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.

Our star and primary energy source that makes life on this planet possible may also be a cosmic cannibal. That's according to new research that suggests the sun may have swallowed a super-Earth planet billions of years ago in its early history. And our star may still be hiding the evidence.

The scientists behind this research think that the fingerprints of this violent consumption of a planet may still exist within the solar interior. Super-Earths are common occupants of other planetary systems, and these findings can explain why the solar system lacks such a world.

"Our new study suggests that a planet several times more massive than Earth may have fallen into the young sun and left a lasting chemical imprint deep inside it," Mutlu Yildiz, of Ege University, Turkey, said in a statement.

Yildiz and colleagues theorize that the sun's act of planetary infanticide may help to explain differences between observations of the sun and what is predicted by models of stellar evolution. This includes the depth of the sun's convection zone and the so-called sound-speed structure just below the convection zone.

It could also explain why the surface of the sun is depleted of the element lithium.

"By modelling the sun's evolution and comparing the results with precise observations of its interior, we find that the ingestion of a super-Earth could help explain long-standing differences between standard solar models and observations, including subtle changes in the sun's internal structure and its depleted lithium abundance," Yildiz said. "We were interested in whether these problems might have a common origin in the early chemical history of the sun."

The researcher explained that young stars like the sun during its infancy are surrounded by vast flattened clouds of gas and dust called protoplanetary discs, where substantial amounts of material can move between the disc and the star.

"Since planets are made of material that is chemically different from the gas in the disc, we wondered whether the early engulfment of a planet could have left a chemical signature inside the young sun," Yildiz said.

What happened to the sun's planetary meal?

Using advanced stellar evolution software, Yildiz and colleagues tested their idea by investigating different ways the sun could have swallowed a planet.

Their results found the best fit for the sun's current characteristics was the cannibalism of a planet between five and ten times the mass of the Earth, a type of planet called a super-Earth. This could explain the strange, unpredicted characteristics of the sun.

We thought planetary engulfment might affect the solar structure but did not expect the calculations to converge on such a specific super-Earth mass range," said Professor Yildiz. "That was one of the most interesting outcomes of the study."

The team's research is supported by previous studies that suggests one or more super-Earth planets could have formed with the orbit of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun.

These worlds would have then migrated through the protoplanetary disk surrounding the infant sun before crashing into the star.

But this new study leaves open the possibility that something else, other than this violent collision with the sun, may explain the discrepancies in measurements of the sun's interior and its lithium content. The team's model doesn't need a planet to have been totally engulfed by the sun.

Currently, this idea is based on computer modelling and unexplained solar features, but the researchers think that the predicted structural and chemical signature of a planetary engulfment could still exist within our star and could be detected.

"The earlier work proposed that a super-Earth could have formed and migrated into the young sun. Our paper asks whether the sun itself could still carry observable evidence that such an engulfment actually happened, and we believe it could," Yildiz concluded. "The next step is to see if these fingerprints can be independently detected."

The research was published on Thurs (Sept. 10) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Are those purple, wavy, alien thumbprints? Or perhaps an otherworldly ocean? Nope! It's actually a dune field on Mars, colored purple.

What is it?

Across the Martian surface are all sorts of unique features in the rocky, dusty surface material. In this false-color image, snapped by the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, you can see the incredible and strange ripples of a dune field on Mars.

"Our science goal for this observation is to observe any changes from a previous image we acquired in 2011," a statement sharing the image reads. "For this footprint, the target enlarged and centered more over the dune field, which is located on the floor in the northern half of an unnamed impact crater."

Why is it incredible?

Spacecraft like MRO, with its HiRISE camera, have opened our eyes to the incredible features across the Martian surface.

From dune fields like we see here to craters and ancient riverbeds, these views have helped scientists piece together the planet's incredible, dynamic history. For decades, observations from orbit around Mars and by rovers on the planet's surface have helped to solve at least part of the mystery of what Mars was once like.

Researchers are still looking for signs that unequivocally point to life once existing on the planet. But so far, observations have showed that, billions of years in the past, Mars had abundant surface water — lakes, rivers perhaps even a huge ocean. In analyzing the material in and near ancient waterways on the planet with NASA's Perseverance rover, researchers have already found evidence that could possibly link to biosignatures.

While this image might look like a strange but beautiful purple-colored desktop background, photos like it this can be essential clues for scientists hunting for answers.

Wrinkles on the surface of Mercury have revealed that the closest planet to the sun is shrinking faster than scientists thought.

New research suggests that Mercury is shrinking between 10% and 30% faster than had been previously estimated. The team behind this research calculated that the planet has lost nearly 12 miles (19 kilometers) of its total diameter since it formed.

The researchers think that the extremity of this shrinking has gone unnoticed previously because bombardment from space rocks over time has created craters that obscured the evidence of this process.

Scientists say determining the extent of the shrinking of Mercury is key to investigating the composition of the planet's interior.

"More shrinking means Mercury could have a larger metal core, less light elements like silicon mixed into the metal core, or a higher starting temperature," team leader Gaku Nishiyama, of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Space Research said in a statement.

Mercury's rocky past

Like all rocky planets in the solar system, Mercury was formed 4.5 billion years ago during a violent and turbulent time in the solar system's history, as rocks and asteroids collided with each other and were bound together.

These impacts generated heat, which Mercury has been losing ever since. As the interior of Mercury cooled, it also shrank. This caused geological wrinkles in the form of scarps and ridges to develop in the rocky outer layers of Mercury.

This cooling should result in Mercury shrinking in a roughly uniform way, and that would make these shortening structures common across the planet. However, asteroid impacts throughout its history have not only created craters that obscure signs of its geological history, but have also spread debris across the surface of Mercury. This makes wrinkles tougher to spot among the accumulation of billions of years' worth of geological features.

The team combined previous maps of Mercury's geology with new observations of the entire planet's surface roughness. They found the roughest terrain of Mercury featured the fewest wrinkles.

"It made us think that there's a process obscuring shortening structures," said Nishiyama, who thinks that impact debris in the roughest regions of Mercury is covering shrinking wrinkles.

The team then used the ridges and scarps in regions less affected by the dispersal of debris to estimate the amount of contraction. This indicated that missing features in rough areas could amount to 10% to 30% extra shrinkage over the 4.5 billion-year lifetime of Mercury. That amounts to a total change in diameter of up to 14.5 miles (23 kilometers) rather than the currently estimated 2.5 to 10 miles (4 to 16 kilometers).

"30% is a little bit surprising, but the corrected amount of contraction actually makes sense to me," Nishiyama said.

There may be more surprises in store. Nishiyama believes that the updated figures could still be an underestimate. This estimate is based on data collected by NASA's MESSENGER probe, which ended in 2015. MESSENGER could only distinguish features larger than around 3 miles (5 kilometers) across.

In November 2026, the BepiColombo mission will start conducting scans of Mercury's surface in much higher resolution than this, and that could reveal even more shrinkage features.

The team's research was published on Thursday (Sept. 10) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Decades ago, Captain Kirk faced off against the Gorn on the uncharted desert planet Metron. But as we can see in new satellite imagery from NASA, that mysterious rocky world can actually be found right here on Earth in California.

What is it?

In this new image captured by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on NASA's Landsat 9 satellite, you can see the wide variety of rock and vegetation in the area around Vasquez Rocks Natural Area County Park in southern California.

The 25-million-year-old Vasquez Rocks is a magnificent natural area with an incredible range of unique, large rocks jutting out of the ground. In this false-color image, you can see the area in shortwave-infrared and near-infrared wavelengths that show the differences in vegetation across the landscape.

And this location hides some amazing history. Not only is Vasquez Rocks home to incredible rock formations and desert vegetation, it is also where Captain Kirk fought the Gorn in Star Trek the Original Series. It's not a surprise the series chose this location for its infamous fight scene (among many other Trek scenes), as the massive, sun-bleached boulders pointing to the sky and barren landscape give it a distinctly alien feel.

Why is it incredible?

While the rocky landscape of Vasquez Rocks is firmly fixed here on Earth, it has consistently made history as the backdrop to a whole host of iconic science fiction moments.

Indeed, Star Trek is one as Vasquez Rocks has been used for filming in a whole host of Trek episodes. It was even Spock's home world of Vulcan in the films Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek (2009).

But beyond Star Trek, the site has been used for filming sci-fi classics like Galaxy Quest, Battlestar Galactica and Planet of the Apes in addition to a whole host of cowboy movies and more.

It turns out that right here on Earth, we can find perfectly good alien worlds.

A volcano on an Indonesian archipelago began erupting on Sept. 4, and satellites in orbit have been watching closely.

What is it?

