coma, and its tail, where JWST can detect them.

When viewed spectroscopically, the water-ice in comets native to our solar system creates a strong absorption line in a comet’s spectrum at a wavelength of three microns, as well as less-prominent absorption lines at 1.5 and two microns.

Yet when the JWST’s Near-Infrared spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument viewed 3I/ATLAS three times between August 2025, before its closest approach to the sun, and after closest approach in April 2026, scientists found the 1.5- and two micron absorption lines were missing, though the three-micron line remained strong.

"That combination was a puzzle," research lead author Silvia Protopapa of the South-west Research Institute said. "The strong three-micron band points to water-ice in the coma, but the weak or absent shorter-wavelength bands suggest the ice is not in the form we usually see in solar system comets."

The JWST's muddy 3I/ATLAS findings

Whenever presented with an unusual observational signature such the JWST delievered for 3I/ATLAS researchers turn to modeling to find the physical characteristics that best fit the spectrum.

The modeling suggested to Protopapa’s team that 3I/ATLAS was composed of sub-micron grains of dirty water-ice, rich in dust. In comparison, the grains from the solar system’s indigenous comets are much cleaner, with almost pure water-ice relatively uncontaminated by dust.

"What seems to set [3I/ATLAS’ grains] apart is how much dust is mixed into the ice," said Protopapa. "Those grains hold clues to the conditions where the comet was born."

Comets are made of primordial material found in the planet-forming disk of gas and dust that surrounds a young star, and therefore the composition of comets can provide a window into the conditions in which planets form.

Whereas solar system comets tell us about the birth of Earth, an interstellar comet can tell us about conditions in which planets formed around another star, and how similar or dissimilar those conditions were to the birth of the solar system.

Yet comets are not the only icy remnants that date back to such primordial times. There are various families of bodies in the outer solar system, and 3I/ATLAS’ spectrum bears a resemblance to the spectrum of some medium-sized TNOs that are rich in carbon-dioxide ice and organic compounds (organic meaning containing carbon atoms). Indeed, in a separate 2025 study led by Cordiner, the JWST found 3I/ATLAS to have one of the greatest abundances of carbon dioxide ever seen in a comet.

TNOs are sizable bodies that are located far beyond the orbit of Neptune, The TNOs in question would have formed in a different part of the Sun’s protoplanetary disk than most comets and their composition reflects that.

On the other hand, the results imply that 3I/ATLAS was formed around its star of origin from similar icy material to that which produced some of the TNOs in our solar system, showing that the building blocks of planets around other stars share a common range of properties with the building blocks that formed our solar system. Indeed, 3I/ATLAS could even be a fragment of a TNO-like body that was shattered in a collision.

"At first glance, 3I/ATLAS looks different from the icy comets we know," said Protopapa. "But when we placed it alongside distant icy worlds in our own solar system, it no longer looked out of place.

"This suggests that the icy building block of planets, here and around other stars, may share ice in the form of tiny, micron-scale grains, ranging from relatively pure ice to ice mixed with dust, with 3I/ATLAS toward the dusty end."

What this tells us is that these sub-micron-sized icy grains must form first in planet-forming disks, to then be incorporated into large bodies such as comets and protoplanets.

The team's findings were published on Monday (Oct. 26) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

This rainbow-hued rocky plain looks like the landscape of an alien world. And, it turns out, it is.

What is it?

In this image, we can see an ancient, rocky hill on Mars. In the Red Planet's Southern Highlands, this alien terrain is chock-full of minerals, which we can see clearly defined in this color-enhanced view of the region.

This image was snapped by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been studying the planet's surface, atmosphere and climate since arriving in Martian orbit in March 2006.

But this isn't exactly what the surface of the planet would look like through our eyes; the image is color-enhanced. Why would scientists take a natural-color image and turn it rainbow? Doing so enhances the slight color differences in these rocks, allowing researchers to pick out the different minerals.

Why is it incredible?

As pointed to above, enhancing colors in scientific images can be an incredibly useful tool for exploration.

For instance, in this image, the blue- and green-toned rocks could be full of minerals like pyroxenes and olivine, according to scientists analyzing the image. And they think that the yellow, orange and red patches may contain minerals formed by past interactions with liquid water.

By exploring the mineral content of rocks like this, researchers can peel back the layers of history within the Martian bedrock. The discovery of certain minerals, for example, can show that water flowed on Mars long ago, pointing to potentially habitable conditions.

So, as we can see, this striking rainbow image isn't just a beautiful landscape; it's also hiding serious clues to Mars' history.

An iceberg has quickly escaped from the Weddell Sea in Antarctica, on its way to an icy new destination.

What is it?

As captured by a satellite in orbit, the Antarctic iceberg A-81 has quite quickly (for an iceberg) parted ways from its icy home, breaking off to drift toward a shallow underwater shelf in Georgia.

The 600-square-mile (1,550-square-kilometer) iceberg first broke off from the Brunt Ice Shelf in January of 2023. Now, generally speaking, giant icebergs don't travel that fast. But In just three years, this massive iceberg has traveled 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers) north of the Brunt Ice Shelf. For an iceberg, that's really fast.

Over this time period, the iceberg drifted through the Weddell Sea in Antarctica's Southern Ocean before reaching the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, floating further into the Scotia Sea and then finally now reaching the edge of a remote island in South Georgia.

In this satellite snapshot captured on Oct. 20, 2026, we can see the iceberg in its current location near an underwater shelf off the coast of South Georgia. While it isn't abnormal for icebergs like A-81 to break off from larger ice shelves, Brunt has recently had multiple large icebergs break off one quickly after the other, according to a statement from NASA.

Why is it incredible?

This image was captured by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), an instrument on board NASA's Terra satellite.

Earth-observing satellites like Terra keep a close eye on changes on our home planet. In addition to this image, observations from Terra have showed how the iceberg has traveled over the last few years.

With satellites like Terra, scientists can keep a close eye on these changes in Antarctic ice, which is becoming increasingly important as climate change continues to progress across the globe, affecting everything from Arctic ice to sea levels rising, worsening natural disasters and more.

The powerful Vera Rubin Observatory has spotted what seems to be a dwarf planet circling the sun in the frigid depths beyond Neptune.

The icy object, known as 2026 ED138, is likely between 600 and 1500 kilometers (373 to 972 miles) wide, scientists say. It's therefore probably big enough to be sculpted into a sphere by its own gravity — a key characteristic that separates dwarf planets from asteroids and other small space rocks.

And if 2026 ED138 is indeed a dwarf planet, that's a pretty big deal, as astronomers have confirmed just five of them to date: Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake.

2026 ED138 was discovered by Matthew Holman, who works at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA). The big moment came on Oct. 13, when Holman was running previously collected Rubin data through a search code that he developed with his CfA colleague Kevin Napier.

That search revealed a mysterious object beyond Neptune's orbit. Despite its immense distance from the sun, this body was relatively bright, suggesting that it's larger than the average trans-Neptunian object.

"My first reaction was one of excited disbelief," Holman said in a statement on Tuesday (Oct. 27), the day the discovery of 2026 ED138 was announced. "Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong."

Those checks involved a thorough search through Rubin's catalog. And that catalog is pretty heft, even though Rubin is a pretty new scope.

The Vera Rubin Observatory sits atop Cerro Pachón, an 8,799-foot-tall (2,682 meters) mountain in northern Chile, and features a primary mirror 28 feet (8.4 m) wide. The scope achieved first light in April 2025 and began its main project, the 10-year-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), in June of this year.

During the LSST, Rubin images the entire southern sky every few days using a 3.2-gigapixel camera, the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy. This work creates a high-resolution time-lapse "movie" that can reveal a great deal about the cosmos.

For example, astronomers think Rubin will shed light on dark energy and dark matter, the mysterious stuff that together makes up most of the universe's mass-energy budget. Its observations will also serve as a solar system inventory, helping scientists map out our cosmic backyard like never before. Rubin has already discovered more than 11,000 new asteroids, for example, with many more surely to come.

The LSST inventory will likely include a number of new dwarf planets as well — including, possibly, 2026 ED138. For the object definitely exists: Holman and his colleague Mario Jurić, who works at the University of Washington and serves as Rubin Solar System Lead Scientist, found that Rubin spotted 2026 ED138 30 separate times on 20 nights between March 4 and July 11 of this year.

And further digging revealed that the Dark Energy Camera (DEC), an instrument on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, also spotted 2026 ED138. Indeed, DEC observations of the object go all the way back to 2016.

The data show that 2026 ED138's orbit is tilted by about 25 degrees relative to the plane of the solar system. It therefore likely had a gravitational interaction with Neptune, which knocked it off kilter, scientists say.

2026 ED138 currently lies about 46 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. (One AU is the Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers). This puts it beyond Pluto's average distance from the sun, which is roughly 40 AU.

There is still much to learn about the object, however. For example, we won't know whether or not it's a dwarf planet until astronomers nail down its size. And that will require observations in infrared light, the range of wavelengths that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is optimized for.

So stay tuned: There's doubtless more news about 2026 ED138 coming, and Rubin could turn up more worlds like it in the coming months and years.

"If confirmed as a dwarf planet, ED138 would join a very small family of worlds," Holman said. "Rubin will image the whole southern sky again and again for 10 years, so any others hiding in the places earlier surveys skipped are now within reach."

In 1927, Norwegian civil engineer and amateur radio operator Jørgen Hals made an unusual discovery: while monitoring transmissions from a shortwave radio station in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, he began hearing odd, "delayed" radio echoes, arriving approximately three seconds after the original transmissions, that sometimes accompanied the station's signals.

"From where this echo comes I cannot say for the present," Hals wrote of his peculiar discovery, adding that he could "only confirm that I really heard it."

Almost a century after Hals' discovery, the exact cause of this unusual phenomenon — known today as long delayed echoes, or LDEs — remains unknown. Their baffling nature has prompted a range of potential explanations, most of which focus on a variety of unexplained natural phenomena occurring in Earth's atmosphere. However, a few more far-out possibilities, including potential evidence of extraterrestrial technology, have also been considered.

What do we know?

A curious discovery

The enigma of long-delayed echoes has perplexed scientists since their initial detection by Hals, who at the time reported his odd findings to Norwegian physicist Carl Størmer. This prompted an investigation by Størmer with physicist Balthasar van der Pol, during which the duo was able to reproduce the phenomenon but were unsuccessful in determining its cause.

Since those early observations, ongoing reports of long-delayed echoes have continued to be recorded. Under normal conditions, radio echoes occur whenever a radio signal reflects or "bounces" off an object, although other conditions such as signals traveling through a delayed path can also cause echoes to occur.

Long delayed echoes, by contrast, are generally characterized by radio signals that return after more than 2.7 seconds following their original transmission, although the terminology has sometimes been applied more broadly.

Complicating investigations into this unusual brand of radio phenomena over the years has been their unpredictable nature, along with significant reported variances in the timing and nature of the delays, which has made it difficult for researchers to narrow down a single cause.

Possible explanations

Despite the challenges presented by this unique class of space mysteries, there are several theories that have been put forward over the years about what could cause long-delayed echoes.

In the mid 1980s, researchers R. J. Vidmar and F. W. Crawford conducted experiments in Alaska that aimed to detect long-delayed echoes, which built on earlier research they published involving possible detections in 1970. According to their findings at the time, Vidmar and Crawford hypothesized that radio signals could be captured between ionized layers in the atmosphere and "guided" over long distances.

More recently, University of Oslo researcher Sverre Holm has advanced a similar concept that he calls magnetospherically ducted echo (MDE), in which radio waves may become trapped within electrically charged regions of Earth's upper atmosphere and guided along magnetic field lines extending far into the magnetosphere. Under certain conditions, these signals may reach as far away as the opposite hemisphere before they are "bounced" back toward Earth, resulting in the delayed echo effect.

According to Holm, MDE "is the best understood mechanism for long delayed echoes" out of five promising explanations he outlines, adding that based on the MDE model, such long delayed echoes "can be predicted to what seems like about 5 ms accuracy using a simple model for the magnetic field lines."

Still, one problem that arises involves the relatively short delays associated with this mechanism, which may not necessarily account for the much longer, multi-second echoes reported in some historical observations. Since radio waves travel at close to the speed of light, a signal could theoretically cover distances equivalent to the planet's circumference several times in a single second. While this doesn't prove the signals actually followed such paths, it does imply that some of the reported instances of long-delayed echoes might correspond to dozens of journeys around the planet.

Speaking with Space about historical cases involving much lengthier long-delayed echoes, Holm was clear in expressing that the MDE theory also has its limitations.

"In my view," Holm told Space in an email, "Magnetospheric Duct Echoes cannot [account] for those historical LDEs at all."

To illustrate this, Holm points to two primary differences. First, the historical echoes were detected at approximately 9.55 MHz, well above the 1–4 MHz frequency range typically associated with MDEs. Additionally, historical LDEs reportedly exhibited delays ranging from 3 to 30 seconds, whereas MDEs generally produce delays of only a few hundred milliseconds.

By contrast, "MDES are only a few hundred milliseconds," Holm explained, meaning that they cannot account for all the characteristics of the earlier historic observations of long-delayed echoes.

Other theories that might be capable of filling some of the gaps in the long-delayed echo mystery include the idea that electromagnetic radio energy could be coupled into slower plasma-wave "modes" while traveling through Earth’s upper atmosphere, which, according to Holm’s review of the earlier work by Vidmar and Crawford, could potentially create much longer delays than ordinary radio propagation would allow.

After this proposed coupling into a plasma-wave mode, the signals may be converted back to ordinary electromagnetic signals and bounced back down to lower levels of Earth's atmosphere. Finally, a similar line of investigation has looked at whether clouds of plasma originating from the sun might also be able to produce the well-characterized echo effect.

What remains unknown?

Extraterrestrial origins?

Although scientific research has identified several promising explanations for long-delayed echoes, the mysterious nature of these events has also inspired more speculative theories over the decades, including some involving the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

This unique dimension to the LDE mystery has its roots in the theories of Australian physicist Ronald Bracewell, who was the first to propose the idea that autonomous interstellar probes might be used by an advanced civilization as a means of establishing contact.

According to Bracewell, the initiators of such a hypothetical contact scenario might choose to reveal their presence by intercepting and re-transmitting radio signals rather than engaging in direct communication. Carl Sagan explored a similar concept in his novel "Contact", in which transmissions from the 1936 Olympics — the earliest broadcast signals to leave Earth's ionosphere — are intercepted and rebroadcast back to Earth as a data-encoded message originating from the Vega system.

However, more than a decade before the publication of Sagan's famous novel, Scottish writer Duncan Lunan attracted international attention for his 1973 article in the journal "Spaceflight" outlining his belief that he had successfully decoded a radio message dispatched from an extraterrestrial probe. According to Lunan, the initial detection of this "hidden" alien signal had taken place decades earlier in 1927, with the famous discovery of long-delayed echoes by Jørgen Hals.

Lunan's theory essentially went like this: an extraterrestrial civilization in the Epsilon Boötis system had deployed a hypothetical autonomous communications probe (known as a Bracewell probe) to Earth in the distant past, which had been comfortably orbiting in one of Earth's gravitationally stable Lagrange points for thousands of years.

Using the original long-delayed echo detections from Hals and Størmer's research decades earlier, Lunan placed the transmitted sequence on a vertical axis, while placing the recorded echo delay time on a horizontal axis, revealing what he believed to be a view of the constellation Boötes as it might have looked 15,000 years ago — right around the time the suspected space probe would have been dispatched to Earth.

Despite Lunan's imaginative theory, an alternative hypothesis proposing a natural cause behind long-delayed echoes was subsequently advanced by Anthony Lawton, which ultimately garnered an award from the British Interplanetary Society. By 1976, Lunan had withdrawn his ideas in an article published in the Journal of the Society of Electronic and Radio Technicians, although he would eventually revisit a version of the theory in the 1990s.

The mystery continues

While few modern researchers seriously consider extraterrestrial hypotheses to explain long-delayed echoes, these obscure phenomena remain intriguing, even as ongoing research sheds light on their possible causes. Explanations such as Sverre Holm's magnetospherically ducted echo model offer promising mechanisms that may account for at least some of these unusual signals, although important questions remain unanswered.

For now, long-delayed echoes serve as a reminder of the challenges of studying electromagnetic phenomena, and how even seemingly familiar aspects of our physical world can harbor mysteries that resist straightforward explanations, even after nearly a century of investigation.

From the dangerous Sydney funnel-web to the common huntsman, Australia is home to its fair share of spiders. It even has a crater shaped like one.

What is it?

One stretch of the vast Western Australia wilderness is imprinted with a curious crater, which likely formed after a meteor impact hundreds of millions of years ago. Geologists think the spider-like pattern in the crater's center was created when its floor rebounded following the initial impact, NASA has said.

In the hundreds of millions of years since the initial impact, erosion has continued to carve this formation into its current, signature shape. Complete with "legs," the planetary imprint has earned its name Spider Crater.

This image shows the impact structure in its entirety, which stretches 8 by 7 miles (13 by 11 kilometers) in full, with the central "spider" piece measuring 2.5 miles (4 km).

Why is it incredible?

In this image, we can see this "spider" from space. This snapshot shows the geologic feature as captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) aboard the Landsat 9 satellite, an Earth-observing craft that launched back in 2021.

The satellite, a collaborative effort between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, is the ninth in the Landsat Earth-observing series, which goes all the way back to the launch of Landsat 1 in 1972. On a near-weekly basis, Landsat 9 delivers observations of everything from deforestation to water quality and crop growth.

The series of Landsat satellites have been a critical piece in the modern understanding of how our planet continues to change. Whether it's the repercussions of climate change or fluctuations in agriculture, observations from orbit do more than provide interesting photos of our home world; they also capture critical data.

On Sept. 30, NASA formally concluded OSIRIS-REx, the historic first U.S. mission to pluck a pristine piece of an asteroid and deliver it safely back to Earth.

The van-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft — whose name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer — visited and sampled Bennu, an ancient space rock holding pristine remnants from the dawn of our solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. Among those cosmic relics are raw organic building blocks, the kind that may have seeded life on Earth.

"I have known this day was coming for a long time, but it is still difficult to see it arrive," OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta, who's based at the University of Arizona, said in a post on LinkedIn. "I feel enormous pride in what we accomplished together, and real sadness that this journey has come to an end."

For the mission team, the farewell capped a decade of high-stakes engineering, on-the-fly troubleshooting and nail-biting close calls that ultimately delivered to Earth the largest asteroid sample ever collected in space, one that held secrets from the early solar system.

Long before launch, the team faced obstacles that nearly thwarted the endeavor — chiefly, two rejections from NASA — before finally securing the green light for the $1 billion project under the New Frontiers Program in 2011.

When OSIRIS-REx launched on Sept. 8, 2016, on a two-year journey across the inner solar system, Bennu was little more than a point of light in telescopes. Scientists expected the asteroid’s surface to be a smooth, sandy sphere where OSIRIS-REx could seamlessly touch down. Much to their surprise, however, when the probe arrived at the asteroid in late 2018, it revealed Bennu to be a treacherous, loosely bound amalgamation of jagged boulders.

"Our expectations about the asteroid's surface were completely wrong," Lauretta said in an Oct. 7 statement from the University of Arizona. "There was no obvious place to collect a sample anywhere."

When OSIRIS-REx touched down on a small crater named Nightingale, Bennu offered so little structural resistance that scientists said its surface reacted more like fluid than a hard, rocky shell. The spacecraft's sampling head sank directly into the asteroid, stopping after burrowing 20 inches (51 centimeters) deep by firing its thrusters at the right time to pull away, with the precious sample in hand.

Then came another nail-biting moment: The sample collector lid got jammed in a partially open position because so much material was scooped up, allowing fragments of the precious cargo to escape. In a race against time to prevent further loss, the mission team quickly stowed the sampler head directly inside the return capsule, securing the cosmic treasure for its journey back to Earth.

Even the final return to Earth, on Sept. 24, 2023, kept the team on edge: A parachute failed to deploy properly during reentry, forcing a tense but ultimately safe landing in the Utah desert.

"Successful exploration missions are not those that avoid surprises; they are those that are deliberately designed to adapt to them," Lauretta said in the statement, quoting a line from the mission's final report to NASA.

"That certainly describes OSIRIS-REx," he said. "Again and again, the mission presented us with circumstances we had not expected, and again and again, this team found a way forward."

The mission's triumphs began long before the samples reached Earth. For example, the probe set a Guinness World Record when it slid into orbit around the 1,610-foot-wide (490 meters) Bennu, which became the smallest object ever circled by a spacecraft.

The scientific payoff that followed included remote-sensing work that confirmed Bennu's surface is coated in carbon-bearing compounds. Those observations also revealed that Bennu was once part of a much larger, water-rich parent asteroid that shattered in a catastrophic collision in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The returned sample — which weighs 4.29 ounces (121.6 grams) here on Earth, more than twice the mission's requirement — continues to thrill and occupy scientists.

A wave of research papers, now topping 200, continues to piece together the composition and history of the ancient space rock. Among other findings, Bennu's pristine material has revealed amino acids and sugars that, on Earth, are essential for life, alongside a history of exposure to liquid water that could have served as the "broth" for these compounds to interact.

More discoveries are likely to come. Most of the returned Bennu sample is being preserved for future generations of scientists, who will study it "with questions and instruments we cannot yet anticipate," Lauretta said in the statement.

Though its OSIRIS-REx chapter is closed, the spacecraft itself is far from retired. Renamed OSIRIS-APEX (OSIRIS-APophis EXplorer), the probe is using its remaining propellant to head toward Apophis, another near-Earth asteroid and a different type of space rock from Bennu. It is scheduled to arrive in 2029.

The moon is shrinking, and scientists are narrowing in on exactly how much our natural satellite has dwindled over the years.

The moon is thought to have formed from a violent collision between a massive object and our young Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago, and its interior is still gradually cooling off from this ancient collision. As it cools, the moon contracts, leading to a long, slow shrinking process. Now, in a new study, scientists think that they have figured out how much smaller the moon is actually getting.

In this new study, scientists analyzing images snapped by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) have spotted over 10,000 young faults, or cracks across the moon's surface. This helped them to figure out how much the moon has contracted over time, and they now estimate that the moon's radius has decreased by about 148 feet (45 meters) over the past 400 to 800 million years.

"The number of these young faults revealed in LROC images is much greater than I ever imagined," study lead Thomas Watters, a geologist and scientist emeritus at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, said in a statement. "As the interior of the moon continues to cool and contract, it is expected that the growth of existing faults and formation of new faults continues today."

With these LROC observations, researchers in this study saw a variety of different types of cracks and landforms across the lunar surface. This included lobate scarps, or long, curved structures that form when the moon's surface contracts, cracks and is pushed upwards; and small mare ridges, or narrow "wrinkles" in the lunar surface, across the dark plains on the moon.

Tectonic activity on the moon looks a lot different than it does on Earth. On our own planet, there are about 15 major tectonic plates. On the moon, there are no tectonic plates at all. Instead, the moon has a single-plate body meaning its outer shell is a single piece only broken by faults or other such cracks created by the moon contracting. This means that instead of faults or cracks appearing at tectonic plate boundaries, they are instead scattered all over the moon.

By mapping these thousands of different features, all created from the moon cooling and contracting over time, the researchers are piecing together lunar history. In addition to finding the extent to which the moon has shrunk over time, they also found that some areas of the moon are covered in many more faults than other areas, and the areas with fewer cracks and faults have thicker moon crust.

This led them to conclude that not only are these areas with thicker crust more stable, but they suggest that a great deal of the widespread cracks in the lunar surface were created later in the moon's history as, in its earlier years, its thick crust would have insulated the moon's warm interior and prevented cooling, contracting and cracking.

This work was described in a study published Oct. 14 in The Planetary Science Journal.

Antarctica is a magnificent sight, and that beauty is visible all the way from space.

What is it?

Orbiting planet Earth, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission captured a close-up of West Antarctica.

Winter is ending in the Southern Hemisphere, meaning this is the peak of icy weather and sea ice in the Arctic.

In this image snapped by Sentinel-3, you can see a massive swath of ice which includes Elephant Island on the left-hand side. An ice-covered island off the Antarctic coast, Elephant Island floats in the Southern Ocean. It got its name both from the island's shape, which some liken to that of an elephant's head, and the fact that the island is home to a community of elephant seals.

Why is it incredible?

While a seal-inhabited island on the left floats near the Antarctic coast, across the water is a vast, frozen landscape. In just this snapshot, you can see about between 746 and 1,056 miles (1,200 to 1,700 kilometers) of the icy continent.

This image was captured on Sept. 30, 2026. In the Southern Hemisphere, that was just past the end of winter. The absolute peak for sea ice in Antarctica fell just a couple weeks before, on Sept. 14, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, ESA reported.

So in this one snapshot, we can see a near-maximum for sea ice in the Antarctic, spanning hundreds of miles. In observing our own planet from space, we are able to peer across vast landscapes, capturing important observational data. This is especially critical for the Antarctic as, with the progression of climate change, this sea ice continues to dwindle, adding to sea level rise among other serious consequences across the planet.

For as long as humans have watched the night sky, we have wondered about the moon, pondering everything from its alien appearance to its influence over phenomena on Earth such as ocean tides, climate stability, and even the natural rhythms of many organisms.

Among the many questions we have about Earth's lone natural satellite, one remains preeminent: what are the moon's origins, and how long has it orbited Earth?

Today, the leading theory among astronomers is that deep in our planet's past — perhaps within roughly the first 100 million years of solar system history — Earth collided with a planet-sized object, creating the moon within a period that may have been as short as just a few hours. Known as the giant-impact hypothesis, this proposed event involves a hypothetical Mars-sized protoplanet astronomers call Theia. The material ejected into orbit by the powerful impact in question would have accumulated afterward, forming the moon that we observe today.

What do we know?

Birth of a lunar origin hypothesis

The evolution of this striking solution to one of the moon's most enduring mysteries goes back to 1946, when geologist Reginald Aldworth Daly was among the first to suggest that an impact event might explain the formation of the moon.

Before Daly, scientists had been leaning toward theories that involved Earth's rapid spin billions of years ago, when each day may have at one time lasted as little as 2 or 3 hours. Decades later in the 1970s, researchers William Hartmann and Donald Davis developed their own models involving collisions of large bodies left over from planetary formation, which could collide with younger planets.

Building on such ideas, other researchers went on to propose similar scenarios between the early Earth and a Mars-sized object. Early in the following decade, the concept eventually claimed its place as the leading lunar-formation process during a landmark conference held in Kona, Hawaii, in 1984.

Evidence of a planetary-scale collision

The popularity of the giant-impact hypothesis can be attributed to the multiple lines of evidence supporting the impact scenario. For instance, researchers have long recognized the similar stable-isotope ratios between both moon rocks and those from Earth, strongly suggesting a link between their origins.

Additionally, the unusually high angular momentum (or spin) of the Earth-moon system, when compared to observations of other rocky planets, also could be explained as one of the effects of a massive collision.

Further clues can be found in the moon's composition, which reveals a relatively small iron core and lower density. This is significant to astronomers, since a hypothetical giant impact would have seen the suspected Theia protoplanet's metallic core merging with the young Earth's interior — meanwhile, lighter mantle and crust material from both worlds would have become dislodged and blasted into orbit, eventually helping form the moon.

Another important piece of evidence involves the relative depletion of volatile substances (a chemical that easily turns into gas or vapor at room temperatures) in lunar material, which again suggests that it might have been lost during an extremely energetic event, an idea further supported by evidence that the early moon once possessed a substantial magma ocean.

What remains unknown?

New research expands on the Theia hypothesis

Still, several significant questions remain, including what precise conditions led to the impact, and how the resulting planetary material evolved into the moon as it appears today.

Recently, a new study by Adeene Denton of Southwest Research Institute and colleagues at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory put a new spin on the Theia hypothesis, suggesting that the suspected ancient impact may have been significantly influenced by the heat and physical strength of the two colliding bodies.

The team's findings challenge some long-held views about the giant-impact hypothesis, while lending new support to others. For instance, the team's simulations revealed that while some impacts lead to the creation of a disk of debris that later coalesces into a moon, under other conditions, simulations support the idea that the moon could have been formed in a remarkably short period of time — perhaps within around five hours.

However, one of the primary issues with determining the exact conditions of the giant-impact hypothesis involves the ongoing debate over the moon's age.

"There is a large controversy regarding the age of the moon," said Dr. Erik Asphaug, a planetary science professor at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and one of the new study's co-authors.

In an email to Space, Asphaug explained some of the issues arising from this, since current estimates place the timing of the moon's formation anywhere from around 40 to 120 million years after the formation of the solar system. Therein lies part of the issue, according to Asphaug, who says this timing could have significant implications for models of the Theia impact.

If it had been an earlier collision, Asphaug says this would have involved a hotter Theia due to the greater degree of radiogenic heating; by contrast, a later impact would have meant a cooler and stronger Theia.

"I don't think we know enough yet to say the moon (and by corollary, the Earth) formed this way or that way," Asphaug told Space. "But knowing how temperature affects the result opens up a new dimension for viewing the problem, and that is always helpful because it shifts our frame of reference, like getting out of the car to have a walk around."

A lunar enigma in time and space

For researchers like Asphaug, understanding the moon's formation requires looking at it as more than just an event in space, but also as one in time. Doing so allows comparisons between three different metrics: isotopic decay, temperature-dependent material strength, and the geological record of debris striking other planets — a process through which he believes tighter constraints could be placed on precisely when the moon-forming impact might have occurred.

Adeene Denton, the study's lead author, also emphasized the introduction of the time component her team's research brings to the table, telling Space in an email that the outcome of the moon-forming impact could have depended significantly on the timing of the collision.

"Before, scientists have generally assumed that the outcome of the collision will be the same regardless of when it takes place," Denton wrote. "But now we know that temperature's effect on material properties, which is dictated by how old and/or cold the proto-Earth and Theia might be, alters things substantially."

By connecting impact simulations to data related to the moon's geochemical record, as well as models of early solar system formation, Denton thinks her team's work could help scientists better constrain precisely how and when the moon formed.

The mystery continues

For now, in terms of which possible scenario — an earlier or later collision event — emerges as being the most likely, Denton says it's still difficult to say.

"It depends on which scenarios for solar system formation you favor," Denton told Space.

"I am generally in favor of an earlier formation of the moon, consistent with a rapid planet-building phase in our solar system," Denton said, "but we can't neglect the possibility that the moon formed late."

While much work remains to be done, Denton and Asphaug believe their findings help significantly advance present efforts to resolve some of the questions about the giant-impact hypothesis — a few of which have lingered now for many years.

For Asphaug, however, such lingering questions may simply be part of the scientific process.

"Science has a way of wandering around for a long time until finally it all comes to focus," Asphaug said.

"I believe that will happen, in part thanks to this work, in the coming decade."

Editor's note: Japan launched its bold MMX sample-return mission to the Mars moon Phobos on Oct. 19) at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT).
Watch a replay of the liftoff and read our launch story here.

Japan will launch an epic mission to Mars today (Oct. 19), and you can watch the action live.

The Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is scheduled to lift off atop an H3 rocket from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center today at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT; 4:41 a.m. on Oct. 20 local Japan time).

You can watch it live via the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Coverage will begin at 2:45 p.m. EDT (1845 GMT).

As its full name suggests, MMX will focus on Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos. They're both tiny compared to Earth's own moon; Phobos is just 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide, and Deimos is even smaller, with a diameter of about 8 miles (13 km).

They're also quite mysterious. While astronomers have a pretty clear understanding of our own moon's birth — it coalesced from material blasted into space when a Mars-sized planet slammed into Earth long ago — there's no consensus about Phobos and Deimos' origin story.

The duo "may be the remains of a massive impact on Mars that sent material into orbit around the planet, or they could be ancient asteroids that were captured by Mars' gravity billions of years ago," Tom Statler, MMX program executive and program scientist at NASA Headquarters, said in an Oct. 15 statement. (NASA is a partner on the mission, providing a scientific instrument, a technology demonstration, communication support and funding for American scientists on the MMX team.)

"Having the answer will help illuminate that early era when Earth and the other inner planets may have been acquiring much of their water and organic compounds," Statler added.

MMX will help provide that answer, if all goes according to plan.

The spacecraft will arrive in the Mars system in August 2027, then slip into orbit around Phobos a month later. It will study that moon and Deimos from a distance for about 18 months, then deploy the French-German Idefix rover onto Phobos' surface in early 2029.

The 55-pound (25 kilograms) Idefix "has two main tasks: providing information to prepare for the landing of the main spacecraft to collect samples, and analyzing the composition and texture of Phobos' surface," European Space Agency officials wrote in an MMX mission description.

"The gravity on Phobos is so low that Idefix will only weigh the equivalent of 15 grams [0.5 ounces] on its surface!" they added.

The MMX mothership's Phobos landing will occur in 2030. The spacecraft will grab at least 10 grams (0.4 ounces) of samples from the moon, then head back toward Earth with this extraterrestrial bounty. MMX's return capsule will land here in 2031, after which scientists around the world will scrutinize the Phobos sample for clues about the history and evolution of Mars and our solar system more broadly.

MMX was originally supposed to launch in 2024, but issues with the H3 rocket prevented it from doing so. Mars and Earth align properly for interplanetary launches just once every 26 months, so MMX had to wait a while for its next chance.

Japan already has an impressive sample-return track record. The country's Hayabusa mission brought home pieces of the asteroid Itokawa in 2010, for example, and Hayabusa2 did the same with material from the space rock Ryugu a decade later.

Editor's note: Japan launched its bold MMX sample-return mission to the Mars moon Phobos on Oct. 19) at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT).
Watch a replay of the liftoff and read our launch story here.

Japan's mission to Mars is one of the most ambitious in spaceflight history. It aims to become the first spacecraft to return to Earth from Mars orbit, carrying with it the first-ever samples from the Red Planet system.

The mission, known as Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), is a first-of-its-kind endeavor to study the origin of Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos. The robust undertaking includes a landing on Phobos to collect the samples — which will likely be the first from the Mars system to return to Earth — and a search for evidence that could shed light on events during the formation of the solar system billions of years ago.

MMX launched on an H3 rocket from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center on Monday (Oct. 19) at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT; 4:41 a.m. local time in Japan, Oct. 20). After a 10-month journey to reach Mars, the spacecraft will spend about three years studying Phobos, deploying a rover and landing to collect its samples. The mission will then shift its focus to Deimos for a series of flybys before departing for Earth in November 2030. If all goes according to plan, the MMX sample-return capsule is scheduled to land in Australia in 2031.

The spacecraft

The MMX spacecraft is comprised of three main parts, as well as a small rover. After release from its H3 launch vehicle, a propulsion module will provide the boost to put MMX on course for Mars. MMX's main exploration module carries the microwave-size IDEFIX rover and most of the mission's scientific instruments, while the return module houses the sample-return capsule.

Japan's Mitsubishi Electric built MMX's three main modules, with the French space agency CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales) and Germany's DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt) jointly developing IDEFIX. The little rover is named for a dog in the 1960s French comic "Asterix," in a nod to the country's first satellite, Astérix, which launched in 1965.

IDEFIX carries a suite of cameras, as well as the Raman Spectrometer for MMX (RAX) and miniaturized radiometer (miniRAD) instruments to analyze Phobos' surface composition and temperature.

Most of MMX's scientific instruments are housed on the exploration module, like NASA's Mars-moon Exploration with Gamma rays and Neutrons (MEGANE, pronounced "meh-gah-nay") device, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), and France's MIRS (MMX InfraRed Spectrometer) instrument.

The exploration module also houses the Japanese-built TENGOO (TElescopic Nadir imager for GeOmOrphology) tight-zoom camera, wide-angle OROCHI (Optical RadiOmeter composed of CHromatic Imagers) multispectral camera, laser altimeter (LIDAR) and Mass Spectrum Analyzer (MSA). The return module, meanwhile, carries Japan's Circum-Martian Dust Monitor (CMDM) and Interplanetary Radiation Environment Monitor (IREM).

The mission

MMX will arrive in orbit around Mars in August 2027, at which point it will shed its propulsion module and transition into a quasi-satellite orbit (QSO) around Phobos that allows the probe to fly in a sort of formation with the small, asteroid-sized moon as they both circle the Red Planet.

The spacecraft will spend its first few months in the Martian system observing Phobos from different altitudes, using its TENGOO and OROCHI cameras, LIDAR and MSA to map the moon's surface, study its composition and select potential landing sites.

IDEFIX will be released in late 2028 or early 2029, during the first of two MMX landing rehearsals, at about 130 feet (40 meters) above Phobos. Due to the 14-mile-wide (22 kilometers) moon's extremely low gravity, the rover will be able free-fall to the surface damage-free (hopefully), right itself after a few bounces and begin exploring to gather data on the terrain and surface conditions.

MMX sample collection could begin as early as December 2028, the acting director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, Lindsay Hays, said during a mission briefing on Oct. 15. The spacecraft will attempt two collection landings, with its exploration and return modules descending and returning to orbit as one vehicle.

On Phobos' surface, two different sampling mechanisms — the Corer Sampling Mechanism (C-sampler) and Pneumatic Sampling Mechanism (P-sampler) — will extract and collect at least 10 grams (0.35 ounces) of material for stowage inside the spacecraft's return capsule before MMX lifts off again for orbit. After its first touchdown and sample collection, MMX will return to QSO near Phobos before descending to a second landing site for a similar attempt and subsequent return to orbit.

MMX will end its observations of Phobos after about three years focused on the Martian moon, and will transition into a higher, resonant orbit around Mars in 2030. That course will repeatedly intersect Deimos' path for a series of flybys to collect and compare data with those from Phobos observations as scientists aim to investigate the moons' origins.

Near the end of 2030, the exploration module will separate, leaving the return module to fire its engine out of Mars' gravitational influence and begin an eight-month journey back to Earth with the collected samples. As MMX closes the last stretch of void during its approach to Earth in 2031, the sample-return capsule will separate and enter the atmosphere for a targeted parachute landing in Australia's Woomera region, where its contents will be recovered for laboratory analysis by Japan and its mission partners.

Phobos and Deimos

Those samples, and the data collected by MMX, could tell scientists a lot — about the moons' composition, geography and, perhaps most importantly, how they came to exist in the first place. There are two leading theories for Phobos and Deimos' origins, both of which point to very different versions of ancient Martian history.

"Phobos and Deimos are interesting, but not just in their own right. Their presence is a key piece of the larger story of the Mars system," said Tom Statler, MMX program executive and scientist in NASA's Planetary Science Division, during the Oct. 15 mission briefing. "By uncovering the moons' origin, we'll gain new insights into the history of both Mars and Earth, especially those events that shaped both planets billions of years ago and helped create the worlds we see today."

Both Phobos and Deimos are relatively small and irregularly shaped, and bear several resemblances and spectral characteristics to primitive D-type asteroids — ancient bodies thought to preserve material dating back to the solar system's formation about 4.6 billion years ago. Those similarities suggest Phobos and Deimos may have formed elsewhere in the solar system and were later captured by Mars' gravity.

Their near-circular, equatorially-aligned orbits around the Red Planet, however, somewhat complicate that theory. For example, a captured asteroid would be much more likely to have entered an elongated and tilted orbit akin to the direction and velocity of its original approach, scientists say. A competing hypothesis, therefore, offers a much more violent, but somewhat familiar, narrative for the moons' origins.

An enormous collision with ancient Mars could have blasted material into orbit to form a debris disk from which the two moons eventually coalesced. Such a process, which would be similar to the formation of Earth's moon, could explain their circular, equatorial orbits.

The contradicting geological and orbital observations for Phobos and Deimos collected to date have prevented scientists from definitively establishing one hypothesis over the other. MMX aims to provide an answer.

"It's two totally different lines of evidence that point in two different directions. That's what makes it an interesting puzzle," Statler said. Several theories have also been presented for hybrid scenarios combining the two, he added.

"There's all kinds of different ways, all kinds of different combinations of those two basic scenarios," Statler explained. "But that's the puzzle from the start, the two seemingly contradictory lines of evidence that are pointing us to what … the real history was, but we don't know what it is yet."