The volcano Anak Krakatau started spitting out ash and lava on Sept. 4. On an archipelago between Sumatra and Java, the island volcano's sudden eruption grounded flights, closed schools and even stopped fishing in the area.

The volcano launched ash into the air and into the city of Jakarta and the Lampung province during a 25-hour-long eruption. But even following this eruption, Anak Krakatau remained active throughout the weekend. In fact, the volcano is still so active that it could erupt again soon.

But it wasn't just people on Earth watching the volcano erupt this past weekend. The Landsat 8 satellite, operated by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), spotted a white plume of volcanic gas billowing into the atmosphere all the way from space. The white plumes of gas are thought to mainly contain water vapor, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, while ash and debris make up the brown clouds surrounding the plumes.

Why is it incredible?

While Anak Krakatau simmers after this most recent eruption, this event isn't a major shock, as the volcano sits in what is known as the "Ring of Fire." This "ring" (a loose term, as it's not exactly a ring) snakes about 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) around the Pacific Ocean and includes over 750 volcanoes, some dormant and some active.

In fact, in Indonesia alone there are 500 volcanoes, and 127 of them are active, including Anak Krakatau. And this volcano has a particularly interesting story: It emerged from the sea in 1927, rising from the caldera formed by the 1883 eruption of Krakatau (also known as Krakotoa), which was one of the most famous and destructive volcanic events in history. (Anak Krakatau means "child of Krakatau" in the Indonesian language.)

While not all geologists agree on the exact margins of the Ring of Fire, it rests on a string of tectonic plates and has existed for over 35 million years. And not only is this ring home to hundreds of volcanoes, it's also a hot spot for earthquakes.

China is making progress on its Tianwen 3 Mars sample return mission, which aims to bring back to Earth roughly 500 grams (17.6 ounces) of Red Planet collectibles in 2031.

According to the China National Space Administration, the Tianwen 3 mission will have a lander, an ascender, a service capsule, an orbiter and an Earth reentry module.

If all goes to plan, Tianwen 3 will launch in 2028 on two Long March 5 heavy-lift rockets from the Wenchang Space Launch Site on the island of Hainan, China's southernmost province.

Sputnik moment

"The Tianwen 3 mission is progressing smoothly, with intensified efforts being made to overcome technical challenges," Hou Zengqian, the mission's chief scientist, recently told CCTV, a state-run Chinese broadcaster.

"The probe equipment has entered the prototype development phase, and scientifically, many scientist teams from across the country are working together to tackle the challenges in accordance with the mission's scientific objectives," Hou added.

Meanwhile, NASA's plans for hauling Mars samples to Earth are murky at the moment. So China appears to be in the lead to notch a major space milestone.

"If accurate, this represents a Sputnik moment," said former NASA "Mars Czar" Scott Hubbard, referring to the reported Tianwen 3 progress.

"China will not only grab the headlines but may be the first to find evidence of life on another planet," Hubbard, who also previously directed NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told Space.com.

Top scientific priority

"The Tianwen 3 mission will look for microbial traces potentially similar to early forms of life on Earth, while also taking into consideration the possibility of unknown forms of life that may have emerged through Mars' unique evolutionary history, providing crucial evidence to answer this major scientific question," Hou told the state-run Xinhua news agency in a recent interview.

Searching for potential signs of life on Mars is the top scientific goal of the Tianwen 3 mission, Hou said on Sept. 3 during the 2026 International Deep Space Exploration Conference on, which was held in Hefei, the capital of eastern China's Anhui Province.

Landing site

China's Mars sample-return trek will be launched "around 2028" on two Long March 5 rockets departing from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China's southernmost island province of Hainan. (Launch windows for Mars missions come around just once every 26 months. The next one opens in November-December of this year, and the one after that, which Tianwen 3 apparently is targeting, runs from December 2028 to January 2029.)

Hou also said China expects to finalize the landing site for the mission by the end of 2026, with Chinese specialists advancing work on a next-generation geological map of Mars in its entirety.

If everything goes according to plan, the mission will collect samples from the Martian surface and then send them back to Earth around 2031.

"Regardless of whether signs of life are found, the returned Martian samples will have irreplaceable scientific value," Hou said.

Tackle the challenges

Hou added that analyses of the returned samples at microscopic, molecular and isotopic scales could deepen our understanding of Mars' geology and environment, as well as the evolution of habitability and the conditions under which life may originate.

According to Hou, Mars sample return is an extremely complex project, with landing-site selection, planetary protection and contamination control, and the identification of potential signs of life among its key challenges.

Chinese Mars researchers are selecting candidate landing sites for the mission based on factors that include geological age, history of water activity, habitability and the potential for preserving biosignatures.

Planetary protection lab

Xinhua reported last month that a "planetary protection laboratory" is to be built in the first phase of Hefei's Deep-Space Science City in east China's Anhui Province, citing the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL).

"The planetary protection laboratory will implement a two-way protection system that guards both the returning Martian samples and Earth's biosphere," Xinhua reports.

The lab's tasks encompass sample sterilization, unsealing, processing and biological risk assessment. "The facility is designed to support the implementation of major deep-space missions and to enable scientific research on Martian samples," added Xinhua.

China "will follow the planetary protection policies of the Committee on Space Research, to prevent biological contamination of Mars by terrestrial organisms and to protect Earth from any potential extraterrestrial life forms that may be carried back in the samples," said Li Hang, director of the development planning department at DSEL, according to Xinhua.

You can view a video about China's Mars sample return plans here.

Scientists may finally know why Venus, Earth's twin, lacks a moon, finding that the hottest planet in the solar system may have consumed its own natural satellite.

Venus is often referred to as Earth's twin due to its size, mass, rocky composition, and distance from the sun, but there are some glaring differences between the two planets. Aside from Venus' blisteringly hot temperature, which could melt lead, incredible surface pressure, violent high-speed winds, and clouds of sulfuric acid, one of the key differences between Earth and Venus can be seen from afar. While our planet has a constant companion in the form of the moon, Venus lacks a moon of its own. In fact, the only solar system planets lacking moons are Venus, the second planet from the sun, and Mercury, the closest planet to the sun.

One question that scientists have puzzled over for years is whether Venus always lacked a moon, or if the hottest planet in the solar system once had a natural satellite and somehow lost it. Now, a team of researchers may have arrived at an answer, determining the fate that would have befallen a hypothetical moon orbiting Venus.

"I have always had a fascination with moon formation and evolution in the solar system, and particularly with Venus since my research is centered around its evolution and potential for past habitability," team leader Stephen R. Kane of the University of California, Riverside told Space.com. "Venus is Earth's twin, and both are nearly identical in size, mass, and composition. However, Earth has a large moon, and Venus has no moon at all, not even a small captured satellite.

"Venus undoubtedly experienced large impacts, just as Earth has, and so has had as much, if not more, opportunity to form a moon similar to what we see in our own skies."

Kane and colleagues constructed a simulation to test their ideas of what could have become of the Venusian moon.

"The work involved going back to fundamental physics and creating the simulation from the ground up, which I validated by ensuring I could reproduce the evolution of the Earth-moon system," Kane said. "The moment I realized that our model provided a complete explanation for Venus not having a moon was an exciting one!"

Did Venus consume its own moon?

The team modelled a gravitational tug-of-war between Venus, a hypothetical moon, and the sun, following this forward over billions of years.

"This is the same physics that governs our own moon, which is slowly drifting away from Earth. We ran the calculations across a wide range of possibilities for how fast Venus was spinning and how massive its moon might have been, using two independent mathematical descriptions of how tides work," Kane explained.

The researcher said that this was done so the conclusions reached wouldn't hinge on one set of assumptions. They found in most cases a Venusian moon would not drift safely outward the way ours does. Instead, the modelling showed that a moon orbiting Venus would eventually reverse its course and spiral inward, causing it to be torn apart by the planet's gravity.

Kane and colleagues found that possessing an intimidating size wouldn't guarantee a Venusian moon's survival, either.

"An interesting aspect is that a heavier moon is destroyed faster, since a massive moon would drain Venus's spin so efficiently that it hastens its destruction," Kane added.

But are there any circumstances under which a Venusian moon could have survived?

"Survival came down to two main things: Venus had to be spinning fast when the moon formed, with a day shorter than about 12 hours, and the moon couldn't be too massive, up to roughly the mass of our own moon," team leader Stephen R. Kane of the University of California, Riverside told Space.com. "In that narrow window, the moon migrates outward and stabilizes, much as Earth's did. Outside that range, the moon is unfortunately doomed to be consumed by Venus.

"So a surviving moon would have had to be modest in size, orbiting a rapidly spinning early Venus, which are conditions that don't match what we think early Venus was actually like."