The science

Each theory for where Mars' moons came from predicts different chemical characteristics for their surfaces. Presumably, captured asteroids would preserve chemical signatures of material originating elsewhere in the solar system, potentially rich in volatile elements like hydrogen. Moons formed through a planetary impact, however, would contain a mixture of Mars and impact material, altered by the intense heat of such a violent collision.

Determining which scenario is more likely could reveal whether Mars experienced a massive moon-forming collision or acquired its moons from elsewhere in the early solar system. Either answer could offer new insights into the planet's evolution and the events that shaped the terrestrial planets like Earth billions of years ago, mission team members say.

"At this point, we know nothing about the composition of Phobos," David Lawrence, MEGANE principal investigator at APL, said during the Oct. 15 briefing. "We have information about mineralogy, but no elemental composition. And so, elements are really a key way to get at some of these foundational questions."

MMX's scientific suite has been carefully calibrated to make those determinations. The cameras and sensors on the MMX exploration module's TENGOO, OROCHI and LIDAR instruments will map Phobos' terrain, geological features and variations in surface materials from orbit, to provide clues about the moon's formation and evolution. Complementing those measurements, MIRS is designed to detect and classify Phobos' surface minerals and search for organic compounds to further differentiate its possible origin as an asteroid or ancient chunk of Mars.

The RAX spectrometer and miniRAD instrument aboard IDEFIX will add localized context to those observations by examining surface mineralogy and their thermal properties up close.

Back in orbit, NASA's MEGANE instrument will measure Phobos' elemental composition through gamma-ray and neutron spectroscopy that can scan tens of centimeters beneath the moon's surface for signs of volatile elements. Higher abundances of hydrogen, chlorine, sodium and potassium, for instance, would favor the asteroid-capture hypothesis, while lower abundances of those compounds could point to the heat and chemical deterioration associated with a planetary impact.

"In Japanese, 'megane' means eyeglasses," Lawrence said. "So we like to think of MEGANE as being an instrument that will look at Phobos with gamma ray and neutron glasses."

When compared to the samples MMX will return to Earth, MEGANE's findings could help scientists determine if volatile depletion found on Phobos reflects the intense heat of a post-impact formation or billions of years of subsequent erosion from the natural effects of space exposure.

MSA, meanwhile, will measure charged particles around Phobos, searching for evidence of subsurface ice and investigating how solar wind exposure has altered the moon's surface. It will also study atmospheric particles escaping from Mars. CMDM will measure dust around Mars, including particles potentially ejected from its moons by impacts.

Comparative observations of Deimos after MMX's final departure from Phobos will help establish whether the moons share similar compositions and, potentially, a common origin.

Once safely returned to Earth, laboratory analysis of the Phobos samples will allow scientists to examine chemical composition and mineralogy with a precision beyond that of MMX's onboard instruments. Tests like isotopic analyses — measuring subtle differences in the atomic makeup of elements — can help identify the samples' origins by comparing their chemical fingerprints with those of Martian rocks and asteroid material.

JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) scientists think some returned material could even originate from Mars itself, deposited on Phobos after ancient asteroid impacts blasted rocks off the Red Planet's surface, potentially holding evidence of its geological past.

International effort

The JAXA-led mission represents interagency partnerships with NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which are providing hardware and communications support through the Deep Space and Estrack networks.

NASA's contributions to MMX also include MEGANE, the Honeybee Robotics-built P-sampler, and an approximately $87 million investment through the end of the mission. NASA is funding the United States scientists on the MMX team, who will, alongside NASA's astromaterials experts, "be fully involved in the examination and scientific analysis of the Phobos samples when they are delivered to Earth," Hays said during the mission briefing. "We get all of the value and all of the scientific participation at a lower cost total [than funding the entire mission]."

For its role, NASA will receive at least 15% of the returned samples, with materials to be maintained at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston for analysis and long-term preservation. To that end, MMX's scientific impact could extend far beyond the mission's conclusion.

"The Phobos samples will be historic," Statler said, with the potential "for future research to answer the questions we don't even know yet how to ask."

Two leading space scientists say there is a need to redefine the edge of the solar system by presenting a theory which states that measurements of the Milky Way's gravitational field, including its dark matter, redraws the sun's frontier.

That theory was put forward by Jim Green, former NASA chief scientist and past director of the space agency's Planetary Science Division, along with Ed Belbruno, a professor of mathematics at Yeshiva University and a senior research associate at Princeton University.

The solar system's gravitational frontier extends to nearly 3.8 light-years from the sun, they contend, roughly 241,000 astronomical units (AU), a distance that brings the "edge" of the solar system to within the same scale as the separation between neighboring stars. The edge of our solar system may be defined not by a sharp boundary, but by a "complex dance among forces, energies and trajectories," they write. Green and Belbruno recently made their case in the August 2026 issue of the magazine ROOM - the Space Journal of Asgardia.

Slow moving objects

Moreover, this theory claims that the gravitationally stable Solar Lagrange points L1 and L2 could form a type of "portal" that could funnel future interstellar visitors such as the recent comet 3I/ATLAS into the solar system, perhaps allowing scientists to capture them for future study.

"Discovering the solar-galactic center L1 location is important since slow moving objects that enter this region can be captured by our sun and become part of our solar system," Green told Space.com. "Who knows if there may be a large captured rogue planet on its way into the solar system right now," he said.

Green said there's a need to look at these newly calculated L1 and L2 locations to see what could be found. He is now in discussion about making such observations with the New Horizons spacecraft team that explored Pluto in 2015 and is now operating in the outer heliosphere.

"Even accumulated dust in this region could verify many of the calculations we have made including the extent of the dark matter in our galaxy," said Green.

Ballistic capture

"It's a really nice and significant result," Belbruno told Space.com. The ROOM article, written for a popular audience, draws from his August 2025 keynote lecture at the Niels Bohr Institute. Much of the theory also stems from Belbruno's work on permanent capture into the solar system and weak stability boundaries published in 2024 in the journal Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy.

Belbruno authored the book Fly Me to the Moon: An Insider's Guide to the New Science of Space Travel (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007). In that work, he spells out how to harness low-fuel space travel he likens to "surfing the gravitational field."

"This new work represents a new application of weak stability boundary theory, first applied in 1987 to find new routes to Earth's moon, using ballistic capture for spacecraft," Belbruno said. "Now, its application is substantially extended to ballistic capture into our solar system from interstellar space and in estimating the size of our solar system," he said.

Green and Belbruno point out that the very recent discovery of interstellar objects  — such as interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in 2025  — passing through our solar system on hyperbolic trajectories "has opened an entirely new window onto the material and processes shaping planetary systems across the galaxy."

Mastery of gravity

The article in ROOM adds some impactful ideas regarding potential distant alien civilizations.

"Interstellar travel requires a mastery of gravity, which an advanced extraterrestrial civilization might use to tour the galaxy, using portals created at Lagrange points for leverage, Green and Belbruno write.

"Remaining at these locations, they could observe the life within a stellar system with essentially no energy expenditure," the researchers add, "so perhaps we should be looking for large space stations at stellar L1 and L2 locations as a techno-signature of advanced intelligent life?"

NASA is accelerating the development of three helicopters that will be deployed into the sky above Mars after a voyage aboard NASA's Space Reactor‑1 Freedom spacecraft.

Slated for launch in 2028, SR-1 Freedom is the first fission nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft and is assigned the duty of dropping off the SkyFall entry capsule loaded with the trio of aerial vehicles at the Red Planet. SR-1's trajectory will deliver the SkyFall helicopters in Mars' northern hemisphere during the planet's spring season to avoid dust storms.

SkyFall is based on the success of the first aerial craft to float about the Red Planet, Ingenuity, which flew over 70 missions at Jezero Crater before it finally broke a rotor. It was designed to fly five. The SkyFall mission will consist of three identical helicopters to be deployed by an entry vehicle in the atmosphere, let loose at roughly under a mile (3,300 feet or 1,000 meters) above Mars, with each of the craft landing independently.

Regions of interest

The SkyFall mission is to conduct investigations that address objectives relevant for science and preparing for human exploration of Mars. Anticipated flights of the vehicles will travel outside of the landing ellipse to regions of interest within a broader exploration zone.

However, there are further science-focused flight paths and regions that have yet to be determined. NASA intends for the SkyFall helicopters to go to multiple regions of scientific interest on Mars.

NASA's Mars Exploration Program, along with the SkyFall project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), will work together to pick those "why and where" paths to navigate.

A first workshop on potential landing sites for the SkyFall mission and adjacent exploration zones of high scientific value is slated for early next year. And as always, sites and zones on Mars for the choppers means satisfying engineering constraints imposed by the project and spacecraft design.

Given the rapid development cadence of the SkyFall mission, decisions are to be fast-paced, but are geared to maximizing science value of the endeavor.

What Mars researchers are after will be a ranked list of potential landing sites that will be studied in more detail by the SkyFall project and science community, prior to a second workshop to be held in late 2027.

Notional flight trajectories

On the table are potential science value and notional flight trajectories of individual landing sites given the capabilities and payload of the SkyFall helicopters.

Landing site selection will occur after the back-to-back landing site workshops next year, said Matthew Golombek, SkyFall Project Scientist at JPL.

"The project has identified a design reference landing site that targets subsurface water ice deposits with glacial/periglacial terrains," Golombek told Space.com.

Given their deployment, how much real estate will the aerial vessel assault study?

Golombek said that the helicopters are capable of flying one to two kilometers every other sol, so flight traverses of 125 miles to a little over 185 miles (200-300 kilometers) are possible.

"The helicopters are designed to last 6 months, with a goal of one Earth year and each can fly every other sol so multiple flights are expected," Golombek added.

Thanks to the success of the Perseverance rover's unleashing of the Ingenuity rotorcraft, Golombek said that there are a host of lessons learned, as well as engineering additions to be made to the set of SkyFall vehicles.

Nominal payload

"Although the helicopters are slightly larger than Ingenuity, they are being designed to operate in exactly the same way, so all of the experience with Ingenuity operations will be directly relevant," said Golombek.

The nominal payload to be toted around the Red Planet will be identical for all three helicopters, consisting of five instruments, plus engineering navigation cameras. Those instruments are to investigate the subsurface structure of Mars, the geomorphology and geology of surface terrains, as well as look at the meteorology of the atmosphere and the radiation environment.

Although there is no dedicated hardware to directly measure winds, the helicopters themselves can serve as on-the-spot wind sensors, even shifting to "Balloon Mode," whereby a helicopter will drift in the background wind.

Radar love

Each low-flying helicopter is outfitted with a ground penetrating radar (GPR) instrument, one that can detect layering in the near surface, at depths unobservable by orbital radar.

Those layers could be assembled from rocky material, buried ice, or combinations of the two. Detection of near-surface ice is of interest both scientifically as well as in support of future human expeditions to Mars.

Subsurface ice not only preserves a record of past Martian climate but also serves as a "high-priority environment" that might have served as a habitat of past…or Martian life resident today.

SkyFall maneuver

AeroVironment of Arlington, Virginia is partnering with JPL, selected last August to co-design and co-manufacture the SkyFall helicopters. They too are building on their experience as co‑developers of NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter that made those 72 flights at Jezero Crater on Mars.

"Now, with SkyFall, we're taking AV's high‑volume uncrewed systems mindset into planetary exploration and showing that Mars helicopters can be built as a repeatable product line, not a one‑off delivery," said Jeff Rodrian, Head of MacCready Works, AV's advanced research and development organization.

A special "SkyFall maneuver" is to be utilized in deploying the three aerial craft. They will be released directly from the carrier spacecraft into the Martian atmosphere, where they separate, deploy, descend, and land under their own power.

"By eliminating the need for a single-use lander stage or a host rover (as Ingenuity required with Perseverance), this approach significantly reduces the technical and financial risk of getting to the Martian surface," explains an AeroVironment statement.

Mountains of data

"Just like here on Earth, Mars helicopters can cover distance quickly and can go places that might be impossible to reach by ground," said Will Pomerantz, Head of Space Ventures at AeroVironment.

The science community may guide these helicopters to locations, Pomerantz said, where the ground penetrating radar can map out the specific spots of ice below the martian surface.

"The three SkyFall helicopters are going to show us parts of Mars we've never seen before and return mountains of data for scientists to pore over," said Pomerantz.

The location of Earth's geographic poles has changed several times over the past 320 million years in a process known as true polar wander, according to measurements of ancient flooding brought about by sea level changes resulting from our planet's crust shifting relative to Earth's spin axis.

Such a shift can affect climate, both on local scales and globally, as regions that were by the poles find themselves moving down to lower latitudes and vice versa. This can then affect atmospheric circulation patterns, which affect climate across the world.

The changes would have affected the environments in which life developed and evolved, from the age of the dinosaurs through to some of our oldest primate ancestors.

True polar wander is not the same as a change in the rotational axis of the Earth. Currently, Earth spins at an angle of 23.4 degrees relative to the plane of its orbit around the sun, and this rotational axis can vary periodically over tens of thousands of years as a result of the Milankovitch cycles caused by the gravitational pull of the sun and planets.

True polar wander is different. Here, the angle of Earth's spin axis does not change relative to its orbital plane. Instead, Earth's crust and mantle shift relative to that rotational axis. This is because Earth is not perfectly spherical. Instead, it is oblate, with Earth's rotation causing the equator to bulge out and the poles to slightly flatten. Because Earth is not spherical, it has multiple axes of inertia, the largest one being aligned with the rotational axis.

These axes need to be balanced to prevent Earth's rotation from becoming chaotic. However, plate tectonics and indeed the Milankovitch cycles can upset that balance of mass, for example by causing more continental crust to congregate in one hemisphere than another.

To rebalance things, Earth's crust and mantle must become decoupled from our planet's core, which stays aligned with the rotational axis. In physical terms, if there is more continental crust in one hemisphere, the crust and mantle might rotate in that direction relative to the rotational axis and the Earth's core in order to balance itself. This sees the geographical locations of the poles change, hence the name 'true polar wander'.

Currently, true polar wander takes place at a rate of 10 centimeters (4 inches) per year, but figuring out when and how fast true polar wander has occurred in the past is not without its difficulties, not least since plate tectonics can mask and even mimic the signal of true polar wander.

Previous studies relied on paleomagnetism, the study of residual magnetic traces in ancient rocks, since the orientation of those magnetic traces would have varied depending upon where that rock was located relative to Earth's magnetic field. Alas, it's not a terribly accurate means of measuring true polar wander and scientists arrived at substantially different conclusions using this technique.

Nevertheless, based on paleomagnetism, scientists had concluded that true polar wander had been negligible, or slow to proceed, in the distant past. However, new results from researchers at the Centre for Planetary Habitability at the University of Oslo in Norway, led by Mathew Domeier, have shown this not to be the case.

Domeier's team looked through the geological record to track how sea level has changed across millions of years. True polar wander would bring about an identifiable pattern in sea-level changes as the oceans reacted in response to changes in the mass distribution of the planet. The sea level changes would be equal but opposite between hemispheres — sea level rises on one side of one hemisphere would be matched by rises on the other side of the opposite hemisphere, creating a 'quadrupolar' effect.

By using statistical modeling on maps of sea level changes across intervals of 10 million years, Domeier's team identified four periods of true polar wander: in the early Jurassic period 190—200 million years ago, the late Jurassic — early Cretaceous period 140—150 million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous 90—100 million years ago and from the Oligocene period 30 million years ago through to the Miocene 20 million years ago.

The results show that, contrary to established opinion, true polar wander can happen in bursts that are relatively fast on geological timescales, with the results showing that during the episodes of true polar wander the Earth's surface shifted by as much as 0.6 degrees per million years relative to the spin axis. This is slow by human standards, but fairly fast on geological timescales, certainly quicker than plate tectonics.

Domeier's team were also able to rule out a suspected case of true polar wander around 300 million years ago when the last great supercontinent, Pangea, migrated northwards. It turns out that Pangea's movements were entirely due to plate tectonics.

The findings were published on Oct. 1 in the journal Science.

NASA is asking for ideas to stop static electricity from zapping astronauts or critical hardware during moon missions.

The agency opened a "Lunar Grounding Challenge" to avoid situations where an astronaut on the moon could become "a walking, high voltage capacitor." Submissions for the $150,000 competition are due Jan. 15 and you can see the requirements here.

NASA is hoping to put astronaut boots at the lunar south pole in 2028 during the Artemis 4 or 5 missions, on the first landing mission since NASA's Apollo 17 in 1972. But simulations suggest that both "tribocharging" (electric-charge transfer between two objects) and plasma charging (from ambient gas in the region) could build up electric charge on spacesuits. "This problem is severely compounded when entering lunar shadows and permanently shadowed regions," the agency wrote, referring to deeply cratered areas where the sun does not touch the lunar surface.

The concern is that astronauts' spacesuits could become electrically charged, as there would be an excess of electrons (negatively charged particles) compared with ions (positively charged) in these areas.

"The risk occurs when an astronaut returns to the spacecraft," the agency added. The lander would have a slight positive charge, producing an issue once the "highly negatively-charged astronaut approaches the vehicle."

NASA has asked industry partners for ideas that can help an astronaut avoid "becoming a walking, high voltage capacitor", including issues such as an electrical arc that could damage spacesuits, spark fires in the oxygen atmosphere of a spacecraft, or create electrical shocks. (A Mars simulation in 2018 was reportedly derailed due to a crew experiencing electrical issues, so this problem is not unprecedented.)

The challenge aims to create designs that would safely discharge the astronaut and their spacesuit before an astronaut touches the lander. Among the technical requirements, NASA is looking for something small (in terms of mass, volume and power) that would be able to operate even in the extreme temperature swings of the lunar surface. The technology must also be able to help as many as four extra-vehicular activities (moonwalks) that take place over as long as 10 days.

"In addition, the suspended lunar dust and heavy dust buildup on a suit in these environments significantly increases arcing lengths, allowing sparks to jump across larger gaps than they would in a clean vacuum. Therefore, the solution must aim to avoid a sudden arc that may come into contact with the outer pressure garment — suit — or the lander," NASA wrote in the challenge description.

The challenge will include multiple phases, including a concept design, concept refinement after chatting with reviewers, and then a final selection. NASA did not release a target date in its press release for when the tech would be available for astronauts, but the agency is planning on a long-term moon base for astronaut missions that would be largely ready to go in the 2030s if schedules hold.

A neon blue pool swirls amongst what look like clouds, all surrounded by a bright red stretch of land. This might look like the surface of an alien planet, but it's actually a salt flat right here on Earth, seen from space.

What is it?

Etosha National Park in northern Namibia hosts the largest salt pan, or piece of land covered with salt and other minerals, in the country.

This image of the Etosha Pan was captured on April 5 of this year by Europe's Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, which consists of two identical satellites in the same orbit.

The Sentinel-2 pair observe and capture imagery of our planet in different wavelengths using a high-resolution multispectral imager that can see 13 different spectral bands, or ranges of wavelengths.

By looking at our planet from space, and observing it through different wavelengths and colors, we can better understand Earth's topography and how it changes over time. With this image, researchers can better understand this landmark in Namibia, a nation in southwestern Africa.

Why is it incredible?

While this image is strikingly beautiful, the Etosha Pan doesn't exactly look like this in real life. If you were standing close to the pan in the national park, it would look bright white.

While this is a real image, false color has been added, which allows scientists to separate different types of vegetation and topography.

With the false color, the vegetation surrounding the salt pan appears in shades of red, while the salt pan itself looks like a mix of bright, light and dark blues with cloudy sediment floating around.

The varied vegetation captured in this false-color image includes grassland, savannas and mopane trees, which appear bright red. These trees are not only a dominant type of vegetation in areas of this park, they also provide essential shelter and habitats for local wildlife, including elephants, giraffe and leopards.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has moved a step closer to launching its second-ever interplanetary mission — an ambitious, eight-year exploration of seven asteroids between Mars and Jupiter that will culminate with a landing on the mysteriously red asteroid 269 Justitia.

The mission team unveiled a half-scale model of the homegrown probe that will make that landing during an Oct. 1 press conference in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE. The autonomous craft will ride attached to the main spacecraft MBR Explorer, named after Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and the UAE's prime minister.

The flight-ready lander is being kept pristine in a vacuum chamber in the capital before being transported to Colorado by Etihad Airways, officials said, where it will be integrated with the main spacecraft, which was developed by the UAE Space Agency.

If all goes to plan, the mission will lift off from Japan in March 2028, kicking off the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (EMA). The project is an ambitious follow-up to the UAE Space Agency's Hope Mars orbiter, which has been studying the Red Planet since 2021.

"It's a proud moment for us here at the UAE," said Faisal al-Bannai, the secretary general of the Advanced Technology Research Council in Abu Dhabi.

'We don't know what we're going to find'

EMA will conduct high-speed flybys of six asteroids before reaching and orbiting 269 Justitia. It will travel a total of about 3 billion miles (5 billion kilometers), which is equivalent to circling Earth roughly 125,000 times, said Najwa Aaraj, the CEO of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, which designed, built and tested the mission's lander.

Along the way, the MBR Explorer will utilize gravity assists from Venus and then Earth to swing deeper into space, zipping past its first three asteroid targets: 10253 Westerwald, 623 Chimaera and 13294 Rockox. A subsequent gravity assist from Mars will fling the spacecraft even farther out, guiding it past three more space rocks: 88055 Ghaf, 23871 Ousha and 59980 Moza.

By 2036, the spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with its final and most intriguing target, 269 Justitia. A roughly 30-mile-wide (50 km) object in the middle of the asteroid belt, 269 Justitia is unusual for its remarkably crimson hue.

Its distinct color more closely resembles icy objects in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune than its immediate main-belt neighbors. This unique trait has led planetary scientists to hypothesize that the asteroid formed in the frigid outer solar system and migrated inward early in the solar system's history. If true, visiting 269 Justitia would offer a rare, close-up look at pristine material from the distant outer solar system via a much shorter journey.

Scientists are particularly excited that the asteroid may still hold water-related minerals and organic compounds preserved from its origins. Studying its surface could therefore offer clues to how water and organic material were distributed as planets began to form, Elias Tsoutsanis, a chief researcher at TII's propulsion and space research center, said during the press briefing.

"We don't know what we're going to find — that's exploration," Tsoutsanis told reporters. "We're really excited."

According to the mission plan, the MBR Explorer will spend roughly seven months studying 269 Justitia from orbit. Beginning at an altitude of 155 miles (250 km), the spacecraft will gradually lower its path before releasing the lander. The smaller probe will then head toward the asteroid's surface, a descent that should take two to three hours depending on 269 Justitia's precise gravity, which remains unknown.

Although TII describes the mission ending with a landing on the surface of 269 Justitia, the engineering details suggest a more violent endgame. Cruising toward the asteroid's surface at 15 to 27 meters per second (34 to 60 mph) with no meaningful way to slow down, the probe will function less like a traditional lander and more like a planned impactor.

"We don't expect that the probe will survive the touchdown," said Mariam Alhammadi, a researcher in TII leading the mission's electric propulsion.

To ensure its two onboard cameras capture essential imagery during the descent, the probe will rely on an attitude-control system to counteract any post-separation spin, Alhammadi said. Should the probe unexpectedly survive the hard landing, she added, its battery is built to last 20 to 50 minutes, providing a narrow but crucial window for it to beam close-ups of the asteroid's surface back to Earth.

The high-velocity impact is also expected to dig a small crater on 269 Justitia, possibly exposing pristine subsurface material. Because this material cannot be imaged from orbit, the team expects the probe's final images to be among the most valuable of the entire mission.

Zero margin for error

Back on Earth, the team faces an unforgiving timeline. To execute the planned flybys, the mission must launch during a narrow three-week window that opens in early March 2028.

"God forbid we miss that — we basically don't have a mission," Mohsen al-Awadhi, the mission director at the UAE Space Agency, told reporters at the press conference. The orbital mechanics are so rigid that another comparable opportunity will not arise for at least 100 years, prompting al-Awadhi to add that he is devoting no time and energy to a backup plan.

Meeting the launch window is just the first hurdle, however. Once deployed in deep space, the lander must operate with absolute autonomy, receiving no commands from Earth or the main MBR Explorer spacecraft, the team says.

"In these eight years, I have no control to call it back — so nothing can go wrong," said Aaraj.

The team is confident that rigorous engineering and testing have produced a probe that can essentially "think for itself." Equipped with AI, it is designed to decide on its own when to capture images and how to filter and rank the most valuable data. Rather than waiting until it reaches its destination, the lander will take images throughout its eight-year cruise and send the best ones back to Earth roughly every six months, according to a TII statement.

Officials declined to disclose the mission's overall cost or say whether it has stayed on budget. The United States' ongoing war in Iran has sparked missile and drone attacks across the UAE, but the mission team has persevered: WIRED reported that they pressed on even as missiles were intercepted overhead.

Looking ahead

Beyond the immediate scientific return, officials said a central pillar of this mission is accelerating the UAE's sovereign deep-space capabilities and fostering its domestic space economy.

The UAE Space Agency, established in 2014, has steadily expanded its portfolio from satellite launches to a Martian orbiter and sending two astronauts to the International Space Station. The EMA probe represents a developmental leap, designed and built in just under two years by a team of roughly 50 local engineers and scientists, many of whom began their careers as entry-level technicians on the Hope Mars mission.

"I don't want to call them my kids — there's a lot of them — but that's how attached I feel to them," al-Awadhi said during the briefing.

The UAE aims to position itself among the world's 10 largest space economies by 2031, targeting a massive expansion of a sector currently valued at about $12 billion. According to al-Bannai, the EMA project is designed to be one of many programs to come. By the time the lander impacts 269 Justitia in 2036, the technology matured during this journey will already be driving the next generation of Emirati spacecraft, he said.

"That's the journey we're on today."

A new genetically engineered microbe may one day help humanity settle Mars, a nonprofit biotechnology research startup suggests.

Our species has launched nearly 50 missions to Mars since 1960, all of them robotic. If everything goes according to plan, they've all been building toward crewed Red Planet flight, which remains a high priority for national space agencies and private companies alike.

Ideally, human crews there will not rely on shipment after shipment from Earth, but can instead make use of any resources they can unearth on Mars for air, food, water, building supplies and more. Perhaps the most radical possible outcome from this approach is the concept of terraforming Mars — transforming the cold, arid world to support life as we know it.

Now, researchers at Pioneer Labs in Emeryville, California, have developed a microbe they suggest may be a useful, safe first step toward terraforming Mars.

"On Mars, nature will do the same jobs for us that she does on Earth — create fertile soil, shelter, oxygen and food," Erika DeBenedictis, CEO of Pioneer Labs, told Space.com.

A key problem with the idea of terraforming Mars is that the Red Planet's surface is essentially toxic. While raw materials potentially useful for Earth life are found in abundance on Mars, they are mixed in the soil with toxins such as perchlorate, as well as salts that would make growth difficult for most organisms.

Previous strategies for growing plants on Mars included rinsing these poisons out, bringing supplemental fertilizers from Earth, or avoiding Martian soil entirely and using hydroponics. However, Pioneer Labs argues that these approaches do not scale up well in terms of time and expense.

The organization has developed a microbe, dubbed sPL.001, that can live off artificial, chemically accurate versions of Martian dirt, water and air. It can do this with having the toxins removed, or with fertilizer added. Moreover, it can generate bioplastics — a class of materials used nowadays on Earth for items as diverse as compostable cups and 3D printing filaments — that could be useful for building habitats on the Red Planet.

"Mars has all the raw materials for life in abundance," DeBenedictis said. "Life can grow entirely using nutrients in unprocessed Martian regolith. That’s special and different from other places, like the moon, which doesn’t have nutrients in the regolith."

In a new study, the scientists revealed how they took Earth microbes that could manufacture bioplastics and slowly exposed them to more and more Mars-like conditions over time.

"It wasn’t obvious this was going to work," DeBenedictis said. "The first time we tested growth of terrestrial microbes in Mars conditions, none of them grew! We had to keep going and test a lot more organisms before we realized we had just gotten unlucky the first time."

Eventually, the scientists evolved a tolerance for toxins normally found in Martian soil.

"It was so cool to see these microbes start growing better on simulated Mars nutrients," DeBenedictis said. "Life finds a way!"

To survive, the new microbe needs to grow inside a stirred, heated bioreactor that protects it from extreme temperature, radiation and the thin Martian atmosphere. It must also receive a processed form of air that gives the microbe the valuable nutrient nitrogen in the form of acetate, as normal Martian air has nitrogen levels too dilute for the microbes to live off. The organism is also not photosynthetic, so it cannot make its own food.

In another study, the researchers suggested that these limitations ensure their microbe cannot survive if it ever found its way outside on Mars. These measures reduce the risk that their microbe might contaminate the Red Planet as an invasive organism, especially if Mars ever did develop life of its own that might still exist in underground aquifers or within ancient salt crystals.

Samuel McKee, a DNA repair scientist at the University of Reading in England, found it believable that such a microbe could not accidentally terraform Mars.

"Many adapted or edited microbes on Earth do not survive outside of a fixed environment despite their evolution, or without a certain food supply," McKee, who did not take part in the new research, told Space.com.

In a third study, the scientists estimated that, thanks to the microbe, mission planners could fit everything needed to build a city on Mars onto a single rocket.

"The biggest limitation of what we’ve done is that simulated Mars isn’t actual Mars," DeBenedictis said. "We reconstructed the relevant chemistry of Martian regolith as carefully as we could from high-quality rover data from multiple locations on Mars. But ultimately, the real test will be doing this with actual Martian regolith."

Such research could find use beyond Mars.

"I am excited about how these avenues of research could impact our dealing with climate change on Earth or extreme environment habitats," McKee said. "Microbes can be utilized to generate much of the material and needs we have thanks to gene editing."

All in all, "we will be watching with anticipation when these microbes are finally launched to the Martian surface," McKee said.

Are there secret underground caves on the moon? NASA has a new program that aims to find out.

Though we see it in the sky most nights, the moon still holds an incredible amount of mystery. One such mystery is a large underground cave, or a cavernous tube carved out by ancient lava, that scientists think extends past a particular pit on the moon's surface. And to get to the bottom of it, NASA has selected a project known as GIMLI (the Geophysical Instruments for Marius Lunar pit Investigation, not the character from Lord of the Rings). GIMLI was selected along with two other programs that are all intended to expand our understanding of the moon to better support a future moon base, which NASA aims to build near the south pole.

"NASA Science is building the ultimate interplanetary survival guide to ensure that science goes first to the lunar surface to provide our future astronaut crews with the vital information, resources, and safety precautions needed ahead of time to survive the night on the moon," Nicky Fox, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement.

Lunar mysteries

The site of this investigation will be the Marius Hill Pit, which was discovered in 2009 by Japan's Kaguya moon orbiter. You can see the pit clearly in the probe's images. But researchers think that there's more there than just a large hole in the lunar surface.

They think it's possible that the pit is connected to a vast, underground cave likely created by lava flowing in the ancient past. If true, this could shed light on the history of volcanic activity on the moon.

"Confirming a substantial lava tube would give us an insight into how volcanism operated on the moon," GIMLI deputy principal investigator Gareth Morgan said in a different statement. "Lava tubes are a common feature of basaltic volcanism on Earth, so identifying them on the moon means we could use knowledge of such terrestrial caves to better understand lunar history."

Even more, if researchers confirm the presence of this lava tube, astronauts could potentially use it as a natural shelter on the lunar surface. These lava-made caves would provide general shelter as well as protection from the extreme temperatures and radiation exposure experienced on the moon's surface. Lava tubes could also be a safe "bunker" of sorts where future astronauts could be shielded from micrometeorites. While a future moon base will probably have human-made shelters included, natural caves could be an incredible, existing resource that astronauts could tap into.

How to find a moon cave

GIMLI will work directly on the lunar surface, scanning beneath to look for signs of the lava tube. This investigation comes from a proposal led by the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute (PSI) and will be funded through NASA's Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon (PRISM) program.

The investigation is partnering with Honeybee Robotics to help build the equipment and instrumentation that will be necessary for the study. This gear will get to the moon aboard a lander and rover via NASA's Commercial Lunar Payloads Services program, and the data collected will be studied by a team led by PSI associate director and senior scientist Than Putzig. The work done by PSI will be in partnership with the Norwegian Space Agency.

From the lunar surface, GIMLI will gather data using ground-penetrating radar, seismic sensors and a gravimeter to better understand what's really happening underneath the surface. These measurements will allow GIMLI to determine if there is a subsurface lava tube and, if so, how big it is. Could it fit an entire astronaut crew? We will have to wait and see.

Imagine the sun has just risen as you wake to the soft sounds of Martian dust swirling outside. You look out and what do you see? A beautiful mountain range, bathed in golden light.

While this imaginary scenario might not be possible today, if future astronauts ever get to enjoy their morning coffee on the Red Planet, this is what they might see.

What is it?

NASA's Curiosity rover recently captured a stunning new panorama of dawn breaking over a Mars mountain range

The panorama, made using six different shots captured of the view, showcases Martian cliffs on the northwestern edge of Mount Sharp.

Curiosity has been exploring this 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain for over a decade. Crawling up the mountain since 2014, the rover has explored all sorts of strange and unusual terrain. And now? It has captured a beautiful, peaceful Martian morning.

Why is it incredible?

Looking at this image, it seems almost Earth-like. Despite the complete lack of plant life (or any life that we're aware of), the view is reminiscent of mountains rising out of the deserts on our very own planet.

But what might feel like a familiar sight in a national park is an entirely different planet.

And by enjoying this view (and analyzing it scientifically), researchers can better understand how features like the cliffs on Mount Sharp formed.

Mars was once home to a variety of bodies of water like lakes and rivers. But what happened to the planet once it lost its atmosphere and, subsequently, its liquid surface water? How did the minerals left behind from these streams and lakes affect the Martian topography? These are just some of the many questions researchers aim to answer with observations like this.

The moon is a historical landmark — a celestial body continually peppered with robotic landers shot from our home planet, as well as human footprints planted there by a dozen visiting moonwalkers from 1969 to 1972.

A recent gathering in Italy of the International Scientific Committee on Aerospace Heritage (ISCAH) looked at protecting lunar heritage with an eye toward developing guidelines for spacecraft deorbiting onto the moon's surface.

Particular attention was paid to the risks posed by the impacts of deorbited satellites and rocket stages, recently highlighted by the crash of a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage into the moon last August.

As pointed out in the meeting, as lunar traffic increases, controlled crash landings of moon orbiters and rocket stages are becoming an attractive end-of-mission disposal strategy.

And that's a problem.

Limited knowledge

There is limited knowledge regarding ejecta modeling and the effects produced by these impacts, said Luca Forassiepi. He spoke at the Sept. 14 meeting in Piza, which was called "Protecting Lunar Heritage: Developing Guidelines and Recommendations for Controlled Lunar Deorbiting."

"These effects have only been observed, and only partially, in a handful of historical cases. As a result, much of our current understanding relies on simulations, which necessarily involve a number of simplifications compared with reality," Forassiepi told Space.com.

Strong incentive

"Because the moon is an airless world, any movement on the surface is going to stir up sticky, abrasive dust that erodes human materials," pointed out associate professor Alice Gorman, an Australian archaeologist and heritage consultant at Flinders University.

"This is a problem for cultural heritage sites," Gorman said. "Imagine the iconic Apollo 11 landing module, the Eagle, being worn away until it crumbles into dust itself."

"It's also going to be a problem for habitation and mining installations," she added. "So there is a strong incentive for [the] space industry to minimize the impacts of rocket and satellite crashes, protecting both heritage places and new surface missions."

End-of-life planning

Gorman pointed to 51 hard spacecraft impacts on the moon to date, a number that includes nine rocket bodies and 19 lunar orbiters.

"We've reached an inflection point where spacecraft craters aren't just new archaeological sites, they're an environmental hazard that may cause irreversible damage," Gorman told Space.com.

Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, Gorman observed, nations are liable for any damage their space hardware causes to the property of other nations. "We could be looking at a situation where a state could demand compensation for a rocket body crash harming its cultural heritage. End-of-life planning is going to become critical."

Cultural landscape

Also taking part in the meeting was Beth O'Leary, a cultural anthropology and archaeology specialist and college professor emerita at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

"The moon is part of the cultural landscape of Earth," she said. As such, its environment and heritage deserve international attention.

It's now been more than 60 years since the first successful soft landing on the moon, that of the Soviet Union's Luna 9 spacecraft in February 1966. And lunar traffic is poised to increase greatly in the coming years, as both the United States and China aim to build bases near the moon's south pole.

Given this landscape, "we seek to address the challenges of lunar traffic from crashes, deorbiting spacecraft, and intentional landings and to understand those risks to our aerospace heritage. Our committee attempts to estimate the real consequences of the impacts," O'Leary said.

With global experts in planetary geoarchaeology, site formation processes and heritage management, ISCAH is analyzing and increasing the knowledge base that could prevent the irreversible destruction of the significant historic cultural resources on the lunar surface.

Far-reaching consequences

"Our recommendations should inform consensus-based decisions and support international best practices and policies," said O'Leary.

The ongoing work of the group provides the best opportunities for lunar preservation and protection by and for humanity, she added.

"In our short three years," O'Leary said, "we will have had three conferences, created a mission statement, received World Monuments Fund listing, and will continue as a delegation to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space."

O'Leary told Space.com that all these issues are complex scientifically and legally, "but it is so important to rely on excellent research and proven heritage management principles in order to make good decisions about preservation which have far-reaching consequences."

Planetary geoarchaeology

One goal the group is addressing is a "post-mission gap," particularly regarding lunar projects.

That is, what happens to lunar heritage following the completion of a successful mission and in the decades that follow?

Also, what are the appropriate end-of-mission practices, and how can we ensure the long-term protection of spacecraft, robotics and other material remains associated with these missions?

Those questions are being deliberated by Justin Holcomb, an assistant research professor with the Kansas Geological Survey, a research unit of the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Planetary geoarchaeology provides one way to address this issue, by identifying the natural (geological) and anthropogenic (human) processes operating within these environments "that may threaten lunar heritage, while also identifying environmental settings that are more conducive to its long-term preservation," Holcomb told Space.com.

Lunar practices

Forassiepi said that future points of action are on the agenda.

"There is certainly ongoing and continuous work by the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Aerospace Heritage on this aspect," said Forassiepi.

ICOMOS is the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a non-governmental organization working to conserve and protect cultural heritage sites on our planet — and off it as well.

"In active collaboration with the World Monuments Fund, we will further refine our research into the potential risks associated with deorbiting and crash landings," Forassiepi noted.

Over the coming months, Forassiepi said, the group will move into a second phase focused on listening and dialogue with all relevant stakeholders in the sector, from space agencies and the scientific community to private actors, heritage experts and communities with social and religious values associated with the moon that could be affected or disrupted by certain lunar practices.

Ultimate goal

"The aim is to initiate an open dialogue and exchange among all these different actors, with a view to collectively developing guidelines based on broad consensus," Forassiepi said.

These will then be presented in the context of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 2027, with the hope that, over time, they may evolve into "internationally recognized standards of behavior" and be adopted and followed by all space actors, Forassiepi added.

"The ultimate goal is to build a lunar future that is sustainable not only from an operational perspective, but also in terms of scientific research and the protection of the earliest traces of human presence in the history of space," he stressed. "These are two irreplaceable forms of heritage, and their damage would represent an enormous loss for future generations."

Earth and Mars formed in the same part of the solar system, but their chemistry suggests the two planets were built in different ways, according to new research.

The finding adds to growing evidence that suggests planets do not all form in one way. It also has implications for a long-running open question about how exactly the disk of gas and dust around the young sun formed the planets of today's solar system around 4.5 billion years ago.

"The most surprising result was that Earth and Mars appear to have formed in different ways," Anders Johansen, a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who co-led the study, said in a statement. "You might have expected that two planets formed side by side in the same solar system would share a more similar formation history."

Around 4.5 billion years ago, the solar system was a crowded place. The young sun was ringed by a rotating disk of gas and dust with the first building blocks of planets taking shape within it.

In one long-standing picture, dust grains collided and stuck together to form pebbles, which grew into kilometer-wide rocky bodies known as planetesimals. Those planetesimals repeatedly crashed into one another and merged, building planets over a few tens of millions of years.