We may never conclusively know if Venus has indeed destroyed its own moon, as Kane thinks that collecting direct evidence from astronomical observations will be very difficult.

"Finding direct observational evidence is pretty tough. A moon lost billions of years ago would leave little to no direct trace we can point a telescope at today, so we can't observe the event itself," Kane said. "However, there are indirect avenues. For example, if a moon was destroyed and its debris rained down on Venus, it could have left a chemical fingerprint in the planet's surface or atmosphere, and upcoming missions to Venus, including NASA's DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) probe, will measure atmospheric composition in detail."

If missions such as DAVINCI could help us develop a better understanding of the Venusian interior, then this would also improve the models such as the one used in this research. That is because the outcomes of such models depend on properties of Venus's interior, which aren't currently well understood.

"There's a broader test beyond our solar system because our results predict that slowly rotating, Venus-like planets around other stars should generically lack large moons, so as astronomers begin searching for moons around exoplanets, that's a prediction that can eventually be checked against real data," Kane said.

Kane and colleagues don't intend to rest on their laurels while further data from Venus or even Venus-like exoplanets are delivered. They have plenty to work on in the meantime.

"There are numerous implications of our work that I would like to explore further. These include the compositional and atmospheric effects of a Venusian moon consumption event that may be testable now," Kane concluded. I would also like to explore similar effects for Mercury and Mars, and conduct further studies on exoplanet cases where such moon collision scenarios may have occurred."

The team's research is available as a pre-peer-reviewed paper on the repository site arXiv.

The moon could have formed in a matter of hours following the giant impact between Earth and a Mars-size protoplanet early in the history of the solar system. The theory comes from new simulations that take into account how the internal temperature of young protoplanets affected their geologic properties and therefore the collisions they experienced.

This giant impact scenario has become the leading theory of how the moon formed, thanks in particular to work done by planetary scientist Robin Canup. Since 2001, she has conducted and refined numerous computer simulations that describe how a Mars-size body called Theia collided at an angle just right to throw debris into orbit around the proto-Earth.

Now other researchers are getting in on the act. Adeene Denton of the South-west Research Institute led a team who performed some of the most detailed simulations of the collision yet, taking into account more of the geologic properties of the colliding worlds.

"Models have evolved to include material strength, something that's really important when you're studying collisions between smaller bodies like asteroids or for my previous paper about the formation of the Pluto–Charon system," said Denton in a statement. "We weren't sure it would matter for the moon or not. When we did the simulations, we found it actually matters quite a bit."

It turns out that warmer bodies are weaker than colder ones. After the planets formed, they were still hot inside from their formation, which would have affected their material strength. Given that the moon-forming impact occurred not long after the solar system's formation, this would have affected the collision with Theia — but to what degree depends on exactly when the collision occurred and how much Theia had cooled.

As Theia smashed into Earth, it was utterly destroyed. While much of what was left of Theia's shattered iron core sank into the Earth, a large ring of debris wrapped around Earth to form the moon.

The main effect of the temperature being warmer in the outer few hundred miles of Theia was that it would have affected its ability to deform upon impact and absorb the momentum of the collision. This, in turn, would have affected how debris was strewn around Earth to form the moon. Therefore, by including varying temperatures and material strengths in the simulations, Denton's team was able to get a better look at how the collision and the resulting formation of our moon played out.

Previous simulations have shown two possible scenarios. One is that the ring of debris hung around for a substantial amount of time, allowing the moon to accrete from it gradually. The other scenario, first depicted in NASA-led simulations in 2022, implies that the moon came together from this debris in a matter of hours.

Now, Denton's models potentially bolster this startling possibility.

If Theia was colder, meaning that the impact occurred a little later in the history of the solar system, perhaps 100 to 150 million years after the birth of the planets, then the ring of debris would have formed in such a way as to allow the moon to accrete gradually. And because it was stronger, more of Theia would have survived intact to merge with Earth.

On the other hand, a warmer Theia that impacted Earth less than 60 million years after the planets' formation, would create a scenario where the moon could form very quickly while Theia itself would be obliterated.

"Depending on how hot the Earth and Theia are prior to the collision, the impact can destroy Theia and produce this massive disk of debris that eventually forms the moon," said Denton. "But when I used the same parameters as original impact modeling – down to the equal temperature structures inside both bodies — within around five hours, an intact moon emerged."

That would have been quite a day in the history of our planet, acquiring a new moon and an almighty headache all at once.

"These surprising and exciting new results imply a potential connection between the physical properties of the moon today, including perhaps its volatile content, and the thermal state of the Earth and Theia at the time of the giant impact," said the Southwest Research Institute's Robin Canup, who was not involved in this study. "This in turn might help scientists better constrain when the moon-forming event occurred."

In both scenarios, the moon appears to be made mostly from Theia's mantle material, with just a little bit of Earth's mantle mixed in. This latter finding is surprising, given the similarities between the moon's composition and Earth's mantle. However, research has shown that there's clearly more to the story because despite the similarities there are also some puzzling differences in the levels of isotopes that cannot be easily explained by current simulations, including Denton's.

The simulations could have repercussions in the search for exomoons. If the moon did form in a matter of hours, then searching for exomoon-forming disks around terrestrial exoplanets might be a fruitless endeavor because such disks would be so short-lived. Moon-forming disks around gas giant exoplanets would be a different matter, however, because those disks do not form from impacts, but rather from material leftover from assembling those planets.

The results were published on Sept. 1 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

We are a planet-based species: With a few notable (astronaut) exceptions, everyone who has ever lived remained glued to our spinning Earth, which now houses 8.3 billion people.

That's the gravity of the situation. But we're also a world of floods, typhoons, earthquakes, heat and cold calamities, volcanic eruptions and even encounters with sun-caused auroras and bruises from incoming asteroids.

It's quite a world worth watching — and for decades that's what spacecraft have been doing. But what do they view and who's on the other end of the space-based telescopes capturing our daily doings, faults and all, down here on terra firma?

Privacy, security and trust

Recently, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group based in Paris, published a report on the expanding access to satellite Earth-observation data, spotlighting what it means for privacy, security and trust.

"Advances in optical systems, photonics, cloud computing and artificial intelligence [AI] have democratized both the quality and accessibility of satellite data. However, this convergence of technologies also carries risks, including for national security and privacy," states the report, which was authored by the OECD's Marit Undseth and Claire Jolly.

Broadening access to advanced satellite data also creates new challenges, states the report, such as one of the key characteristics of Earth observation — its dual-use nature. "The same satellites used to track illegal fishing can often also detect military troop movements," the authors write.

New concerns

The OCED report notes that Earth-observation data and the technological convergence with artificial intelligence raise new concerns about national security, privacy and the ethical use of these data.

In fact, the report points to the growing hazard of fake or incorrectly used satellite imagery. "As part of the growing trend of digital disinformation, the trust in satellite data can be eroded by fake, misinterpreted or intentionally misrepresented imagery," it states.

Space.com asked leading remote-sensing specialists what's being done, what's being learned and what we should worry about.

Sovereignty and cost efficiency

Viktor Stoyanov is the chief operating officer of Smart Solutions at Space42, where he oversees the business unit's operational and financial performance.

Space42 is a United Arab Emirates-based space technology company that integrates satellite communications, geospatial analytics and AI capabilities. The group runs the Foresight Earth Observation constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites.

Space.com asked Stoyanov about the growing international use of remote-sensing data.

"Governments increasingly expect Earth-observation systems to deliver both sovereignty and cost efficiency, two goals that were long seen as mutually exclusive, as sovereignty typically meant heavy in-country investment in duplicative research and development and capital infrastructure," he responded.

Dual use

Stoyanov said Space42's focus is to combine those two outcomes.

"We believe that can only be achieved through international cooperation. Our Foresight constellation reflects this model, as the first sovereign dual-use synthetic aperture radar constellation in the region," Stoyanov said.

The satellites were manufactured in partnership with ICEYE in Finland, with critical integration and testing completed in the organization's facility in Abu Dhabi.

"The Abu Dhabi facility was built in cost-cautious and scalable manner, so that it can satisfy current sovereignty requirements commensurate with the constellation size, with the ability to expand the facility and meet demand of future programs," Stoyanov said.

Through cloud, dust and darkness

What new in-orbit technologies are being applied to Earth observation?

"The biggest shift in recent years has been the move from few, large, general-purpose platforms to constellations of small, specialized satellites and synthetic aperture radar," said Stoyanov.

"SAR satellites image through cloud, dust and darkness, which matters enormously for our region and for any customer who needs consistency regardless of timing and weather," he added.

Looking ahead, Stoyanov said that the short lifespan of satellites in low Earth orbit is an opportunity to ensure that each replenishment cycle becomes an upgrade cycle.

"As we plan to maintain and expand our fleet, we will continuously seek to deploy technical improvements across various performance metrics of the system — resolution, latency, satellite life, for example," said Stoyanov.

Artificial intelligence

A SAR constellation generates far more imagery than analysts can review manually within the allocated time, Stoyanov said. So the value lies in what can be extracted from it, not in the pixels themselves.

AI is therefore becoming increasingly important as a sorting tool for remote-sensing data, Stoyanov said. It is now the only practical way to work, for three reasons: volume, speed and accuracy.

Customers responding to a flood, a maritime incident or a supply-chain disruption need an answer in minutes, not a report next week — "decision-grade intelligence within minutes," explained Stoyanov.

On the topic of accuracy, while trained analysts are excellent at interpretation and large-object classification — like buildings and sea vessels — there are changes that the eye can easily miss. "Algorithms comparing each new pass against the historical baseline — they catch those consistently, without fatigue," said Stoyanov.

Hybrid model

Francis Doumet is the CEO and co-founder of Metaspectral, a company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, that builds AI technology to rapidly analyze hyperspectral imagery.

Doumet views collaboration between different national space agencies as "extensive and, somewhat uniquely, very open." Missions are frequently carried out through "shared funding, instruments, expertise and ground infrastructure," he said, with the resulting scientific data made available internationally.

Commercial imagery is less openly distributed because it is commercially licensed and may have security implications, Doumet said, but it is increasingly enabling international cooperation in the defense sector.

For example, the U.S. Space Force's Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking (TacSRT) program combines commercial satellite imagery and analytics from American companies and allied nations to rapidly respond to operational requests, Doumet said.

"This has shaped the Earth-observation sector into a hybrid model," said Doumet. Governments and allies share requirements and intelligence, he explained, while commercial operators supply imagery and analytics "at a speed and scale that would be difficult or impossible for a single nation to produce alone."

Hyperspectral sensors

The improvement in the spatial resolution of hyperspectral sensors is an important advance in Earth observation, Doumet pointed out.

Better sensors, high-speed compression and improved communications, such as optical links, are now narrowing a "resolution gap." Onboard AI is equally transformative, he added.

"Satellites can analyze imagery in real time, identify relevant signatures and transmit alerts or compact intelligence products instead of waiting to download an entire hyperspectral data cube," Doumet explained.

Spectral fingerprints

Angie Crews is a principal research associate with the University of Colorado, Boulder's Center for National Security Initiatives.

"There has been a tremendous growth in the commercial remote-sensing industry," Crews told Space.com, noting that this field had previously been government-based. "It's now possible for these commercial companies to deploy entire constellations of Earth-observing satellites, which fundamentally changes the architecture in place."

Crews pointed to the hyperspectral nature of Earth remote sensing — taking the "spectral fingerprints" of what's occurring on Earth.

"It's impressive how the industry is moving forward with some of these capabilities," she said.

Balancing act

"There are some tremendous benefits as well as some things that we need to think about" when it comes to the new direction that Earth observation is taking, Crews said. Remote-sensing data can be inherently dual use, she added.

"Overall, I think we're seeing some enormous benefits from our increasingly capable commercial remote-sensing systems. But it does raise some security and governance questions," said Crews.

It's a balancing act to manage, according to Crews. How best to secure the information for national security purposes versus not putting the squeeze on innovation exhibited by the private Earth-observation firms?

Meaningful information

Shifting to her teaching role at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Crews told Space.com that one of the things that's especially important is to train students in the remote-sensing field to think beyond any single sensor or dataset.

"The next generation needs to understand how different sensing technologies work and also how to work with very large datasets and extract meaningful information using AI and machine learning," Crews said.

"We also need to train the students on critical thinking and ensure they are aware of the limitations of AI. The underlying physics need to be understood and the results need to be validated so that the students use and interpret the results appropriately," she concluded.

New research suggests that dust from meteorites contains a "fossil record" dating back to the formation of the sun. The research reveals that magnetism played a far greater role in the birth of the solar system than had previously been suspected.

Around 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was a cloud of gas and dust, known as a solar nebula. Over the next few million years, this cloud began to flatten, forming a donut-shaped ring or torus with a budding star gathering mass at its core. Eventually, planets would form within this so-called protoplanetary disk.

Scientists have always theorized that gravity was the main sculptor during this early era. But the new study suggests that gravity had major assistance from magnetism. The signature of this additional cosmic artist was found within grains of dust sealed in DOM 08006, a meteorite recovered from Antarctica in 2008.

The grains found by the team are calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs), which are thought to have formed during the first 200,000 years of the solar system. That potentially makes them the oldest samples of solar system material ever seen.

"We know they are the oldest things we have of the early solar system," team leader Cauê Borlina of Purdue University said in a statement. "But CAIs are very complex and are not all the same, even within a 1-millimeter piece of the meteorite. So we have to carefully identify what types they are."

These CAIs indicated that there was a magnetic field in the proto-solar system even during its solar nebula phase. This magnetic field would have been stronger than Earth's magnetosphere and, as such, would have influenced the flattening of the solar nebula.

"This transition, from a spherical cloud to a protoplanetary disk, is one of the most significant events in all of solar system history," team member Benjamin Weiss, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in the same statement. "It has long been theorized that gravity caused this, but our measurements show magnetism likely played a role."

A new spin on early solar system magnetism

In the newly forming solar system, a magnetic field would have been generated when charged particles were sent spinning through the collapsing cloud of gas and dust that birthed the sun. This plasma would then have sustained that field.

As such, that magnetism must have affected the material in the solar nebula that would become the solar system. For that reason, the team reasoned that the strength of this field should be "locked in" to materials from the time as remanent magnetization. This matter could make its way to Earth in meteorites.

In fact, the same scientists who conducted this research previously found evidence of a magnetic field that existed 2 million years into the formation of the solar system, baked into meteorites. That's an impressive and important find, because this magnetic field would have helped planets like Earth form — but the sun was already around by that point. Thus, the team was after an earlier magnetic field, one that predated our star.

"Nowadays, people don’t debate whether magnetism is present when planets are forming. But the debate is around the very early solar system, before planets are forming, when there’s just a disk," Borlina said. "That's where the debate still resides, and that’s where we’re operating now."

DOM 08006 is one of the most unspoiled or "primitive" meteorites ever discovered, retaining and preserving materials, including CAIs, as they were when the sun was forming.

"Other meteorites went through many different processes over this 4.5 billion-year history," said Weiss. "They were formed in the solar nebula, then added to bodies with water, then got destroyed, moved to the asteroid belt, and then landed here. But somehow, DOM has experienced less alteration than any other meteorite."

If a magnetic field existed during the earliest stage of the solar system, it should be observable in the matter that makes up DOM 08006.

The team was able to isolate and identify a handful of CAIs that contained inherently magnetic minerals such as iron, which they tested to measure any magnetism they had retained.

Studying these grains, the researchers found evidence of a magnetic field 12 times stronger than that of Earth. They think this magnetic field may have played a crucial role in the evolution of the solar system.

"We think these kinds of magnetic fields were helping to move gas from the protoplanetary disk inward toward this central star, the sun,” Borlina said. "Gravity is also playing a role. But we are now showing that, if you want to fully understand how the sun and planets formed, you should include magnetic fields in the ingredients that make them."

The new study was published Aug. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Astronomers have witnessed a small, icy body that orbits the sun out beyond Jupiter transforming into a comet, providing a missing link between comets and inert bodies called centaurs.

The object in question is called 450P/LONEOS and is named after the Lowell Observatory survey that found it back in 2004. It is a centaur, which is a breed of inactive body that orbits the sun between Jupiter and Neptune. These objects are thought to have wandered in from the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto, their paths perhaps perturbed by distant gravitational interactions with the gas giant planets, or even a nudge from a passing star.

Because a given centaur's orbit crosses the path of at least one of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, a centaur's orbit is unstable over millions of years. Consequently, the giant planets can push them even closer to the sun or kick them out of the solar system entirely.

It has long been suspected that those pushed closer to the sun turn into what are called Jupiter-family comets, which are comets with orbital periods around the sun of less than 20 years and which are influenced by the gravity of Jupiter.

To date, no one has ever seen a centaur turn into a Jupiter-family comet. The orbital period of 450P is currently 22 years, so it isn't a Jupiter-family comet yet, but astronomers led by planetary scientist Charles Schambeau of the University of Central Florida have been observing the onset of comet-like behavior on the centaur. In particular, using the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii they have seen the formation of a cloud of gas and dust called a coma around the solid nucleus of 450P, with this coma brightening in the period between 2019 and 2024, when 450P arrived at perihelion (the closest point to the sun in its orbit).