Whether Earth and Mars were built by one process or a mix of both has not been settled. The Copenhagen team set out to test the competing ideas by studying the chemistry of the planets' crust and mantle.

The researchers focused on volatile elements such as sodium, zinc and potassium, which evaporate easily at high temperatures. So whether those elements are present or missing acts as a chemical fingerprint of the heat and violence a planet went through while forming, according to the researchers.

"It is a major detective job to figure out what happened back then when most of the evidence disappeared long ago," Johansen said. "But even after 4.5 billion years, the compositions of Earth's and Mars' mantles remain the same."

What formation route suits best?

The team fed the data about the reservoirs of volatile elements of both Earth and Mars into computer models to test which formation scenarios fit best, and the results favor a hybrid model.

At least 75 percent of Earth's mass appears to come from two young planets, known as protoplanets, that grew large by gathering pebbles, while planetesimals supplied up to 25 percent, the study found.

For Mars, the team thinks that this balance was reversed, with roughly three-quarters of its mass appearing to come from planetesimals, and the remaining quarter from pebble accretion.

The exact chemical makeup of the raw material that became Earth and Mars is unknown, so the calculations depend on assumptions, the study notes. Nevertheless, adjusting those assumptions did not change the main conclusion, according to study co-lead Haiyang Wang of the University of Copenhagen.

The team argues that its method is more direct than the isotope-based approach widely used in the field, which "can often be interpreted in multiple ways," according to Wang.

The technique used by the researchers could eventually be applied to worlds beyond the solar system, extrasolar planets, or exoplanets.

As future missions find Earth-like planets around other stars, judging whether those worlds could be habitable will require some sense of what they're made of.

"If we understand how planets lose volatile elements during their formation, we can also become better at predicting how much water and other life-supporting substances they ultimately retain," Johansen concluded.

This research is described in a paper published Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

An ancient crater buried underneath the Oklahoma town of Ames has been discovered to be almost 100 million years younger than thought, consequently connecting it to one of the big five mass extinction events in Earth's history.

The crater, which spans about 10 miles (16 kilometers) in diameter, is buried under 9,000 feet (2.7 kilometers) of sedimentary rock and was not discovered until seismic readings revealed it in 1991.

Initial estimates of the crater's age came from the discovery of the tooth in a rock found within the impact site. It was identified as belonging to an ancient eel-like creature called a conodont, which existed during the middle of a geological period known as the Ordovician, in a rock found within the impact site. This period was marked by a dramatic bombardment of asteroids known as the Ordovician Meteor Event 467.5 million years ago, which left nearly two-dozen craters spread around the world, all within 30 degrees of the equator. This equatorial pattern suggests there may have been a ring of material from a broken-up asteroid encircling the Earth's equator.

However, a team led by Elizabeth Catlos of the University of Texas at Austin has arrived at a different conclusion, finding that the crater is 370 million years old instead. So rather than being part of the Ordovician Meteor Event, this new dating places it around the time of the Late Devonian mass extinction, also referred to as the Frasnian–Famennian boundary extinction.

"With this research, we're basically taking a major pawn out of the Ordovician Meteor Event and dumping it into the Frasnian–Famennian event and saying, 'this is where this impact belongs'," said Catlos in a statement.

The new evidence for the age of the Ames crater comes from zircon crystals. Zircon is a silicate mineral, and zircon crystals can be dated by analyzing the amount of uranium and lead contained within them. When zircon crystals form they contain uranium and thorium, but the formation process pushes out lead atoms. A newly formed zircon crystal therefore contains no lead, but over time uranium radioisotopes decay into lead atoms, so the more lead a zircon crystal contains, the older it is.

The pressure of the impact that gouged out the Ames crater would have formed new zircons. Working with a team at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Catlos' group were able to image the zircon crystals using cathodoluminescence and electron backscatter diffraction. Cathodoluminescence bombards materials with electrons, which causes materials to emit photons at different wavelengths depending upon the material's composition. Electron backscatter diffraction, on the other hand, is a technique that uses a scanning electron microscope to study how electrons are diffracted at different angles by different atoms.

"No matter what technique we used, it was coming back to this younger signal," said Catlos.

So what about the fossil conodont teeth? The teeth were probably in the rock a long time before the impact, and just got jumbled in the violence that formed the crater.

While the impact alone was not big enough to cause a mass extinction, it may have contributed. Other possible causes of the extinction include a reduction in oxygen, super-volcanism or a nearby supernova, or possibly all these events operating in tandem.

When the impact occurred 370 million years ago, what is now Oklahoma was submerged beneath a shallow sea, which is how the 1.6 miles (2.7 kilometers) of sedimentary rock that today covers the crater was laid down. The impact also fractured the Earth's crust beneath it, and these fractures have allowed oil and natural gas to seep up. Wells struck oil three kilometers down inside the crater and since 1991 it has produced 17.4 million barrels of oil and a volume of 79.5 billion cubic feet (2.25 billion cubic meters) of natural gas.

Danny Stockli, who is the Dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the research, is effusive in his praise of using zircon crystals to date the ages of craters.

"These small crystals allow us to go back in time and learn about the major changes to Earth's ancient landscapes," said Stockli. "It would be great to do this for more of the meteor impact sites across the continent so we could get a more accurate timeline for these major events."

The findings were published in July in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

The water ice at Mars’s north pole is not as dusty as planetary scientists thought, which could change how we think about the Red Planet’s past and present climate. That could, in turn, improve our understanding of Mars' prior habitability.

When dust is present in ice it acts as an insulator, absorbing sunlight and consequently causing the ice to melt or sublimate depending on the air pressure. Previous estimates suggested that the water-ice in Mars’ north polar cap and extended polar regions contained as much as 25% dust by mass.

"We know there is water-ice in the area surrounding the north pole of Mars, but there has been widespread disagreement as to how dusty that ice is," Aditya Khuller of the University of Washington said in a statement. "If it is dustier, the ice will be darker. Just like a dark t-shirt in the sun makes you warmer, dusty ice gets warmer and vaporizes faster on Mars."

However, a new analysis by Khuller and graduate student Pari Mohan using an alternate method has now concluded that the ice contains merely 3% dust by mass.

This means that not only does the ice absorb less sunlight, reducing the amount of ice that vaporizes into the Martian atmosphere, it also reflects more sunlight back into space because it is cleaner and therefore brighter.

The reflectivity of a planet is referred to as its albedo, and the more sunlight is reflected, the less is retained to help warm Mars, which needs all the warmth it can get sitting on the outer edge of the solar system's habitable zone.

A new way to look a Martian ice

This new conclusion is a consequence of Khuller realizing that the technique previously used by planetary scientists to determine the properties of Mars’ water ice was not the best model.

That technique was based on the properties of lunar regolith (dirt) on Earth’s Moon, but when Khuller applied it to ice on Earth, he found the results were not accurate. If it had problems describing the properties of Earth’s ice, was it really suitable for deducing the properties of Mars’ ice?

So Khuller and Mohan applied a tried and trusted technique derived by Steve Warren, professor emeritus at the University of Washington.

"His methods had been used successfully to study snow and ice on Earth for decades," said Khuller. "So I thought it would be interesting to adapt these Earth-tested methods to Mars."

Khuller and Mohan ran the numbers, which is when they came to the conclusion that the ice at Mars’ north pole was not as dusty as previous models had suggested. But what does that mean for Mars’ climate history?

Mars has ice caps at both its poles, and during winter they are covered in a frosty layer of carbon dioxide ice.

At the south pole, this layer is tens of feet deep, but at the north pole it is shallower, about a meter deep. In summer, that carbon dioxide ice sublimates into the air, and this happens faster at the north pole because of the relative thinness of the carbon dioxide. Exposing the more permanent water-ice cap beneath.

This is called the North Polar Residual Cap, which sits on top of numerous mile-thick layers of water-ice deposits, some dustier than others, collectively called the North Polar Layered Deposits. The residual cap is just the most recent active layer of what Khuller refers to as an "ice-cream sandwich."

The different layers of ice in this sandwich contain different amounts of dust, with dirtier layers sandwiching cleaner ones. Depending upon which layer was exposed to the air at the time, it would have affected Mars’ climate differently. The current residual cap appears to be scarce in dust and is contributing to Mars’ cold environment. However, these differences can even occur on an annual timescale with the coming and going of the carbon dioxide frost.

Orbiting satellites such as Europe’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey have been imaging and mapping the Martian surface, including the polar caps. These observations have noted the ice caps changing in brightness seasonally as the carbon dioxide ice builds up and then sublimates.

"By looking at how the brightness changed over time, we figured out that there is a frost that forms in the winter and it’s more dusty," said Khuller. "In the Martian summer it goes away, exposing cleaner, older ice."

There could also be a connection with possible habitable environments on Mars.

Mars wasn't always so barren and dry

In the past, when the dustier layers of the polar cap’s ice-cream sandwich were exposed, they would have absorbed enough sunlight to melt the bottom of their particular layer of ice. This would have created pockets of liquid water that would be rich in nutrients provided by the dust.

On Earth, shallow pools of dusty meltwater are usually teeming with microbes that become dormant when the water freezes again in winter and then reactivate when the ice melts in summer.

Mars' ice caps could therefore have provided the perfect habitat for microbial life, but as of yet we have not found any life on the Red Planet.

"The fact that Mars and Earth both have these similar layers of water-ice and dust is interesting," said Khuller. "Why does one planet have life and the other doesn’t?"

Khuller and Mohan’s research was published on 8 September in the journal npj Space Exploration.

Blue Origin just unveiled its "Power Tower," which is designed to provide solar electricity for an upcoming base on the moon.

The space company, which was founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, posted an animation of the tower on X on Sept. 25, showing the hardware landing on the moon and then deploying above the lunar surface.

"Our Power Tower is a 20-meter-tall, vertically deployed solar array system designed to provide more than 10 kilowatts of power for Moon Base operations at the lunar south pole," Blue Origin wrote in the post.

The X post also links to a YouTube video, which shows a real deployment test that occurred here on Earth on July 22, 2026. From the low vantage point of the camera, you can see a pole extending up from the base, before arms branch out from the center to deploy solar arrays that fold down.

"Its modular architecture will support future surface networks, extending power beyond the lander to the assets that need it most," reads the Blue Origin post.

The power tower appears to be an evolution of an earlier technology called Lunar Array Mast and Power System (LAMPS), which was developed by Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin subsidiary, and tested at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston in 2024.

Honeybee Robotics is one of the companies that have been working under NASA's Vertical Solar Array Technology (VSAT) project, which has been developing solar arrays to create the necessary power for a sustained presence on the moon in the future.

The X post mentions that the power tower will be used for operations at the lunar south pole. Blue Origin likely envisions the solar tower as part of NASA's planned moon base, which the agency aims to build in the area via its Artemis program. NASA's Moon Base project is currently in its first phase, which lasts until 2029. The current timeline has the moon base up and running by 2032.

NASA's Perseverance rover has been busy exploring Mars' "Wild West."

What is it?

Perseverance has been exploring the Martian surface for more than five years. Starting this year, the rover began its journey through "Lac de Charmes," an area that the mission team considers the "Wild West frontier" for the rover, according to a recent update.

This region, which is west of the rim of Jezero Crater where the mission landed, is home to valleys and ridges, as well as some of the oldest rocks the rover has encountered yet.

To get to the "Wild West frontier," the mission team had Perseverance snake through different interesting areas. On the journey to "Lac de Charmes," the rover collected data that the team can use to better piece together the story of how the region formed and how it has evolved over the years.

Why is it incredible?

In this latest update, the mission team shared that, not only is Perseverance continuing to explore this region, but it's doing so with the help of a repurposed processor originally intended to allow the mission to talk to the Ingenuity helicopter.

With observations Perseverance has made so far, the mission has found that the igneous rocks in this area may have formed from cooling lava or magma, or even as the result of a violent impact, according to the update.

The rocks in this region are so old that they "formed when Mars was still a young planet bombarded by asteroid impacts, long before the sedimentary rocks inside Jezero Crater formed in rivers and lakes," Athanasios (Thanos) Klidaras, a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University, said in the mission update.

"They therefore could teach us much about the earliest era of Martian history — and, more broadly, how rocky planets evolved during the tumultuous early history of our solar system," Klidaras added.

Those of us still humming on back-to-school energy can add some Red Planet flavor: We just marked the beginning of a new year on Mars.

The Martian new year officially clicked over today (Sept. 30) at 4:16 a.m. EDT (0816 GMT), when the Red Planet once again began its nearly 687-Earth-day journey around the sun.

But if you're a Martian, you wouldn't use Earth days. A Mars day, or "sol," lasts 24 hours and 39 minutes — the time it takes the Red Planet to rotate once. There are 668 sols in a Martian year.

Sept. 30 as New Year's Day on Mars is something of a human construct: Astronomers chose it because Sept. 30 marks the northern equinox, when spring begins in Mars' north and autumn starts in the south.

"Like Earth, Mars has four seasons — winter, spring, summer and autumn," officials with the European Space Agency (ESA) stated in a post about the Martian new year.

"Unlike Earth's seasons, Martian seasons are not of equal lengths due to Mars' more elliptical orbit," they added. "The planet's axial tilt causes the northern hemisphere to receive more sunlight during the northern summer, and the southern hemisphere to receive more sunlight in northern winter."

The strange seasons on Mars also bring a consequence: dust. In the back half of the long Martian year, the Red Planet gets closer to the sun and sees its atmosphere warm up. The warmth brings dust, as winds loft particles from the regolith on the surface.

"Once airborne, these brownish particles heat up and redistribute some of that warmth to the surrounding atmosphere. This process can rapidly pump a lot of dust," ESA stated.

Daily conditions on Mars are also tough, no matter the season. At noon in summer, for example, temperatures range between 32 degrees and 140 degrees Fahrenheit (0 and 60 degrees Celsius), but winter sees the mercury plunge to as low as minus 166 degrees F (minus 110 degrees C).

You can check out the conditions on Mars up close, by following along with NASA's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers. These six-wheeled robots send back images nearly daily, and the agency generally provides a few updates about their activities each month.

The bright blue lagoon waters of Venice, Italy and its iconic canals stand out in this true-color satellite image.

What is it?

Have you ever seen the gondoliers of Venice pushing their gondolas through the canals, singing all the way? Well, if you zoom out all the way into orbit, this is what they look like.

This image, snapped by the European Space Agency's IRIDE satellite fleet back in May of this year, shows the Venetian Lagoon, a bay of the Adriatic Sea that encompasses the city of Venice.

The IRIDE network consists of six satellite constellations that orbit our planet, capturing comprehensive data and imagery of Earth.

Why is it incredible?

Venice is famous for its Grand Canal and canal networks, where you can find people traveling by gondola. Made up of a group of islands, this coastal city is intrinsically linked to the waters it inhabits.

In this view from space, you can see just how intertwined every curve of the city is with the surrounding waters.

There is bright blue water, whose brilliant color is created by suspended sediment, as well as mud flats and salt marshes, which appear as dark brown and green in the top-right of the image.

The great variety of watery ecosystems in this region have created a home for not only humans in the city but an incredible array of wildlife, such as birds in the salt marshes.

While Venice's waters exude an incredible natural beauty, as seen in this image, they also put the city and its residents at risk as sea levels continue to rise. Because Venice is so intertwined with its surrounding water, it is especially vulnerable to sea level rise caused by climate change, and every year the city essentially "sinks" roughly 1/16th of an inch (2 millimeters).

Unusual formations in Mars' Arabia Terra region reveal the Red Planet's climate history.

What is it?

Like the wavy structures of a coral reef, layered deposits in the Arabia Terra region of Mars showcase the planet's strange beauty and even stranger past.

In this new image captured by the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, you can see lighter deposits layered on top of larger formations in Martian impact craters.

And while the image itself is quite striking, it's more than just a pretty picture. This kind of visual data can help researchers better understand what has happened on the Red Planet over the years.

"Researchers have proposed that the rhythmic nature of the layers and their extensive coverage across much of Arabia Terra could be due to global cyclic processes, such as dust storms, perhaps involving groundwater," HiRISE co-investigator Cathy Weitz said in a recent blog post.

"The deposits are currently undergoing erosion, which has produced crenulations, pits, and jagged edges. Darker wind-blown (aeolian) ripples and debris has more recently covered and infilled portions of the layered deposit," Weitz added.

Why is it incredible?

This image stands out, first and foremost, for its unusual appearance. Peaks and valleys ranging from a light sandy color to a deep blueish-gray create an almost hypnotic landscape.

And it is amazing that, with a picture taken by a robotic spacecraft orbiting a planet that lies millions of miles from Earth, scientists can trace through billions of years of that world's climate history.

Every rock, every valley and every winding, sandy, fragmented feature holds an incredible amount of information about the planet it belongs to. So, even just through images from orbit, scientists have been able to slowly piece together Mars' history and the incredible changes the planet and its climate have endured.

Billions of years ago, something happened in our solar system that gave rise to one of the most peculiar planetary mysteries: what caused Uranus to spin on its side?

Although most planets spin with their rotational axes generally upright with respect to their orbital plane, Uranus exhibits an extreme axial tilt, causing its spin to resemble something more akin to a steady roll.

The exact reason for the planet's unusual tilt has long perplexed astronomers, and debate continues over what might have led to its present-day appearance. However, recent research suggests that at some point in the distant past, interactions between Uranus and a hypothetical "lost" moon could hold the key to what instigated this modern planetary mystery.

What do we know?

An atypical ice giant

Compared with its neighboring planets, Uranus is quite the outlier. Not only is it the coldest planet in our solar system, but Uranus is accompanied by at least 27 moons that share its unusual tilt, and some evidence suggests there could be even more Uranian satellites that presently remain hidden.

The earliest recorded observations of Uranus date back to the late 1600s, at which time it was initially thought to be a star. By 1781, British astronomer William Herschel concluded, based on initial observations he made with a home-built telescope, that the object was most likely a comet. Ongoing monitoring would eventually lead to its confirmation as the seventh planet from the sun.

Herschel's early observations of Uranus led to him noticing the odd paths of its moons, which had been one of the earliest indications that the planet possessed an extreme orientation. However, it wasn't until the early 20th century that the first serious attempts to measure the ice giant's rotation occurred, leading to the eventual confirmation of its unusual, tilted appearance.

Compared to Earth's rotational axis of around 23.5 degrees, Uranus's roughly 98-degree tilt causes several notable effects. For instance, according to NASA, because Uranus requires close to 84 Earth years to complete an orbit around the sun, each pole is exposed to direct sunlight for close to a quarter of the Uranian year, leaving the opposite side to cool over a 21-year-long winter. Equally unlike seasonal phenomena on Earth, sunlight falls almost directly onto Uranus's equatorial region during the planet's equinoxes.

What remains unknown?

Uranus's extreme spin

While such seasonal effects are well characterized, the mystery of what caused Uranus to end up on its side remains a matter of debate among astronomers.

One popular explanation suggests that at some point early in our solar system's violent history, Uranus may have collided with a large planetary body, while other theories suggest that no single impact would be necessary, and instead focus on ancient gravitational interactions between the giant planets, which may have gradually altered Uranus's orientation.

In 2022, a team of researchers led by Paris Observatory astronomer Melaine Saillenfest revisited the idea that Uranus may have been gradually tilted long ago by the presence of a large object. However, instead of a planet-sized object, Saillenfest and his colleagues suggested that, based on simulations, an ancient moon of significant enough size could have driven Uranus toward its extreme tilt through gravitational interactions before eventually crashing into the planet.

"The migration of a moon modifies the precession frequency of the planet's spin-axis," Saillenfest recently told Space in an email. "As this frequency increases or decreases, at some point it becomes equal to the precession frequency of the planet's orbital plane (or a harmonic of it). This creates a resonance between the two frequencies."

"Once locked into this resonance, the two frequencies remain equal, and the planet gets more and more tilted as the moon migrates farther and farther away," Saillenfest explained.

According to Saillenfest, the presence of a hypothetical moon and its gradual migration could have pulled Uranus toward a 90-degree tilt, although going beyond 90 degrees would have required an additional step. What the researchers propose in their 2022 study is that as Uranus approached the 90-degree tilt, this would have caused instability in the moon's orbit. The resulting motion would have been chaotic enough to drive the planet's tilt even further, bringing it to the roughly 98-degree tilt observed today.