Should 450P keep up this comet-like behavior and receive one more gravitational nudge from one of the giant planets, then it could finally become a Jupiter-family comet.

"Studying objects like 450P helps us connect different stages of small-body evolution," said Schambeau in a statement. "Centaurs are likely related to trans-Neptunian objects, and some will eventually become short-period comets. By studying their activity, surface properties and volatile [substances with low boiling or sublimation points such as water and carbon dioxide] composition, we can learn how comet nuclei change as they move inward through the solar system, how long they preserve primitive ices and what physical processes turn an otherwise quiet icy body into an active comet."

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Schambeau's team analyzed 450P's coma, finding carbon dioxide gas and suggestions of particles of crystalline ice and dust.

Its transition from a centaur into a comet is thought to have resulted from 450P having a date with destiny. By tracking back its orbit to before its 2004 discovery, astronomers found that 450P had come within 2.9 million miles (4.6 million kilometers) of Saturn in 1992. That's pretty close on solar-system scales. The object's gravitational interaction with the ringed planet caused 450P's orbit to significantly shorten so that its perihelion is now at 5.4 astronomical units 506 million miles, or 813 million km), which is only slightly beyond the orbit of Jupiter at 5.2 astronomical units.

Its last perihelion was in August 2024 and, by getting closer to the sun, 450P received substantially more heat than it has in the past.

"That increased solar heating can warm the surface and the subsurface layers of the nucleus," said Schambeau. "As those layers heat up, volatile ices or trapped gases can be released, which can drag dust away from the surface and produce a coma."

The significance of the JWST's discovery of carbon dioxide gas in 450P's burgeoning coma, coupled with the complete absence of water vapor, tells us that it is carbon-dioxide driving the activity on 450P.

"At 450P's distance from the sun, the nucleus is too cold for normal water-ice sublimation to be the main activity source, so detecting carbon dioxide gives us an important clue about what is powering the coma," said Schambeau.

While there is no water vapor, JWST has picked up hints of solid particles of crystalline water-ice.

"The possible crystalline water-ice is also interesting because it suggests that some of the ice in the coma has experienced heating or physical processing, rather than remaining completely unchanged since formation," said Schambeau.

On pristine cometary bodies and Kuiper Belt objects, ice is usually in an amorphous state, meaning the frozen water molecules are not structured or arranged in any particular way, giving the ice a porous composition that allows it to trap pockets of gas. As 450P nears the sun, the extra warmth that it receives causes the amorphous ice to morph into crystalline ice that has a more regular structure. During the transformation the gases escape, dragging dust and ice particles off the surface with them. Therefore, the presence of crystalline ice is telling us that 450P is in the process of being thermally altered from its pristine state that quite possibly harkens back to the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

Only a very small fraction of Centaurs have ever shown signs of activity, which makes 450P's recent perihelion a very important one to have studied because it is a rare example of an early stage in a centaur's transition into a comet.

"Centaurs are scientifically important because they are thought to be transitional objects that originated further out in the solar system and are slowly evolving toward becoming Jupiter-family comets," said Schambeau. "In that sense, they give us a way to study relatively primitive material from the outer solar system while it is beginning to respond to stronger solar heating."

The findings have been accepted for future publication in the Planetary Science Journal and is currently available on the arXiv pre-print archive.

Mercury, the tiniest and least-explored planet in the inner solar system, is hiding mysteries far larger than itself — and finally, scientists will soon be getting not one but two spacecraft designed to decode the strange world.

That's thanks to the BepiColombo mission, a joint project of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that launched in October 2018. After a harrowing journey through the inner solar system, the mission is tackling a crucial maneuver on Thursday (Sept. 3): separating its science equipment from the transport that carried it all that way. By April 2027, scientists hope the mission's two instrument-heavy probes will be gathering a slew of observations that could help solve puzzles about Mercury — and maybe even the solar system we call home.

"I think being able to see new data come out about Mercury is going to be so fantastic," Rachel Klima, a planetary geologist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told Space.com. The planet, she says, is "just so weird and beautiful and interesting."

An enigmatic planet

For now, Mercury holds the dubious honor of being the least-explored planet in the inner solar system, visited by only two missions to date. NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft made a trio of zippy flybys in 1974 and 1975, giving scientists their first glimpses of the planet's cracked and cratered surface, as well as confirming the world has both a very tenuous atmosphere and a magnetic field.

"It really gave us our first close-up view of Mercury," Sean Solomon, a planetary scientist at Columbia University, told Space.com. "But it left a lot of pages blank."

And for decades, that was it. Scientists didn't return to Mercury until 2011, when NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, with Solomon as its principal investigator, arrived at the tiny world. (Mercury has a radius of 1,516 miles, or 2,440 kilometers, meaning its width is just over a third of Earth's.) The spacecraft was packed with tools tailored to the job, such as spectrometers tuned to gamma-rays, X-rays and neutrons, and instruments to sniff out the atmosphere and measure the magnetic field, and it was there to stay. Four years of observations with MESSENGER showed scientists Mercury's complete surface for the first time, and by late in its mission, the spacecraft was passing just 15.5 miles (24.9 km) above the planet's surface.

But even MESSENGER wasn't sophisticated enough to crack Mercury's puzzles or unveil the strange planet's beginnings. "I think the jury's still out on exactly how Mercury got assembled," Solomon said.

MESSENGER opened up some smaller mysteries, too. It discovered bright, steep-sided pits that scientists dubbed "hollows." It found a suite of elements — that planetary scientists call "volatiles" for their tendency to slip free of rock — somehow more prevalent in Mercury's surface than Earth's. It calculated that the center of the planet's magnetic field is wildly offset from the planet's core. Plus, MESSENGER's tricky orbit also meant the spacecraft never saw the southern half of the planet as sharply as the northern half, leaving one side shadowed in doubt.

The arrival of BepiColombo

It's these mysteries that the ambitious BepiColombo mission hopes to tackle. By April, if all goes well, the mission will consist of two separate spacecraft gathering independent but coordinated data about Mercury.

Europe's Mercury Planetary Orbiter, or MPO, will focus on the planet proper. It's packed with 11 science instruments that will map the terrain, minerals in the crust, and the gravity field, investigate the hollows and volcanic deposits, and observe how the barrage of charged particles from the sun affects this innermost planet.

Japan's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, or Mio, meanwhile, will focus on the planet's surroundings — its magnetosphere and wispy atmosphere, as well as the dust cluttering up its neighborhood.

Both spacecraft also carry instruments to measure the planet's magnetic field, offering simultaneous observations of different parts of the field to scientists who typically make do with data gathered from just one location at a time.

In fact, some of these instruments have been able to gather observations during BepiColombo's long trek to Mercury and its six quick flybys of the planet so far. But because of how the spacecraft were configured for the journey, most of the instruments have not — and will not — get to work until after MPO and Mio have separated. That is expected to happen in December.

The mission's science, then, has begun only in dribbles, while the bulk of its promise still lies ahead. "There is a growing literature of new results that have come from the BepiColombo flybys, but I expect that will explode once they go into orbit," Solomon said.

He's especially excited to see the spacecraft's sharp views of the southern hemisphere, and particularly find hidden deposits of water ice across the area. These deposits would exist in deep craters that never feel the sun's heat. In examining this region of the planet, scientists will be able to reduce the northerly bias of MESSENGER's data and better see Mercury's complete picture.

Meanwhile, Klima is most eagerly awaiting MPO's work to map elements and minerals in the planet's surface. This work eluded MESSENGER, which used a technique that relied on these rocks being rich in iron and similar materials — but as it turned out, those elements were absent, leaving scientists stymied. MPO carries different technology that will be able to read rocks on the world even without iron, which Klima said could help reveal how Mercury — and our whole solar system, as a matter of fact — formed.

Klima says she hopes BepiColombo can get people excited about Mercury, the overlooked terrestrial planet of the solar system: "It certainly doesn't get the love and attention that Mars and Venus and everywhere else gets."

After nearly eight years traveling through the inner solar system, the trailblazing BepiColombo spacecraft has finally begun its arrival at Mercury.

The joint European Space Agency (ESA)-Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission reached a major milestone today (Sep. 3), entering its arrival phase at one of our sun's least-studied planets. BepiColombo's Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), the main power and propulsion system that has ferried a dual stack of planetary probes through space for nearly eight years, released its payload to kick off a sequence of operations that will ultimately place the two spacecraft in Mercury's orbit.

The separation left ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, known as Mio, together for their final approach, which will take about six more months. "It will basically be a new mission starting today," said Bruno Sousa, ESA's head of operations definition and engineering, during today's mission livestream.

BepiColombo launched aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, on Oct. 19, 2018, beginning a journey that was expected to take about seven years. To assist its plunge sunward, the spacecraft's trajectory has included one flyby of Earth, two of Venus and six of Mercury, as it has shed more and more gravitational energy during to slow its approach to the system's innermost planet.

"It's one of the most complicated missions we have ever flown," Sousa said. The mission was made even more complicated in April 2024, when a solar panel issue reduced the available power for MTM's electric thrusters. Engineers devised a lower-thrust trajectory that saved BepiColombo's mission but delayed its Mercury arrival from December 2025 to November 2026.

Today's maneuver doesn't place BepiColombo in orbit around Mercury quite yet. MPO and Mio will spend the next several weeks navigating toward the planet ahead of orbital insertion on Nov. 21. "Arriving to Mercury is not as simple as other missions that do a big maneuver and they are there," said Elsa Montagnon, BepiColombo's operations manager. "In our case, it's going to be six months of continuous activities."

The Nov. 21 arrival will begin a sequence of 16 maneuvers to progressively lower and reshape BepiColombo's orbit. Mio is scheduled to separate from MPO around Dec. 9 and settle into a highly elliptical polar orbit. MPO will jettison Mio's MOSIF sunshield (Magnetospheric Orbiter Sunshield and Interface Structure) on Dec. 16, then continue lowering its own altitude before reaching its own polar orbit on March 10, 2027.

BepiColombo is scheduled to begin science operations on April 6, 2027, with MPO and Mio studying Mercury simultaneously from complementary orbits. MPO will focus on Mercury's surface composition, geology and planetary interior, while Mio will investigate the planet's magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind.

Today's separation took place at 8:00 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), but confirmation of that event didn't come for more than an hour following its scheduled execution. Acquisition of signal from BepiColombo came just before 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT), followed by a positive telemetry reading indicating the spacecraft was where it was supposed to be.

"I'm again extremely relieved," Montagnon said. "That the telemetry comes exactly at the moment we expect it, and that we see in the telemetry that the configuration of the spacecraft is the correct one," she said, "this is the best case scenario."

Comet 220P/McNaught has already put on an unexpectedly impressive show this summer as two dramatic outbursts of activity caused it to shine 20,000 times brighter than usual. Here's how you can spot the icy interloper before it fades in the coming weeks.

Comet 220P/McNaught orbits the sun once every 5.5-years. It reached perihelion — its closest point to the sun — on June 14. Solar heating typically increases cometary activity by causing volatile ices to turn directly into gas, releasing dust that reflects sunlight.

The comet's most recent perihelion passage was accompanied by two dramatic outbursts that saw its brightness jump to 20,000 times its usual level, making the ordinarily dim comet temporarily visible to stargazers using binoculars, telescopes, or cameras.

Comet 220P/McNaught is expected to dim significantly as it travels farther away from the sun, though it's possible that another outburst could see its brightness increase once more in the coming weeks!

McNaught's has a current brightness, or magnitude of +9.2 according to the Comet Observation Database run by the Crni Vern observatory. That would make it a challenge to spot with a pair of binoculars under less than perfect conditions, but puts it within reach of small telescopes under dark skies, where it mayappear as a faint, diffuse patch against the background stars.

Where can I find Comet 220P/McNaught in early September?

Look east around midnight local time to find the stars of the constellation Taurus rising into the late summer sky. Next, identify the "V" formation of the Hyades open star cluster shining at the heart of the constellation. Comet McNaught can be found close to the magnitude 3.59 binary star system Omicron Tauri, two stars out from the point of the stellar "V".

Comet McNaught will become easier to spot in the dark nights surrounding the new moon phase on Sept. 10-11, which will also present a perfect opportunity for . It'll also make for long- exposure photography.

Osama Fathi captured a gorgeous photo of Comet McNaught shining in the skies above Egypt as a lone Perseid blazed earthward on Aug. 15.

"I spent nearly two hours imaging the comet and the real surprise came when a meteor crossed very close to it in one frame — a wonderful and unexpected moment," Fathi told Space.com in an email. "Comets are exciting because of their unpredictability and I hope 220P continues to surprise observers with changes in its brightness and activity in the coming weeks."

Astrophotographer Dan Bartlett, meanwhile, created this breathtakingly detailed mosaic of Comet McNaught's journey through the constellation Cetus as the icy wanderer glowed in the skies over June Lake, California. The mosaic captures the comet's evolution from Aug. 6-26 as its coma and tail transformed in the wake of its Aug. 5 outburst.

Interested in capturing your own photo of Comet McNaught? Then be sure to read our guide to photographing solar system comets, along with our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

The future of a privately backed robotic mission Venus seems about as cloudy as the planet itself at the moment.

Scientists based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are working with the California-based company Rocket Lab to search for possible signs of life on Venus. The first step in that program is the Rocket Lab Mission to Venus, which will deploy a small, nose cone-like probe crafted to sample the Venusian atmosphere using a device called an autofluorescence nephelometer (AFN).

That AFN can measure individual particles in Venusian clouds, constraining their size, shape and composition in a search for signs of organic molecules.But that undertaking, primarily fueled by private dollars, has been waylaid due to getting a needed booster flight-qualified.

Neutron readiness

"We call ourselves the Morning Star Missions to Venus. The Rocket Lab Mission is the first mission in the series," said Sara Seager, a noted professor of planetary science at MIT.

"Rocket Lab moved the project to the Neutron rocket, and we are awaiting Neutron readiness," Seager told Space.com. Neutron was originally expected to debut in 2024, but it has yet to make its maiden voyage.

That first flight, which will launch from Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 3 on Wallops Island, Virginia, also depends on the successful completion of the vehicle's qualification testing and acceptance program, according to the company.

While Venus probing via private means has been a bit booster-bushwhacked, there has been promising progress with the venture.

Ready for Venus duty

Rocket Lab is providing the shell for the entry probe. NASA's Ames Research Center developed its heat shield, called the Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET), which consists of woven material that can protect the spacecraft against temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit (2,500 degrees Celsius).

Also ready for Venus duty is the probe's pressure vessel. Seager's team is providing the AFN, along with their ongoing, rigorous science preparation.

NASA transferred the heat shield to Rocket Lab in March 2025. The Venus probe is now resting in Rocket Lab's Long Beach headquarters. A responsive space entrepreneurial firm, Rocket Lab is providing the launch vehicle, the cruise vehicle and the probe for the mission, which carries the instrument from Seager's team. The mission will conduct the first-ever largely privately funded investigation of Venus.

More to explore

Seager and her team aim to launch follow-on missions to Venus, too.

"After the Rocket Lab mission, we aim to send a payload to Venus to identify complex organic molecules," said Seager. "While this goal will not determine if life is present, it will establish that ingredients for life or molecules potentially used by life are present."

Seager and her colleagues have been studying two potential payloads for future missions. One is a laser desorption mass spectrometer, called ORIGIN, which is being built in Bern, Switzerland. A version of this instrument will soon travel to the surface of the moon on a private lander, via NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Furthermore, Seager and her extended team have been developing a 16-foot-wide (5-meter) balloon capable of floating through the skies of Venus for one Earth week. "We are also developing miniature molecular sensors to target specific molecules of interest, including carbon nanotube sensors," she said.

'High hopes'

Paul Byrne is an associate professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at the University of Washington in St. Louis, Missouri.

While the private Venus sojourn is currently in launch limbo, Byrne is bullish about its potential.

"The course of spacecraft exploration of the solar system rarely does run smoothly. Which is to say, we should expect delays, especially for a private mission, a company focused on developing their next class of rocket and a relatively underexplored destination," Byrne told Space.com.

"I continue to have high hopes for this mission, and for its role in demonstrating the role of private enterprise in space exploration," said Byrne, "and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a successful flight before too long!"

An abode for alien life?

Venus' surface is a scorching-hot hellscape, a planet ravaged by a runaway greenhouse effect. However, Venus has been receiving more and more attention as a potential abode for atmospheric alien life.

Seager and her colleagues suggest that there is mounting evidence that the ingredients for life may exist in the highly acidic clouds that blanket Venus.

In a new study that appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Seager and her team report that, not only can short peptides (short chains of amino acids) remain stable in extremely acidic conditions, they can also fold into shapes that may allow them to have biological functions.

"We really don't know the full extent of what planetary archetypes are out there. We're seeking exoplanets that might be a true Earth twin, but what if they're all Venuses? Our findings definitely open up a whole range of possibilities," Seager said in an Aug. 31 MIT statement.

"If you find life in the clouds of Venus, then you can pretty much assume that life is quite prevalent throughout the universe," said Peter Beck, founder, president and chief executive officer of Rocket Lab.