"During this phase of instability, the planet's obliquity evolves chaotically and it can go beyond 90 degrees up to the observed state of Uranus," Saillenfest told Space. Although the final act in this planetary drama would have been the hypothetical moon's collision into Uranus, Saillenfest says he doesn't think this cataclysmic event is likely to have contributed significantly to the tilting process.

"The satellite is too small to noticeably alter Uranus's spin axis through the collision in itself," Saillenfest said, although noting that the eventual collision of this suspected "lost" moon into the planet is nonetheless a requirement for the team's scenario to work.

"This is because today Uranus has no moon with the mass range needed for this mechanism to work," Saillenfest adds, emphasizing that the planet's existing moons are too small to account for the effects he and his colleagues have modeled.

The mystery continues

Ultimately, the team found that in simulations where the unstable moon exhibits forces against Uranus over time and eventually crashes into it, the planet becomes tilted at about 98 degrees — the same tilt observed today, which Saillenfest calls "quite interesting."

"In order for Uranus to be tilted all the way to beyond 90 degrees, the previous moon of Uranus must have migrated across quite a long range," Saillenfest adds. "This means that internal processes inside Uranus must be able to dissipate a lot of energy through heat."

Saillenfest and his colleagues suggest there are two primary ways their ancient-moon hypothesis can be tested. First, if observations of Uranus's moons revealed them to be moving outward by as much as several centimeters each year, this would provide evidence of such energy dissipation occurring within Uranus — meaning that an ancient moon could potentially have also migrated far enough that it played a role in tipping the planet over. Rapid migration could also suggest that the present-day Uranian moons may even be debris produced during an earlier disruption of Uranus's satellite system.

"This would give support to the idea that [they] could have formed as a second generation of moons, potentially from the debris of the previous moon," Saillenfest says, adding that afterward "they would [have] migrated away from Uranus up to their current locations."

Second, the ages of the planet's current moons could also provide clues. Current estimates indicate that they could be almost as old as the solar system itself, although such values remain uncertain. However, if the present-day Uranian moons were proven to be younger, this could lend support to the idea that they may be debris left over from an earlier collision with a larger singular moon.

Additional observations will be required to confirm the suspected role of this hypothetical ancient impact, but Saillenfest and his colleagues remain optimistic about what future data could reveal.

"If these age estimates are revised in the future, in a way that the current moons of Uranus are estimated to be substantially younger than the solar system, then this would be another hint

The asteroid Bennu was shaped on the boundary between hot and cold in the dusty disk that formed the planets 4.5 billion years ago, meaning the samples brought back from this space rock by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission give us our best look at the primordial material from which the planets assembled.

"Bennu may offer our best glimpse of the original mix of chemical elements from which the terrestrial planets were ultimately built," said Maria Schönbächler, a professor of isotope geochemistry at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, in a statement.

Bennu is a near-Earth asteroid that NASA visited with its OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission between 2018 and 2021. Then, on Sept. 23, 2023, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft which parachuted down to Earth a sample of 0.26 pounds (120 grams) of regolith from Bennu.

The material in that sample was subsequently shared out among researchers around the globe, including half a gram being received by Schönbächler's lab. The findings of Schönbächler and her team had subsequently changed what we thought we knew about the birth of Bennu.

They analyzed isotopes — variations of elements with greater or lesser numbers of neutrons — of iron, titanium and chromium in the sample, finding iron and titanium in particular to be well mixed throughout. Bennu's composition is also remarkably similar to another asteroid, Ryugu, from which Japan's Hayabusa2 mission has also obtained a sample. A rare breed of meteorite, called CI chondrites, also share a similar isotopic composition with Bennu and Ryugu, suggesting a common birthplace.

And that's where things get really interesting. Both Bennu and Ryugu are pieces of larger bodies that at some point were smashed apart. Some scientists have suggested that those parent bodies probably formed far from the sun in the outer solar system, maybe even alongside comets, and that they formed later than the planets since processes that far out are relatively slow.

However, the isotopic analysis of the Bennu sample by Schönbächler's team begs to differ. The even mixing of the isotopes suggests that it was formed from fine dust grains rather than clumpy, coarser material. The presence of water molecules also implies it formed closer to the sun than had been thought.

Schönbächler's team posit the following scenario: that Bennu formed close to the snow line, which was the dividing line in the planet forming disk beyond which temperatures were too cold for water vapour, the water instead froze as ice. Inside the snow line the temperatures were hotter, causing ice to sublimate into a gas or melt into a liquid. This snow line between fire and ice existed roughly where Jupiter does today. Material from both sides of this line flowed together to assemble the parent objects of Bennu, Ryugu and CI chondrites, with ice acting like glue to bond the fine dust particles together.

And Jupiter had a role to play in this process too. The giant planet formed fairly soon after the sun (within a million years). As it grew and came to dominate its orbit, it acted as an obstacle to heavier, coarser clumps of dust while finer grained dust was able to flow around it and feed into the zone where Bennu formed. This explains why the isotopes are so well mixed rather than clumped, and also tells us that Bennu's parent probably formed not long after Jupiter did. The prevalence of water-bearing minerals in the Bennu sample also suggests that water-ice that sublimated into vapor just inside the snow line was also part of the material that was transported into the region where Bennu and its cousins were built.

"Bennu is a hybrid," said Schönbächler. "The material does not clearly match either the inner or the outer solar system." Instead, Bennu has characteristics derived from both regions.

What's more, the well-mixed fine-grained material more closely matches the composition of the pre-solar nebula and hence the sun itself. This means that Bennu is stuffed full of primordial material that was the foundation for the formation of the solar system, and can help us better understand the material out of which the planets, including our Earth, came to be.

What's intriguing is that both near-Earth asteroids, Bennu and Ryugu, which have been destinations for successful sample-return missions should both have very similar origins. Is that pure coincidence, or is it telling us something about where the population of near-Earth asteroids came from?

"We are now wondering whether other asteroids have the same isotopic signature as Bennu and Ryugu," said Schönbächler.

The only way that can be answered is by going and obtaining more samples. A Chinese mission called Tianwen-2 arrived this summer at the near-Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa, to bring back a sample next year, while Japan's Martian Moons eXploration mission, set to launch this August, plans to bring back a sample from Phobos in 2031. While designated a moon of Mars, Phobos is thought to possibly be a captured asteroid. If so, its isotopic composition might have more in common with Bennu than with Mars.

The latest findings from Bennu were published on Sept. 23 in the journal Science Advances.

Throughout the history of the planets, the outer solar system has proven to be a dangerous place with many collisions smashing small bodies apart — but new simulations have shown that violent smashes do not necessarily prevent the formation of potentially habitable sub-surface oceans. This is true for large, icy moons, at least.

"These simulations were pretty much the biggest collisions we could come up with," said the University of Maryland’s Marc Neveu, who led the research, in a statement. "If those don't make a difference, it's unlikely smaller ones would either."

The planets of the outer solar system are replete with frozen moons that could potentially harbor oceans of liquid water deep beneath their surface. However, we know those moons have been peppered with impacts over the course of their 4.5-billion-year history, with some collisions large enough to smash the moons apart entirely. We can see this in Saturn's moon Iapetus, which appears to be the relic of a moon that has been smashed apart. In some cases, the damaged moon can reform through its own gravity pulling its parts and pieces back together again. For instance, Uranus' moon Miranda has a patchwork quality to its surface, giving the impression of it having been broken apart and then reformed.

Neveu's team, which also includes Raluca Rufu, Alyssa Rhoden and Kevin Walsh from the South-west Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado and Yuval Steinberg from Israel's Weizmann Institute, have now conducted detailed simulations in their quest to learn whether such titanic collisions affect the likelihood of an icy moon supporting an interior ocean.

They found that if an icy moon is large enough, not even the largest collisions can prevent it from having a subsurface ocean.

"What we found was that those big collisions don't really matter as far as oceans are concerned," said Neveu. "If there was an ocean before, there's likely to be an ocean after and vice versa."

Neveu and his colleagues combined two different types of simulation, both revolving around moons of two different sizes, 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) and 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide. One type of simulation focused on what happens to the moons when a giant impact breaks one apart, describing how it would shatter, melt and then reform through the mutual gravity of itself and its partner. The second type of simulation modeled the interior of each size of moon over 4.5 billion years, showing how heat leaks out from their core to keep a layer of liquid warm.

The simulations showed that moons smaller than 620 miles across were unlikely to retain an ocean after a cataclysmic impact. A small moon born with an ocean can retain enough heat for an ocean because it has not fully differentiated — or, in other words, the dense material hasn't all sunk into the core and the moon's outer layers are still an insulating jumble of ice and rock. After an impact disrupts the moon, however, the rock is able to sink down into the core, and the outer layer no longer insulates as well as it did, so heat leaks out into space and the ice remains frozen and does not form an ocean.

For larger moons, however, the ocean can actually deepen after the moon coalesces back together again following an impact.

"In larger moons, the energy of the crash converts into extra heat that can actually thicken up an existing ocean for a couple of billion years," said Neveu.

And in both cases, if the moon did not have an ocean to begin with, the simulations showed that a collision could not create one.

Casting his eye around the solar system, Saturn’s moon Rhea catches Neveu's attention as potentially having reformed following an impact. The second largest moon of Saturn, Rhea is 949 miles (1,528 kilometers) across and its craters appear softened as though they have melted. Neveu likens it to how a snowman will appear deformed once the sun's heat begins to melt it.

"Rhea's craters look smoothed out like that, but it wasn't the sun," he said. "The heat came from below. A long-ago collision that boosted an interior ocean could help explain why the moon appears that way."

Neveu's impact simulations are not the entire story. Tidal heating from a giant planet can keep an ocean liquid even in small moons, as we see in the case of Saturn's 310-mile-wide (500-kilometer-wide) moon Enceladus, and so small moons that have been disrupted through a collision will not necessarily freeze solid if they are close enough to their parent planet to experience strong gravitational tidal forces that keep their interiors warm.

Ultimately, Neveu hopes that simulations will become so detailed that we'll be able to replay the evolution of icy moons in planetary systems such as our own.

"Down the line, I would love to press play on a moon system and watch the moons move, how they smash into each other and how their interiors change as a result," he said. While Jupiter's Galilean moons, being almost planet-sized, are relatively impervious to impacts, "Maybe we can reconstruct what happened around Saturn, Uranus and Neptune."

The results were published on 20 August in Nature Astronomy.

Life on Earth has never existed without the shelter of the planet's magnetic field, and according to new research, that constant presence may be quietly woven into the basic biology of living organisms, with possible implications for aging and future treatments for diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Generated deep within Earth's core for at least 3.7 billion years and extending far out into space, this invisible cocoon is popularly credited with helping preserve Earth's habitability, shielding the planet from harsh solar winds and helping retain the water that makes life possible. Scientists have also long known that migratory birds and animals such as sea turtles can sense this field and use it to navigate. However, its more fundamental influence on biology has remained poorly understood, researchers say.

"We live our entire lives within the Earth's magnetic field," Lisa Chakrabarti, a professor at University of Nottingham's School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, said in a statement. "It passes through our bodies, our cells and every living organism on the planet, yet we know surprisingly little about whether and how this invisible force affects the way our cells work."

To get some answers, the research team, co-led by Chakrabarti, tried switching it off. Using a special magnetic shielding system, the researchers reduced the ambient field to near zero and compared two groups of fruit flies, healthy flies and flies with a defect in Pink1, a gene associated with inherited early onset Parkinson's disease in humans. Starting from the moment each fly reached adulthood, the researchers tracked both groups for 70 days, scoring them alive or dead each day, the team reports in a new paper.

The researchers found shielding the diseased Pink1 flies from Earth's magnetic field increased their lifespan by around 20%. However, the environment also reduced their physical performance, which the team measured by placing the flies at the bottom of a small vial and timing how well they climbed. Meanwhile, the group of healthy flies showed the opposite pattern, with shorter lifespans but improved physical performance under the same conditions, according to the study.

"I was really confused at first," study co-lead Jacob Reed, a Ph.D. student in bioscience at the University of Nottingham, told the independent news website 404 Media. "I was thinking: 'Why are these Parkinson's flies living longer than some of the wild-type flies?' I had to double-check all of my data."

The researchers link the source of these effects lies in the mitochondria, the structures inside cells that generate energy, specifically to part of the mitochondria's energy-producing machinery known as Complex II.

Shielded healthy flies showed a significant rise in Complex II activity alongside elevated levels of a reactive molecule called superoxide, which is a byproduct of energy production that in high amounts can damage cells over time and a likely explanation for their shortened lifespan. In the Pink1 mutant flies, that same rise in Complex II activity appeared to compensate for their underlying genetic deficit, producing a "beneficial, life-extending response" effect instead, the study notes.

The findings raise the possibility that such non-invasive hypomagnetic conditions could eventually offer a therapeutic benefit for diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, the study notes.

"Understanding how cells sense and respond to magnetic fields could ultimately reveal new ways of manipulating mitochondrial function in aging and disease," Chakrabarti said in the statement.

The findings also build on a scattered but suggestive body of prior research. For instance, earlier human studies have linked reduced magnetic field exposure to slightly worse performance on problem-solving tasks and small changes in pupil size. Meanwhile, studies in rats examining magnetic fields and bone density have produced inconsistent results, with some finding weaker bones and others finding no effect at all.

Taken together, the research is messy and sometimes contradictory, but one pattern keeps emerging, the study notes, that magnetic fields "can affect fundamental cellular processes" and that responses differ "depending on the cell type."

The new work may also carry implications beyond Earth, the researchers say. As space agencies look toward longer missions to the moon and Mars, astronauts will spend extended stretches beyond the reach of Earth's magnetic field. Scientists already know that this exposes them to harmful cosmic radiation, but how the absence of the field itself, separate from radiation, might affect human physiology is not very well understood.

"The link with interplanetary space travel is absolutely key," Chakrabarti told 404 Media. "Unless we know what those parameters are to measure, we're going to be sending astronauts up there that are potentially going to really suffer over the short, or even or the longer, term."

This research is described in a paper published Sept. 23 in the journal Aging.

Hurricane Polo continues to swirl in new satellite observations as heavy rains start to hit.

What is it?

Already being labeled "one of the strongest storms ever," Hurricane Polo is a Category 5 maelstrom that has already started with heavy rains offshore in Mexico and is expected to hit land this weekend.

In new observations by NOAA's GOES-18 satellite captured on Tuesday (Sept. 22), we can see the storm in progress, swirling violently off the coast of Mexico as strikes of lightning light up the view.

"#HurricanePolo continues to swirl in the Eastern Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico this #TimeLapseTuesday. The Geostationary Lightning Mapper instrument on board @NOAA’s #GOESWest (#GOES18) helps show the lightning flashing in the cyclone’s eye in this imagery captured over a two-hour period earlier today," NOAA shared over social media.

As we watch the storm progress off of the coast, satellite imagery like this can help experts better understand how the storm is operating and what might be expected next.

Why is it incredible?

Hurricane Polo is predicted to be extremely powerful and therefore likely incredibly damaging.

"This is one of the strongest storms ever in the (Pacific) Basin," Kristen L. Corbosiero, a professor at the University at Albany's Department of Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences, told NPR.

Satellite views like this from GOES-18 are incredibly important for our understanding of storms like Hurricane Polo. Satellite imagery can help experts categorize hurricanes and give us up-to-date information on where storms are going, how quickly they're moving and what we might expect if and when they hit land.

This kind of information could be critical for coastal communities to be prepared for storms that could carry the risk of destroying homes and businesses, or even cause injuries or deaths.

A normally arid corner of Western Australia has burst into life, in a transformation so dramatic it can be seen from space.

The spectacular wildflower display has rapidly spread across the rusty red landscape of Western Australia's Murchison region following several wetter-than-usual months, according to the NASA Earth Observatory.

Local experts think this year's bloom could be the best the area has experienced in nearly 20 years.

What is it?

The image was captured by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) aboard the Landsat 8 spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Murchison region is usually dominated by arid shrubland, including grasses, saltbush and slow-growing evergreen mulga trees. But dormant wildflower seeds can spring into action when conditions are just right, carpeting the landscape with delightful blooms.

That's exactly what happened this year. Above-average rainfall in June and August, along with several cold fronts sweeping across the region, woke the seeds from a lengthy slumber to transform the landscape.

Landsat 8 captured this view on Aug. 30, 2026. A comparison image taken on Aug. 19, 2025 shows just how much greener the region is this year.

Why is it amazing?

Besides potentially being the area's best wildflower display in almost two decades and some threatened plant species having also appeared among this year's blooms, the flowers have sprung up in a place normally better known for looking much farther into the cosmos.

Wildflowers carpeted parts of Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, where powerful arrays of radio antennas meticulously study objects in the southern sky.

So while the observatory's telescopes usually have their sights set on the universe, this year there's quite a show happening beneath them too.

Mars may have been a much wetter and more geologically active world than it is today, with water repeatedly coursing through its rocks in different forms, a new study suggests.

The discovery comes from a region along the edge of Mars' Jezero Crater known as the Margin Unit. NASA's Perseverance rover has been exploring the area since 2023, and its observations reveal evidence of at least three distinct episodes of water interacting with Martian rocks — including one involving hot groundwater circulating beneath the ancient surface, according to a statement from the space agency.

The Margin Unit region hugs the inner edge of the crater and was identified through observations from orbit. Scientists initially expected Perseverance to encounter sedimentary rocks deposited along the shoreline of the ancient lake that once filled Jezero.

Instead, the rover found igneous rocks that originally formed from molten material deep underground or through volcanic activity. That unexpected geology preserved an intricate record of water activity.

"Before we arrived at the Margin Unit, the main hypothesis — derived from orbital observations — was that the carbonate seen from orbit formed from interaction with the lake that existed in Jezero Crater," Candice Bedford, lead author of the study and a research scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, said in the statement. "But now we know that this location became a sort of crossroads for aqueous systems. The Margin Unit findings are important because Jezero Crater sits inside one of the largest exposures of carbonate on Mars, so what we learn here reaches well beyond this crater."

Using Perseverance's SuperCam instrument, researchers analyzed more than 185 bedrock targets across the Margin Unit. They found evidence that water altered the rocks during multiple episodes.

During the first episode, carbon-dioxide-rich groundwater reacted with olivine, a mineral that formed as magma slowly cooled. The reaction produced carbonate minerals within fractures in the rock.

A later episode appears to have involved Jezero's ancient lake. Some of the rocks contain silica, which can form when olivine reacts with water and is particularly abundant in rocks that were once below the lake's waterline.

Then came a third, hotter episode. Mineral veins containing calcium sulfate and fluorite formed in the eastern Margin Unit, suggesting that hot water once circulated through the volcanic rocks.

On Earth, hydrothermal systems can create environments capable of supporting microbial life, making these ancient Martian water systems particularly interesting to scientists investigating the Red Planet's past habitability.

While the researchers are able to reconstruct the sequence of these episodes, they cannot yet determine exactly when each occurred. However, the order of events suggests the Margin Unit was more than simply an ancient lakeshore. It was a place where groundwater, surface water and heated fluids interacted with Martian rocks, potentially preserving a complex record of how Mars' environment evolved over time — one that the carbonate minerals in these rocks could help scientists use to determine when and where Mars may once have provided conditions suitable for life.

"If there is one thing I have learned after 10 years working with Mars rovers, it is that Mars constantly throws surprises at you," Bedford said in the statement. "It is very rare that things are as we expect them to be from orbital data. I hope this work helps reshape how scientists view the history of water in Jezero Crater and across Mars. Ultimately, I hope it helps planetary scientists reconstruct the changing climate and habitability of early Mars."

Their findings were published September 21 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

It may not be a slime creature from outer space, but you can finally find "Weird Al" Yankovic's name flying beyond our planet.

The American musician and comedian's name was recently approved for an asteroid, or space rock, that zooms around our solar system about once every four years.

The asteroid is formally known as (14331) Alyankovic, or 1981 EC26. 1981 refers to the year of the asteroid's discovery, and Yankovic's name for it was approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the official body that arbitrates the monikers of things in the universe.