There are other interplanetary missions on Rocket Lab's radar, including its ideas for a Mars Sample Return mission. And the company already has Mars experience: It built the twin probes for NASA's Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, which launched toward the Red Planet atop a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket in November 2025.

To be confirmed

According to Rocket Lab's website, the initial mission with MIT — which the company calls Venus Life Finder — has a launch date that's in "to be confirmed" status.

Undaunted by delay, Byrne said that Venus continues to surprise — and additional surprises are surely to come.

"Revisiting old data has given us new insight into the planet's clouds, and the hazes found by earlier entry probes might in fact be from cosmic dust," he said. "These and many other discoveries continue to motivate researchers and mission developers, and Rocket Lab's mission is only going to motivate us further!"

A mysterious giant 10-sided pattern of clouds has recently formed around Saturn's south pole, a new study finds.

This newfound "decagon" joins the bizarre colossal hexagon seen for decades at Saturn's north pole. Saturn's hexagon — a cloud pattern about 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) wide — was first discovered in 1988 by scientists reviewing data from NASA's Voyager flybys of Saturn in 1980 and 1981. Despite decades of observations, no similar structure was seen anywhere else on Saturn  — until now, as scientists have discovered an even larger structure on Saturn.

The newfound decagon is about 104,250 miles (167,820 kilometers) wide, with each of its 10 sides measuring about 10,425 miles (16,782 km) long. "This is a very unusual atmospheric phenomenon that is helping us to advance our understanding of meteorology in general," study lead author Agustin Sanchez-Lavega, a planetary scientist at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, told Space.com. "It tells us that the hexagon is not a unique, singular feature, as was previously thought."

In the new study, researchers investigated recent images of Saturn captured with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The way that Saturn's axis is tilted meant that the ringed planet's southern hemisphere was not visible from Earth from 2012 to 2023.

Hubble images from 2023 revealed the decagon to scientists for the first time. "It certainly came as a surprise," Sanchez-Lavega said. Ever since the hexagon was discovered in Saturn's north, he and his colleagues had investigated pictures of Saturn "to see if there was a polygonal formation in the south. And there was no sign of it."

The decagon moves slowly. "It takes about 800 days to complete a rotation about Saturn," Sanchez-Lavega said.

Previous research suggested Saturn's hexagon results from an eastward jet within its atmosphere flowing in a curving path near the ringed planet's north pole. Small perturbations in the jet — the kind one might expect from jostling with other air currents — made it meander into a hexagonal shape.

Similarly, experiments that Sanchez-Lavega and his colleagues performed with computer simulations of currents in shallow water suggest the decagon formed because of a meandering wave trapped by a curving atmospheric jet. Unlike the hexagon, whose sides and points have remained equally dark for decades, the decagon varies in darkness across its features. This could mean that it may still be evolving.

"We need to understand how the decagon evolves — in other words, whether in the coming years it will become unstable and break up, or conversely, become more stable and robust as solar radiation increases, which will peak at its latitude of around 60 degrees south in 2032," Sanchez-Lavega said.

The scientists also want to gain a more detailed understanding of the three-dimensional structure of the decagon's clouds, hazes, winds and temperatures. This will help them "develop more advanced models of its formation," Sanchez-Lavega said.

The scientists detailed their findings Sept. 2 in the journal Science Advances.

UPDATE for Sept. 3: BepiColombo mission to Mercury successfully began its arrival sequence at the innermost planet with two spacecraft, one from Europe and the other from Japan, separating from its Mercury Transport Module. See what's ahead for the BepiColombo mission here.

The BepiColombo mission is finally getting ready to arrive at its exotic destination.

BepiColombo launched in October 2018 and took a long, looping and highly circuitous route toward Mercury our solar system's innermost planet. That journey is now nearly over, and the mission is gearing up for arrival.

BepiColombo's two science orbiters — one run by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the other by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) — will separate from their power and propulsion module on Thursday (Sept. 3) at around 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT). You can watch that milestone live here at Space.com, courtesy of ESA, starting at 7:45 a.m. EDT (1145 GMT).

ESA will pause the webcast at 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT), then resume it an hour later to cover the mission teams' acquisition of signals from the newly free-flying orbiters.

Those communications links are expected to be established no earlier than 9:53 a.m. EDT (1353 GMT), according to ESA officials. The webcast will chronicle that activity, as well as some spacecraft status checks, before ending between 10:15 and 10:45 a.m. EDT (1415 to 1445 GMT).

The separation is just the beginning of BepiColombo's Mercury-arrival phase. For example, the two science orbiters — ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO, or Mio) — won't be captured by the planet's gravity until Nov. 21.

The duo will still be linked up on that date. If all goes according to plan, MPO will release Mio into its final orbit — a highly elliptical one that gets as close as 367 miles (590 kilometers) to Mercury and as far away as 7,233 miles (11,640 km) — on Dec. 9 or Dec. 10, then start moving toward its own designated path a week later.

MPO is scheduled to reach its final orbit — an ellipse with altitude extremes of 298 miles and 932 miles (480 by 1,500 km) on March 10, 2027. The science phase of the BepiColombo mission (which is named after Italian mathematician and engineer Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo) will begin on April 6.

That science work — performed over the course of at least one Earth year — should be intriguing and rewarding. MPO will map Mercury and Mio will study its magnetosphere, working together to shed light on "the least explored planet in the inner solar system," ESA officials wrote in a BepiColombo mission description.

"Among several investigations, BepiColombo will make a complete map of Mercury at different wavelengths," they added. "It will chart the planet's mineralogy and elemental composition, determine whether the interior of the planet is molten or not, and investigate the extent and origin of Mercury’s magnetic field."

It's now possible to disentangle the sprinkling of supernova dust on the moon from the lunar dirt it is mixed up in, thanks to a new computer model that opens up the moon's surface as a time capsule holding details about the history of supernova explosions near the Earth as our solar system has travelled through space while orbiting the galaxy.

When stars explode as a supernova, they shower space with debris, some of which is in the form of radioactive isotopes traveling at high velocity. Some of these radioisotopes enter the solar system to fall on all the planets and moons, including Earth and its moon. Studies of radioisotopes in deep-sea sediments on Earth, coupled with those found in samples of lunar dirt – what scientists term 'regolith' – brought back by the Apollo missions, point to two recent peaks in supernova activity, 2.3 and 7.3 million years ago.

"I think it's beautiful that the remains of past stars can be used to navigate the vast history of our Earth–moon neighborhood, if we have knowledge of how to read the stardust," said planetary scientist Emily Costello, of the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, in a statement.

However, because of the process of erosion and subduction through plate tectonics, most Earth-bound records of supernova activity in our cosmic neighborhood have been lost and reliable records on Earth only go back about 10 million years. Earth's moon, however, is a different story. Because the moon has no atmosphere, there's no wind or rain erosion, nor are there any plate tectonics. The moon, therefore, should host a record of supernova activity going back 80–100 million years, or even longer.

However, while the moon lacks Earth's style of erosion, it does experience what planetary scientists refer to as 'impact gardening'. This is when impacts of objects ranging in size from microscopic micrometeorites to large asteroids, turns over the regolith, mixing it all up including the radioactive supernova debris.

In order to disentangle all this and work out at what depths various radioisotopes have been mixed down to, Costello's team developed a mathematical model that can decode what treasures lie in the lunar regolith.

"To model impact gardening, we have to balance a complex web of physical mechanisms, including impact compaction, excavation, radioactive decay and space weathering, all operating simultaneously within a single, elegant continuum model," said Costello.

"Our mathematical model treats lunar impact gardening as a competition between forces burying the soil and impacts digging it back up. It also accounts for radioactive decay of the star remnants while mapping exactly when and where new stardust was delivered by episodic supernovae."

Costello's team validated their model by comparing its predictions for the depth-concentration of supernova radioisotopes to what is found in Earth's deep-sea sediments and the Apollo samples.

"When I first shared my model results, my colleagues were surprised by how well-matched the model and the measurements were," said Costello, "This level of fidelity between empirical observations and a physics model is exciting and remarkable."

Their model accurately predicted the depth-concentration profile of iron-60 found in Apollo regolith samples, as well as heavy elements such as plutonium-244, iodine-129, hafnium-182 and curium-247 that have all been buried over time.

However, the real science will begin when future Artemis astronauts bring back new lunar samples from deeper beneath the surface over the coming years.

"These future samples taken from the moon, when considered in conjunction with our gardening model, could reveal new insights into an untold chapter of supernova history," said Costello. "Understanding the physics of regolith mixing ensures that when future astronauts return deeper cores, we can properly read the scrambled layers to reconstruct the history of our solar system's journey through the galaxy."