Planetary scientist Allison McGraw, an alumna of the University of Arizona who is now with the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute, backed the nomination with several other planetary science researchers, according to the Tucson Star. On Sunday (Sept. 20), McGraw presented Yankovic backstage with a plaque commemorating the naming of the asteroid, ahead of Yankovic's performance at the Tucson Arena.

"I've been working on not being starstruck, the same way I am every time I meet astronauts," McGraw said in the Tucson Star's report, ahead of the meeting. "I'm gonna do my best not to be starstruck, or I guess 'rock struck', but I have the feeling that he's going to be really cool."

Alyankovic (the asteroid) was discovered in 1981 and resides in the main belt of asteroids found between Mars and Jupiter. It is visible from Earth, but only in a good telescope as its absolute magnitude is 16; for comparison, the faintest stars visible to the naked eye are roughly magnitude 5 or 6, under dark-sky conditions.

Alyankovic joins several other musical-themed celebrity monikers on asteroids, such as 17059 Elvis, 17473 Freddiemercury, 249516 Aretha (after Aretha Franklin), 10731 Dollyparton, and all members of the Beatles (both individually, and as a group for 8749 Beatles.)

Meanwhile, Al Yankovic (the singer) has been belting out funny space-related tunes for decades, including the rap-like "Sir Isaac Newton vs. Bill Nye", an Obi-Wan Kenobi-centered retelling of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace called "The Saga Begins," and the self-explanatory and classic "Attack of the Radioactive Hamsters from a Planet Near Mars."

While living persons can have their names attached to asteroids and other "small bodies" like comets, the process can take years, and any name must meet a multi-page set of requirements as well as the muster of the IAU's working group that names small bodies.

"Names have traditionally been assigned to many small bodies and have drawn from mythological characters, planetary scientists, astronomers, and accomplished scientists, engineers, and technicians in other fields. People who have made contributions to the arts, sports, medicine, and other aspects of society are also recognized. Discoverers have also used names of personal significance to them," the IAU states.

Some of the other institutions or things named in the Sept. 9 IAU notice include:

• (15708) Metsoc = 1988 RB12. It is named for the Meteoritical Society, which has an annual conference and hosts the Meteoritics and Planetary Science journal, in large part to showcase countries that are not as widely represented.
• (20176) Aliciagoyena = 1996 XK29. This is named after Alicia Goyena, an educator and history teacher in Uruguay who was director of the women's section of the Instituto Batlle y Ordóñez in Montevideo.
• (31550) Beckmaier = 1999 DT7. Beck Maier is a telescope operator at the Lowell Observatory's Lowell Discovery Telescope in Arizona.
• (50271) Albertoanunziato = 2000 CW. Alberto Anunziato is an Argentinian amateur astronomer whose work includes founding the Argentine Lunar Society, being secretary of the Ibero-American Astronomy League, and teaching at the Autonomous University of Entre Ríos.
• (74025) Marquette = 1998 HA6. Jean-Baptiste Marquette is a retired French astrophysicist known for mapping the chemistry of interstellar clouds.

A planetary body's surface is inherently three-dimensional — and not just because of its peaks and valleys but because it must wrap around the whole world.

That's obvious but easy to forget, since Earth is large enough that we experience it as flat in our everyday lives. But it's a major challenge for cartographers looking to create two-dimensional world maps, like the familiar Mercator projection and the design recently endorsed by an overwhelming majority of the United Nations' General Assembly, called the "Equal Earth" projection. And the same difficulties apply beyond Earth, albeit with much lower stakes, at least for now: any map is a mix of accuracy and distortion.

"It's important to know that sometimes, as with statistics or anything else, you can tell a story with a map," Corey Fortezzo, a geologist and map coordinator for the Planetary Geologic Mapping Program operated jointly by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and NASA, told Space.com. "And it's not necessarily the true story."

That's because flattening a three-dimensional surface into a two-dimensional map is an inherently messy endeavor. "Every projection chooses what to preserve—in some, it's the area, some preserve shape, some preserve distance, some preserve the direction — but not all of them at once," Jue Wang, a cartographic data scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Space.com. "It's not [about] which projection is correct, it's [about] what are you trying to do with the map."

In the U.S., people tend to be most familiar with the Mercator projection, which dates to 1569, when a cartographer working in what is now Germany designed a map on which any straight represents a constant compass direction. "It's built for the purpose of navigation, so the Mercator projection preserves angles," Wang said. "Which is very useful and why sailors have used the Mercator projection for centuries."

But of course, most of the 8.2 billion people currently living on Earth aren't sailors, and today world maps are less about navigation and more about understanding the world we live in. That means many fewer people are getting lost at sea than are operating under the mistaken impression that Greenland is larger than South America — hence the movement backing the Equal Earth projection to take Mercator's place in common settings like classrooms.

That projection prioritizes preserving the relative area of countries and continents, but sacrifices the accuracy of angles of the Mercator projection. As a result, most north-south longitude lines become curved in the Equal Earth projection, while east-west latitude lines are spaced closer together near the poles, rather than farther away.

Beyond Earth

Mapping worlds beyond Earth is only a smidge younger than the Mercator projection: the oldest known map of the moon dates to 1609. In some ways, the activities are inherently different, since mapping Earth has relied on people's observations in place, whereas the foundation of extraterrestrial mapping is remote data gathered first with telescopes, then with spacecraft.

Often, that data has come in the form of images — themselves two-dimensional, warped representations of a three-dimensional surface. "You're stitching together this quilt of imagery and the problem is all the pieces are curved and you have to figure out where they fit together," Fortezzo said.

Another quirk of the process is that because neither Earth nor any other solar system object is perfectly spherical, projection systems can't seamlessly translate between worlds. And each world needs its own unique definition for 0 degrees longitude, an extraterrestrial translation of Greenwich's supremacy as backed by the British empire.

Mapmakers are still chipping away at these challenges, although the International Astronomical Union has operated a working group dedicated to cartographic coordinates since 1979. Right now, this work may induce yawns, but as long-term exploration efforts of the moon and other bodies become both more serious and more varied, the complexity of mapping these worlds may increase.

Consider the needs of NASA's Apollo program — where landing sites were clustered toward the equator on the moon's near side —compared to the current Artemis program, which intends to focus initiatives at the lunar south pole. While something like the Mercator or Equal Earth projections would both make sense for a map related to Apollo, neither excels at depicting the poles, as their treatment of Antarctica attests.

That, of course, is the starkest difference when map-making goes to space: no other world's surface comes with the complications of Earth's patchwork of continents and oceans, which can influence projection techniques. (Take the so-called "orange-peel" or Goode homolosine projection, a bizarre lobed depiction that keeps continents intact and accurately represents their relative sizes, but breaks up the oceans and polar regions.)

In contrast, except for volcanic Io and Titan's water-ice surface sculpted by organic liquids, an extraterrestrial mapper's material is straightforward. "We are able to just take a piece and that piece is going to have nothing but rock and ice," Fortezzo said.

"It makes it much easier," he said. "There's no feelings involved."

NASA's moon-orbiting spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), has captured a fresh new crater on our moon — and this cavity is so huge scientists call it a "once-in-a-century" discovery.

What is it?

What you see in this image is an aerial view of McGetchin crater on the moon. Named after Tom McGetchin, a lunar scientist whose tenure fell during the Apollo era, the crater measures out at 728 feet (221.9 meters) wide and 141 feet (43 meters) deep.

The image was captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's (LRO) Narrow-Angle Camera on Dec. 5, 2025 and covers about 0.75 miles (1.2 kilometers) of width on the moon. The crater itself, however, was originally discovered on Oct. 24, 2025 by LRO scientist Robert Wagner. Serendipitously, Wagner happened to identify the feature during a routine data-quality check of his data. "I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was," he said in a statement.

Scientists believe this huge crater formed in 2024, at some point between April 11 and May 22. They also think the asteroid (or perhaps comet) that smashed into the moon and formed the crater should have been about the size of a three- to six-story building.

Why is it incredible?

The reason McGetchin is dubbed a "once-in-a-century" crater has to do with its massive size. This dent in the moon is actually the largest newly formed crater ever found on our lunar companion — and, in fact, in the entire solar system.

According to NASA, the enormous lunar impact that could have formed a crater with such heft should only happen about once every hundred or so years. Some scientists have even authored a paper that delves into studying the buckets of lunar material that would've been thrown outward as the impact happened; another team looked at how the region around the crater was altered due to the crash.

As to why it's so exciting to investigate a freshly formed crater? Well, it's basically because enough time hasn't yet passed to degrade the scene of the crime. Over time, geologic features slowly change due to exposure to the elements — even on the moon, where time seems to stand still. So, scientists are getting a rather pristine crash site to analyze. And though tons of other bits and bobs hit the moon every year, they either don't form a crater visible to LRO or lead to a very small one.

Last year, for example, LRO found a crater large enough to make the news — but it was so little scientists adorably called it a "freckle." It has surely been overshadowed by this brand new lunar beauty mark.

A newly discovered crater on the moon is giving scientists a rare glimpse into the immediate aftermath of a lunar impact.

Named McGetchin crater, the feature formed sometime between April 11 and May 22 in the year 2024 when an asteroid or comet fragment struck the moon. Measuring about 728 feet (222 meters) across and roughly 141 feet (43 meters) deep, McGetchin is the largest newly formed impact crater identified by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). In fact, it's the largest newly formed crater ever found in the solar system, according to the agency. An impact capable of producing a crater this size is expected to occur on the moon only about once every century, making McGetchin an exceptionally rare real-time discovery.

The findings are detailed in two new studies published Sept 16. in the journal Science Advances. One study, led by Mark Robinson of Intuitive Machines, describes the crater itself and the enormous amount of material thrown across the lunar surface due to the impact that provoked the feature. The second study, led by researchers studying data from LRO's Diviner instrument, examines a much larger region around the crater that was physically altered by the impact. Together, the studies offer scientists something they rarely get: a pristine impact site with observations from before and after the event. And importantly, this site is seen before other processes begin to degrade it.

"McGetchin crater is exceptional because it is the largest newly formed impact crater that has been identified to date," Tyler Powell, lead author of one of the studies, told Space.com. "A crater of this size is expected to form on the moon only once per century, so we're extremely lucky it formed during the lifetime of the LRO mission and that we are able to observe the region both before and after impact."

NASA's LRO mission has been observing the moon for more than 17 years, giving researchers images and measurements of the area before and after the impact. That long-running record allowed scientists to identify subtle changes that would otherwise be difficult to detect.

The crater was first discovered in 2025 by researchers comparing LRO images of the lunar surface. But then, follow-up observations from LRO's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) revealed the fresh crater and the material blasted outward during the impact.

The two studies reveal that McGetchin's effects extend well beyond the sizable crater. LROC observations show an extensive ejecta blanket surrounding the crater, while data from LRO's Diviner Lunar Radiometer revealed an even broader thermal anomaly.

Diviner detected a roughly 4.3-mile-wide (7-kilometer-wide) "cold spot" around the crater that is about 14 to 16 degrees Fahrenheit (8 to 9 kelvins) colder than the surrounding surface during the lunar night. Scientists believe the temperature difference is caused by changes to the upper layers of lunar soil as the impact disturbed and decompacted the regolith, creating a "fluffier" layer that is less able to retain heat, Powell explained.

"Impact cratering is one of the most common and important processes in the solar system. Understanding how impacts modify the surface and their surroundings is important for interpreting lunar geology and history," Powell said. "In addition, understanding how impacts influence surface properties is relevant for lunar exploration and future landed missions."

The moon is covered with impact craters, but most are ancient and have been altered by subsequent impacts and the effects of space weathering. Therefore, McGetchin being a large, pristine crater provides a valuable reference point for understanding how craters form and evolve.

The crater's pristine condition could also make it an intriguing target for future lunar exploration. Its location along a boundary between the moon's darker, basalt-covered mare and brighter highlands terrain offers scientists a chance to study how an impact affects two distinct geological environments.

A rover or crewed mission could take that research a step further by examining features that cannot be fully resolved from orbit.

"Observations from the surface would be really valuable because they would allow us to correlate what we see and map from orbit with small-scale changes to surface texture, the distribution of ejected material, and other properties that can only be studied in detail from the surface," Powell said. "This would improve our understanding of many aspects of the impact cratering process."

Those observations could also have practical implications for future lunar exploration. As NASA and other space agencies plan increasingly ambitious missions to the moon, understanding how impacts alter the physical properties of the regolith could help scientists better anticipate how future rovers, landers and other equipment will interact with the lunar surface. In that sense, McGetchin is more than a newly formed crater — it is a natural laboratory that could help scientists understand both the moon's past and the challenges awaiting future explorers.

Jello molds aren't just for dinner parties — when humans start building habitats on Mars, the structures could be made partly of gelatin and yeast.

A team of engineers devised a recipe for concrete that uses yeast and gelatin to bind together sand into a light, porous material. Theoretically, this should work with Mars material, or regolith, as well. In the lab, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology environmental engineer Ning Liu and colleagues already built tiny versions of future Martian habitats using the substance.

And in fact, the researchers say this biology-based concrete could be easier to use on Mars than some other options that have been proposed. Still, there's a long way to go and a lot of technological hurdles to overcome before we're ready to build a Mars base out of yeast.

Welcome to Mars; don't eat the habitat

Like regular concrete, Liu and colleagues' version uses sand or crushed rock as an aggregate: the solid stuff that's held together by material called binder (usually something like Portland cement, a powder of heated limestone and clay mixed with a little gypsum). Water turns the binder into a gel-like glue, and as it dries, the whole binder-and-aggregate mixture hardens into something solid and reasonably strong. But instead of good old Portland cement, Liu and colleagues use a mix of pork gelatin (the same stuff that makes jello) and genetically engineered yeast.

The researchers swapped a couple of key genes in their special strain of the yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae. One gene makes the cells bind more tightly to each other, and the other produces what are called "mussel foot proteins," or the adhesives that help mussels latch onto rocks.

In the lab, Liu and colleagues 3D-printed their concrete creation in cold, low-pressure conditions meant to mimic the surface of Mars; they also tried a version that involved casting the yeast-based material in a mold, the classic way to manipulate gelatin.

As the yeasty mixture cures — over about 48 hours at -67 degrees Fahrenheit, or -55 degrees Celsius, and 0.000 atmospheres of air pressure, if you're looking for the recipe — the water in it freezes and then sublimates. This leaves behind a light and porous, but remarkably strong, scaffolding of gelatin, crushed regolith and yeast proteins. Those proteins act as very strong anchors between the gelatin binder and the rocky aggregate, "creating a bond that is stronger than the bulk material," Liu and colleagues write in their recent paper.

How strong is the substance? Well, the 1.77-inch-tall and 1.18-inch-wide (4.5-centimeter-tall, 3-centimeter-wide) domes Liu and colleagues built have a compressive strength of about 12 megapascals, which is roughly on par with low-grade concrete. It can also withstand bending forces of up to about 6 megapascals.

"This is actually strong enough to build a one- or two-story building on Earth, whose gravity is three times that of Mars. So you can probably easily build a multistory building on Mars with the material," Hong Kong University engineer Jishen Qiu, the study's senior author, said in a statement. "We are confident in scaling it up."

Mars habitats are going to need more than just study walls, though; they also need to shield astronauts from radiation, keep breathable air inside and maintain air pressure against a near-vacuum outside. A concrete dome, no matter how strong, can't do all of that on its own.

The yeast-and-gelatin-based concrete is "best regarded as a printable and recyclable in situ structural component," as Liu and colleagues put it, "not as a complete airtight, pressure-retaining, or radiation-shielding habitat envelope by itself." A real Mars habitat dome would probably need a structure with several layers: inflatable or pre-fabricated pressure modules, airtight liners or coatings and seals, a water-filled radiation-shielding layer — and possibly a concrete structure bound together by genetically engineered yeast.

A long way to go

It's going to take more research before engineers can be sure that yeast will even survive well enough on Mars to help assemble anything with it at all.

Mars is bitterly cold, and its thin atmosphere and long-dead magnetic field leave the surface open to deadly radiation (both from the sun and from deep space). But just as Liu and colleagues modified parts of P. cerevisiae's genome to make it a better concrete binder, other researchers may be able to tweak the yeast to withstand higher doses of radiation and colder temperatures.

"In principle, this platform can be engineered for stress tolerance traits, including resistance to cold, vacuum, and even radiation," the researchers wrote in their paper.

Of course, a yeast that can survive on Mars is … well, a yeast that can survive on Mars, which could actually risk contaminating the planet with hardy and fast-multiplying Earth microbes. Liu and colleagues mentioned in their paper that planetary protection strategies would be an important part of future research, along with testing the material's long-term durability and how well it retains heat.

But the gelatin-and-yeast concrete could offer some advantages over some of the other leading ideas for making building materials on Mars, most of which rely on heating and melting regolith to form bricks and support beams. Those methods get around the challenges of shipping materials from home, but they still require tremendous amounts of energy to use, not to mention industrial equipment that is, in the researchers' words, "difficult to scale with rocket-transportable systems."

Liu and colleagues' approach uses an order of magnitude less energy than traditional regolith-melting methods, they estimate. But building anything substantial on would still require shipping tons of materials from Earth, Qiu estimates.

When it comes to building a home for humanity on Mars, there are never going to be any easy answers. On the other hand, the yeast could be a renewable and re-usable resource that only needs to be delivered once. When astronauts are finished with one building, they can recycle the concrete and put the yeast into a bioreactor to grow a fresh batch.

"It would surprise me if materials for future Martian engineering will not be as diverse as those used in Earth engineering — and biology will certainly contribute," said Qiu.

Liu and colleagues published their work in the journal Chem Circularity.

Detective work by a team of space-weather experts has discovered the truth about a historical event that had been thought to be the first-ever case of technological disruption by geomagnetic activity from the sun, but has now been shown to have taken place seven years later.

From it being too hot or too wet to leaves on the track or cows on the line, there's a fine tradition of what the British public consider to be flimsy excuses for delays on the trains. Yet an 1871 edition of the journal Nature describes a very different event that caused a train departing Exeter, in Devon on the south-west coast of the U.K., to be delayed by 16 minutes: a solar storm that flooded the railway signals' electrical telegraph network with current.

"The Exeter train delay is a fascinating story because it sits right at the point where emerging technologies first began to encounter the realities of the space environment," said Jim Wild, who is a professor of space physics at Lancaster University and also the President of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a statement.

The event has frequently been cited as the first example of a solar storm disrupting technology on Earth, but when a team led by Wild went back through historical records to investigate further, they found that things didn't add up.

The original report in Nature stated that the electrical disturbance occurred at 10:05pm local time on Oct. 18, 1841. However, Wild's team found that particular train line didn't open until 1846.

So, they delved deeper into the history books to figure out the truth.

"Our research has a hint of a detective story — piecing together a wide range of archived records to better understand a historically severe space-weather event," said team-member Mike Hapgood, a space weather expert at RAL Space, which is the UK's National Space Laboratory, in Oxfordshire.

Combining data from railway timetables, old newspapers, plus historic reports of solar observations and the northern lights and digitized geomagnetic data, Wild and Hapgood's team were able to conclude that the most likely date for the train delay was Oct. 18, 1848, which coincided with a strong solar storm that hit Earth.

This revised date knocks it off top spot in the chronological list of such events. The first recorded disruption to electrical technologies is now a disturbance on the Midland railway network, which had lines covering much of the U.K., in March 1847.

"Although this means it is not the earliest recorded space weather impact, it remains one of the first clear examples of solar activity disrupting critical infrastructure," Wild said. "It also demonstrates the value of combining scientific records with contemporary newspaper reports and archival documents when reconstructing historic space weather events."

The case reminds us that space weather has been a hazard to technology and modern systems for a long time, and isn't just a recent problem.

"Society has been experiencing the effects of space weather on technology for almost as long as electrical technologies have existed," said Wild.

The most dramatic example is the aforementioned Carrington event of 1859, representing the most significant solar storm on record as it caused telegraph poles to spark and battery power supplies to be disrupted. By this point, telegraph operators had grown used to electrical disturbances associated with auroral activity, but even the Carrington storm shocked them — quite literally in some cases, as extra current ran down the telegraph lines — with its ferocity. Should a similar event occur today, it would cause huge black outs, knock out power grids, disrupt communications and fry satellites.

"While today's space weather [monitoring] capabilities are far more advanced than anything available in the 1800s, the modern technologies we depend on are also much more vulnerable to solar storms," said Hapgood.

The current solar cycle 25 peaked in Oct. 2024 and we are just beginning to come out of an extended period of maximum activity. However, it remains to be seen how the rest of this cycle will play out before reaching solar minimum in about 2030. We've already seen severe geomagnetic storms caused by space weather in May 2024 — will we experience another powerful storm before the decade is out?

Astronauts could travel back to Earth from Mars using rocket fuel converted directly from the carbon dioxide in the Red Planet's atmosphere, using a technique known as electrochemical reduction, a recent study reports.

It's an old method involving electrolysis, which is the application of an electrical current to drive a chemical reaction, but the new trick produces methane pure enough to be used as liquid propellant. (A number of rocket engines these days burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane — including the Raptors that power Starship, the rocket SpaceX is developing to help humanity get to Mars.)

"The work we're doing is basically taking CO2 and using electricity to convert it into carbon-containing fuels and chemicals," said Carter Racine in a statement. Racine is a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University and a member of the study team, which was led by University of Mississippi chemical engineer Ahmed Badreldin.

"You can't bring up everything you need [on Mars] from Earth, because every additional kilogram adds enormous cost and complexity to launch and escape Earth's gravity," added Badreldin. "So the question becomes, How do we make the fuels and chemicals needed for space exploration from the resources already available at the destination?"

One answer is electrochemical reduction, which takes place in an electrolyzer, with electrons flowing from the negatively charged anode to the positively charged cathode. Water at the anode is oxidized, meaning it loses an electron, which is transferred to the carbon dioxide at the cathode, where one of its atoms gains an electron and becomes what chemists refer to as "reduced" (meaning its oxidation state is lowered). It can then react with the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that have split from the oxidized water molecules.

The anode contains a catalyst, and the choice of material for the catalyst dictates what carbon-based compounds are produced when the reduced carbon reacts with the hydrogen and oxygen. For example, a gold catalyst leads to the production of carbon monoxide (CO), while copper produces more complex compounds including alcohols, ethanol and methane (CH4).

What makes the work of Badreldin's team stand apart from previous experiments is that they have developed a nanometer-scale copper catalyst doped in nitrogen that is able to produce nearly pure methane.

Electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide has been used to produce methane before, in applications on Earth. The problem is, those methods have produced a lot of byproducts alongside methane. On Earth we have complex equipment that separates the methane from the other unwanted compounds, but astronauts are not going to be able to take such unwieldy devices to Mars when every kilogram counts. That's a problem, because for methane to be used as a liquid propellant in rocket fuel it needs to be pure.

However, the specific copper catalyst used by Badreldin's team is able to preferentially produce methane over other compounds, thereby creating it pure without having to refine it. And there's plenty of carbon dioxide available on Mars to use: While Mars' atmosphere is thin, it is nonetheless composed of 96% carbon dioxide.

Even if astronauts never go to Mars, the usefulness of this technique on Earth is clear. Rather than drilling for this natural gas, we can create methane from the carbon dioxide already in our atmosphere.

"We want to do that because right now many of these carbon-based products ultimately come from virgin fossil resources," said Racine. "If we can make them using captured CO2 and renewable electricity, it could reduce reliance on virgin fossil carbon and help close the carbon cycle."

Consequently, electrochemical reduction has also been suggested for use on Earth as a carbon sequestration technique, drawing carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere where it acts as an unwanted greenhouse gas.

The problem with that is, converting carbon dioxide into methane to be burned as a fuel simply releases that carbon dioxide straight back into the atmosphere in a net-zero cycle. Ideally, we want to lock that carbon dioxide away from the atmosphere for a long period of time, but Badreldin doesn't think the technology is ready yet.

"What we are ultimately interested in is seeing whether we can move beyond simply recycling CO2 and toward pathways that are net-negative," he said. "That means using CO2 as a carbon source while converting it into products where the carbon is stored or used long enough that it is not immediately released back into the atmosphere."

It should be noted that the best way to alleviate climate change is to cease burning all fossil fuels, including methane. However, using methane created from electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction in a net-zero process rather than drilling for it could help during the transition from fossil fuels to renewable resources.

The study reporting this research was published in April in the journal ACS Catalysis.

Is that a footprint on Mars? Sorry to burst your bubble, but no. However, scientists have found a strange feature unlike anything they've seen before on the Red Planet's surface.

What is it?

While NASA's Perseverance rover is the newest addition to the agency's robotic Red Planet fleet, its cousin Curiosity is still going strong and finding strange and unusual things on Mars 14 years after landing.

In new observations captured on Mars' Mount Sharp, the Curiosity team has identified "features unlike quite anything we have seen in the past," Michelle Minitti, deputy principal investigator for Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), said in a statement.

These mysterious features are a bunch of broad, shallow pits scattered across the Martian bedrock.

Why is it incredible?

While little pits and divots are common to find on the Martian surface, these wide, shallow pits that researchers saw with Curiosity are quite different from surface features that have been seen before.

"The pits of this week were much broader and shallower than past features and were not accompanied by obvious objects that were once in the pits," Minitti said.

The team collected as much data as they could on the strange pits using Curiosity's various instruments, including MAHLI, the Mastcam camera, ChemCam (the Chemistry and Camera complex) and APX (Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer).

They have so far found interesting layers in the pit material that seems chemically different from the main bedrock.

But we will have to wait and see what else researchers might be able to learn about these odd pits. How did they form? How long have they existed? What can they tell us about the history of Mars?

It has now been just over a year since the comet 3I/ATLAS first captured the world's attention as the third known object to fly through our solar system from beyond. Astronomers are still learning new things about where exactly it came from.

For the first time ever, they've been able to study charged particles in the tail of the interstellar comet. This has told them that 3I/ATLAS contains more nitrogen than the typical comet from our own solar system — revealing a tantalizing clue about how the strange comet formed.

"Finding that it's so rich in nitrogen tells us it likely formed in extremely cold conditions, far from its home star," Lea Ferellec, a research fellow at Northumbria University, said in a statement.

Ferellec's group used the William Herschel Telescope in Spain's Canary Islands. One of this telescope's instruments is a fiber-optic weave named, well, WEAVE. WEAVE lets astronomers do spectroscopy — which splits incoming light into its spectrum. Different chemical elements absorb and emit different wavelengths of light, marking that spectrum with different characteristic fingerprints. With spectroscopy, astronomers can look at a celestial object's light, pick out the fingerprints, and reconstruct the stuff inside.

Other astronomers have measured 3I/ATLAS with spectroscopy, but they've mostly examined the comet's coma, a shell of gas that forms when the sun’s heat sublimates the comet’s ice into vapor.

Of course, a coma is not the only feature that forms as a comet approaches the sun. Close in, a comet is battered by the torrent of the sun's solar wind, which pushes the comet's material away into a distinctive tail. In the process, the solar wind's high-energy particles strike the comet's molecules and electrify them into charged ions.

If astronomers can identify a tail's ions, they can find chemicals and learn information they can't from the coma alone. This is a tricky task. When fellow interstellar comet 2I/Borisov visited our solar system in 2019, astronomers identified traces of its ions, but they couldn't make out what those ions actually were.

WEAVE, which switched on in 2023, is powerful and sensitive enough to change that. When Ferellec and colleagues turned WEAVE on 3I/ATLAS in late 2025, they could count ions like nitrogen, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the strange comet's tail.

Comparing these figures can hint at where a comet formed. For example, a comet with a higher ratio of nitrogen to carbon monoxide tends to have formed in a colder birthplace. Ferellic's group found that 3I/ATLAS has a much higher ratio than most of the comets that we observe in our solar system.

In particular, Ferellec and colleagues estimate that 3I/ATLAS formed somewhere colder than -240°C. If this comet was born in a distant star system, then, it formed in that system's outer reaches. In other words, 3I/ATLAS likely formed in a place where little of its star's light could touch it.

"This object gives us a rare chance to study material that formed somewhere completely different to our own solar system," Ferellec said in the statement. "Every one of these objects we study helps us understand a little more about how planets form around other stars."

Ferellec and colleagues published their work in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Sept. 7.

The discovery of water at the poles of the moon has inspired speculation about whether we can build there – cities, industrial neighborhoods, places where people work and live. But is there enough water, and can we use it efficiently enough? In their new article in Frontiers in Space Technologies, Dr. Martin Elvis and Dr. Jonathan McDowell do the math. Even at the most generous estimates of the available water and recycling efficiency, a city of one million people would only last 100 years before all the water runs out. In this guest editorial, which Frontiers in Space Technologies provided, Elvis breaks down what we can and can't do with the technology available.

The discovery of water in dark craters at the moon's poles has sparked a "moon rush" to establish bases there, and then villages, cities and heavy industry. How sustainable is this rush?

Soon after the moon was formed, asteroids bombarded it, creating its pockmarked topography. Near the moon's poles, there are dozens of crater floors that have not seen direct sunlight in about four billion years. Many of these cryogenically cold "pits of eternal darkness" are below a temperature of 110 Kelvin (minus 262 degrees Fahrenheit), forming "cold traps" in which water ice won't sublimate away by more than a millimeter in a billion years, even in the vacuum at the moon's surface. And there is water to freeze: some of those asteroids brought it along with them. Since 2013 we have known that that water is still there, possibly as much as a billion tons of it, thanks to a succession of moon-orbiting missions that have mapped out likely locations in increasing detail.

The presence of water at the lunar poles changes everything about human visits to the moon. Suddenly it is practical to envisage a "moon village" where people could survive without importing every last bit from Earth. They could grow their own food and have showers and functional toilets, unlike the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). This possibility has sparked ambitions from the likes of Jeff Bezos to move heavy industry to the moon and Elon Musk's aims to have "self-growing cities" there. These are enticing visions, but are they attainable?

The good news

We realized that we could make a first feasibility estimate simply by looking at how much power and water a large population would use on the moon, and how long a city of 100,000 or one million people could survive there. How sustainable is a city on the moon?

The good news is that power, even without nuclear reactors, is not a problem. That's because the rims of the craters containing the pits of eternal darkness are in almost permanent sunlight. (That's why they are sometimes, slightly incorrectly, referred to as the "peaks of eternal light.") Up on those highly illuminated rims it would be possible to generate three gigawatts of electricity using kilometer-tall towers covered with photovoltaic arrays. It should be possible to manufacture solar panels on the moon. There's certainly plenty of silicon. This could even make AI data centers on the moon possible, by placing them near these sunny peaks. That would be the start of a true lunar economy.

The bad news

The bad news is that, even assuming a generous one billion tons of water to start with, without recycling the answer to our question of sustainability is that the city would last only a few years. Even in the best-case scenario, with 98% efficient recycling of water — the same as achieved on the ISS — a one-million-person city will run out of water in just over a century. That is a problem for sustainable moon settlement. And today's best estimates of the amount of water on the moon are about 30 times less than a billion tons, shortening the time to water exhaustion by the same factor. This means that even a small city would run dry after just a decade or so. A moon village with a thousand people, or even a town with 10,000 people, would instead be sustainable for several centuries or more.

There are potential solutions. We could improve the efficiency of water recycling by a factor of five or more; lower water usage from new techniques such as vertical farming; import water, probably from accessible asteroids; or, simply, find more water. Of these it may be this last hope that is most promising. Current water surveying techniques do not reach below the surface more than a few meters, while the rubble-like rocks of the surface regolith typically extend tens of meters down and may contain water in the cold traps. If the ambitious plans of the space billionaires are to be realized, then finding more water will be the first step.

For more than a century, astronomers have been captivated by the idea that an undiscovered planet could be lurking in the furthest reaches of our solar system.

The search for this elusive, hypothetical planet has taken many forms over the decades. The discovery of Neptune in 1846 demonstrated that an unseen planet might be inferred from its gravitational effects on other worlds. Based on this, the search for a ninth planet began in earnest, seemingly culminating with the discovery of Pluto by astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh in 1930.

However, decades later in August 2006, Pluto's long-held planetary status was withdrawn after its formal reclassification as a dwarf planet, launching a debate over the Kuiper Belt object's identity that continues today. Yet beyond the controversy over how Pluto should be classified, the quest to determine whether a hidden ninth planet may exist in our solar system continues — and some astronomers are more confident than ever that its discovery could be imminent.

What do we know?

The story of our solar system's unconfirmed ninth planet takes us back to the early decades of the last century. At that time, astronomers began to suspect that, much like Neptune's discovery based on irregularities in the motion of Uranus, evidence of even more distant planets might begin to surface through similar observations. This prompted American astronomer Percival Lowell to advance the idea that orbital irregularities displayed by both Uranus and Neptune could point to the existence of a distant, unknown planet — one he dubbed "Planet X."

Today, although Lowell's name for this hypothetical planet is sometimes used interchangeably with the idea of a "Planet Nine," the concepts are slightly different. While the early search for Planet X relied on observations of the motion of Uranus and Neptune, new data that included Voyager 2's encounters with those planets in the 1980s helped reveal that their orbital behavior could be explained without the introduction of an unknown ninth planet.

By contrast, modern proponents of the existence of a ninth planet focus their searches further out, looking instead to orbital peculiarities in smaller objects that occupy the distant reaches of the solar system. This approach to solving the Planet Nine mystery was put forward in 2016 by Caltech astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown, who argued that an undiscovered planet could account for the odd orbital patterns displayed by several extreme trans-Neptunian objects in the distant solar system.

What remains unknown?

In 2024, the Caltech team presented additional findings, which specifically focused on long-period, low-inclination objects that are known to traverse Neptune's orbit.

"These objects are dynamically unstable, so the population has to be continuously replenished," Batygin recently told Space in an email. "In our 2024 work, we found that Planet Nine naturally produces the observed population, whereas the model without Planet Nine is strongly inconsistent with the data once observational biases are accounted for."

According to Batygin, the Planet Nine theory can potentially explain several unusual attributes about the distant solar system, which include the phenomena of orbital clustering, large perihelion distances some objects exhibit, the presence of retrograde bodies, and objects with highly inclined orbits (meaning their orbital paths are tilted at large angles).

Right now, Batygin says the only thing still lacking from the growing body of evidence is a direct detection of Planet Nine itself. Still, while he concedes that such direct detections remain elusive, he also maintains that something must account for the current data he, Brown, and others have collected.

"If the observed dynamical structure is real," Batygin told Space, "there is presently no comparably compelling alternative theoretical explanation."

The mystery continues

Fortunately, powerful facilities like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile could soon provide the observations currently missing from the body of data needed to support the existence of a ninth planet.

In the meantime, some promising additional discoveries have been made in recent years, which could help to strengthen the statistical case for things like orbital clustering being related to an undiscovered object at the edge of the solar system.

However, Batygin advises that astronomers should be cautious in interpreting such findings.

"I would say the picture has become more complicated, rather than simply stronger or weaker," Batygin told Space. "One has to be careful about quoting a single significance for 'clustering,' because the theory does not predict that every distant object should be clustered."

As far as what would offer the clearest support for Planet Nine's existence — short of obtaining direct visual confirmation — Batygin says ongoing discoveries of distant objects in the solar system, and the patterns that emerge in their behavior, could provide the most promising new data.

"For me, the clearest non-imaging evidence would be for the dynamical patterns in the outer solar system to sharpen dramatically as the sample grows," Batygin told Space, noting that this would particularly be the case "if several independent observables converge on the same Planet Nine parameters."

"If a much larger, well-characterized sample simultaneously exhibited the predicted apsidal structure, orbital-plane structure, perihelion distribution, inclination distribution, and Neptune-crossing population, it would become very difficult to explain the observations without a common gravitational perturber," Batygin says.

With an ever-growing number of powerful ground and space-based observatories going into service, it could be just a matter of time before we receive the final confirmation that a ninth planet has been lurking out there—or that another explanation can be proven to account for its apparent gravitational fingerprints.

Until then, the search for Planet Nine remains much like what "Planet X" was more than a century ago: a captivating idea awaiting a breakthrough observation — one that could lead to a major discovery that significantly expands our knowledge of the solar system.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered that the ring system of a tiny solar system body is even more interesting than they knew.

The object in question is Chariklo, which orbits the sun between Saturn and Uranus, at around 17 times the distance between Earth and the sun. Despite only being around 155 miles (250 kilometers) wide, Chariklo, part of the Centaur family of asteroids, possesses two thick rings.

Though Saturn is the solar system body most famous for its rings, other planets also have ring systems, albeit less prominent. That includes Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter. However, Chariklo and the even smaller body Chiron, show that even the most diminutive bodies can develop rings. Now, thanks to the incredible sensitivity of the JWST, scientists know that the rings of Chariklo are even stranger than their initial discovery in 2013 suggested.

The team, led by researchers from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC), began observing Chariklo with the JWST in Oct. 2022. They used a technique called stellar occultation, which measures the decrease in light from a star when an object passes in front of it.

"By comparing JWST observations with those obtained during other stellar occultations over the last decade, we discovered opposite changes in the two rings: while the inner ring shows significantly higher opacity, the outer ring shows lower opacity," team leader Pablo Santos-Sanz of the IAA-CSIC said in a statement.

The changing rings of the asteroid suggest that it experiences more complex physics than previously thought. This is important because scientists had previously believed that small bodies had relatively stable rings.

"Our results force us to rethink how they form, how they evolve, and what mechanisms maintain their stability," Santos-Sanz said. "The ability to detect these changes opens a new window for understanding the evolution of these systems and, possibly, that of other ring systems in the solar system."

The cause of these changes remains a mystery.

Another milestone for the JWST and Gaia

The research doesn't just represent an important step in our understanding of asteroids and solar system rings, but it is also an important milestone for the JWST.

"Achieving this required knowing with extraordinary precision the orbit of Chariklo, the position of the star, thanks to the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, and the trajectory of JWST itself around the L2 Lagrange point, a region of space located about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) beyond Earth, away from the sun," team member Yücel Kilic of the IAA-CSIC said. "The JWST follows an orbit around this region that requires periodic corrections through station-keeping maneuvers."

During the occultation the team used in their research, Chariklo was traveling at around 5,600 miles per hour (2.5 kilometers per second) relative to the JWST.

This is incredibly fast by Earth standards, but relatively slow for objects racing through the solar system. This low speed allowed the rings of Chariklo to be resolved in unprecedented detail. Astronomers currently rely on occultation to study Chariklo and its rings, as even the JWST isn't powerful enough to directly image this small and distant asteroid.

The team's research was published on Tuesday (Sept. 9) in the journal Science Advances.

We've been studying the moon for a long time. NASA has gathered mountains of data over decades of lunar missions and studies. The data collected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) alone, for example, exceeds that of all NASA's other planetary missions combined.

Analyzing all this information takes lots of time and effort from researchers. So, NASA and IBM have developed an AI model to help sift through the moon data — an advance the agency announced on Thursday (Sept. 10). The open-source model, called the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, is currently available for free at Hugging Face.

"NASA has spent decades building an extraordinary scientific record of the moon, but collecting data is only part of the job," NASA's Kevin Murphy, chief science data officer and acting chief data and AI officer, said in the announcement.

The new AI model can help researchers with tasks like mapping craters, finding young volcanic features, and modeling possible locations of water ice near the lunar poles, according to NASA.

In the announcement, Murphy said that NASA needs to make scientific data easier to explore and use. To this end, NASA has been developing and releasing science-focused AI models with IBM. Previous models include one focused on Earth observation and another for heliophysics.

This is part of a larger trend of AI use in planetary science. Space agencies and private space companies around the world have been looking into how AI models can help with analysis to increase scientific productivity, reduce costs and streamline workflows.

"The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model shows what's possible when we bring AI to NASA's petabytes of scientific data," Murphy said in the announcement. "That's a real opportunity we see with AI: turning large-scale data into new discoveries."

The AI model was mostly trained on data from the LRO mission. Over 17 years, NASA's lunar orbiter has compiled a nearly complete mosaic of images that detail the moon's surface in high definition.