The findings were published on Aug. 14 in Physical Review Letters.

New research into the interior of Mars further emphasizes that the Red Planet is a world of two very different halves.

Deep inside the southern hemisphere of Mars, the temperature is up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius) warmer than beneath the northern hemisphere, deepening the mystery of the strange dichotomy between the Red Planet's flattened north and craggy southern highlands.

"Scientists usually assume that the interiors of planetary bodies are generally spherically symmetric, but this is not necessarily true," said Alexander Berne, formerly of Caltech and now at the University of Arizona, in a statement. Berne is the lead author of a new research paper revealing the discovery of the strange southern hotspot.

Berne and his team went back and looked at archival data from three NASA spacecraft – Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – to look for subtle changes in their orbital velocity that might reflect variations in Mars's gravitational field. Using a technique developed by Berne called 'tidal tomography' that also accounts for the sun's varying gravitational influence on Mars as the Red Planet progresses around its elliptical orbit, he and his team were able to infer a model of the interior structure and temperature of Mars.

How the gravitational field that the various spacecraft experienced changed over time differs substantially from what would be expected were Mars's interior perfectly spherically symmetrical. To explain this difference, the mantle beneath Mars's southern hemisphere must be between 390 and 750 degrees Fahrenheit (200 and 400 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mantle in the north, and indeed it is so warm that it could still be partially molten. This could have repercussions for both Mars's habitability and how long Mars remained volcanically active.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Mars's interior is different in the south compared to the north, because we already know that its surface is asymmetrical. The north of Mars is characterized by lowland plains, while the planet's crust in the south is on average 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) thicker than in the north and is covered by cratered highlands. The northern lowlands may have once been home to a large ocean.

"The dichotomy that we see between north and south is important to understand because it gives information about processes that may have influenced the hydrology of Mars, including the formation of basins that may have held water," said Caltech's Amirhossein Bagheri, who is the second author of the research.

A hotter southern mantle could also explain some other puzzling discoveries on Mars. NASA's InSight lander, which ended its mission in December 2022 and which had a seismometer on board, found that seismic waves dissipate more quickly in the south, which can be explained by the hotter temperature there. Additionally, magnetic anomalies found in iron-bearing minerals in the south now make more sense.

Today, Mars lacks a global magnetic field, but over four billion years ago it had one. If upwelling from a warmer southern mantle heated the crust in excess of the 'Curie temperature', which is the temperature at which materials lose their inherent magnetic properties and any residual magnetism in them is induced, it could have resulted in creating the mysterious magnetic remnants in the iron-bearing minerals.

"Understanding the interior structure of planetary bodies helps us unravel the processes that shaped their formation and evolution," said Berne, although the origin of Mars's north–south divide is still up in the air. It's not even clear whether the surface differences have the same causes as the interior differences.

The leading contender is that it's all the result of an ancient giant impact over four billion years ago and that the northern lowlands are therefore actually an enormous impact basin. By gouging out a huge hole in the north, the impact would have facilitated the release of a lot of internal heat, allowing the northern mantle to cool faster than the south.

Alternatively, the thicker crust in the south could have proven to be an efficient lid, preventing the leaking of much heat from the mantle. This can actually be tested – magma upwelling would have stalled as it encountered the thick, dense crust, creating melt intrusions beneath the surface that could be inferred in higher-resolution gravity data.

These are questions for future missions, but the tidal tomography technique could be employed for other worlds too, from Mercury to the large moons of Jupiter.

"As we get more gravity data, we can determine the three-dimensional intricacies of a planet's interior structure," said Berne. "These inferences in turn give us a blueprint for designing future missions and scientific exploration of these worlds."

The discovery of Mars's thermal anomaly was reported on Aug. 27 in Nature.

Unpopular opinion time, but someone has to say it: I think Pluto being reclassified as a dwarf planet was a great thing for our understanding of the solar system and for the former planet itself. Let me try to convince you, too.

First, a little background. The Pluto planet controversy began exactly 20 years ago on Aug. 24, 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) reclassified the solar system's (former) ninth planet as a dwarf planet.

The reason for the change was the result of the discovery of worlds similar to Pluto in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies and debris extending out beyond the orbit of Neptune. It suddenly became necessary to determine if these bodies are planets or whether the definition of what a planet is needs to be reshaped. The IAU decided on the latter. Pluto took the hit.

The 2006 definition developed for the IAU by the Uruguayan astronomers Julio Ángel Fernández and Gonzalo Tancredi says a planet is "a celestial body in the solar system that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium [it is round or nearly round], and it has 'cleared the neighborhood' around its orbit."

That meant a new definition had to be introduced for large round bodies orbiting the sun, one that meets these first two criteria, but fails to meet the the third. Thus, dwarf planets were defined by the IAU as: "an object in orbit around the sun that is large enough to pull itself into a nearly round shape but has not been able to clear its orbit of debris."

Pluto fell out of the planet category and into the dwarf planet category because, as it orbits the sun out beyond Neptune, other bodies cross its orbital path. Thus, Pluto hasn't cleared its neighborhood. Not a planet then, sorry.

But don't feel too bad. It is a good thing, honestly.

Pluto helped put dwarf planets on the cosmic map

The redefinition of Pluto has had a strange effect on the general public and even some scientists, who seem to "feel sorry" for the former planet, almost as if it has somehow been demoted. There are several Change.Org petitions and petitions on other sites that demand to restore Pluto's planethood. One of these, established in 2024, has over 1,000 signatures.

Some petitions to make Pluto a planet again fundamentally misunderstand why Pluto isn't a planet anymore. Take this one on slightly tongue-in-cheek petition on iPetitions, which states: "Pluto should not have its planet rights taken away form {sic] it just because it is small, so is Daniel, but that doesn't make him not a human anymore! This is a very urgent matter! This is an EMERGENCY!!"

I don't know who Daniel is, but I do know that Pluto being reclassified as a dwarf planet really exemplified how diverse the solar system actually is.

When we think of the solar system, we think of the planets orbiting the sun, and the moons orbiting their planets. Maybe we picture the occasional visit by an asteroid or comet. The reclassification of Pluto ensures that the general public can't really ignore the fact that there are many solar system bodies with sizes between planets and asteroids that are no less important than the planets themselves.

Many of these dwarf planets exist far from the sun, and don't visit the inner solar system — meaning they don't get blasted by high levels of solar radiation. Likewise, they generally haven't been affected by geological processes, meaning that the material they are composed of is unspoiled. Thus, dwarf planets could act as time capsules that allow us to study the matter that existed in the solar system when planets like Earth started to form.

We shouldn't ignore dwarf planets when we talk about the solar system, and as the king of the dwarfs, Pluto ensures we can't. Its change in status made the study of Kuiper Belt objects seem equally as important as the study of moons and planets.

There is also a really simple and logistical reason not to make Pluto a planet again. Though the IAU currently recognizes only five dwarf planets  — Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris  — astronomers think there are as many as 100 of them still waiting to be discovered.

If we let Pluto back into the planet party, then all these other dwarf planets should be allowed back in too, right? Keeping Pluto a dwarf planet better defines what a planet is and prevents an awkward situation in the future in which schoolchildren (and the rest of us) would have to remember upwards of 100 planets.

Don't 'feel sorry' for Pluto

If you are going to feel sorry for any dwarf planet, maybe it should be Ceres. The closest dwarf planet to Earth, it was discovered in 1801, 129 years before Pluto, and was therefore the first dwarf planet to be discovered (though it was not defined as such initially).

Pluto has really stolen Ceres' thunder as the solar system's most prominent dwarf planet.

Spare a thought for Eris as well. Also located beyond the orbit of Neptune, this dwarf planet is 1,445 miles (2,326 kilometers) wide, making it just a hair smaller than the largest solar system dwarf planet, Pluto, which is 1,477 miles (2,377 km) across. But Eris is actually more massive than Pluto, making it the most massive dwarf planet in the solar system, and Eris never even got the chance to be called a planet.

Where is the petition for Ceres or Eris, eh? Nowhere, that's where.

But seriously, there is something crucial to remember in all this: The redefinition of Pluto as a dwarf planet took away none of the former planet's wonder or beauty.

Is the bright heart-shaped plain of Sputnik Planitia, composed of squishy nitrogen ice, any less spectacular because it belongs to a dwarf planet? Are the towering 11,000-foot-high (3,350 m) ice mountains of Pluto any less majestic because they rise from the surface of a dwarf planet, not a planet?

What about the blue haze that envelops the dwarf planet? Or Pluto's regions of shifting ice that show the former planet to be far more active than we once thought? Are they less scientifically fascinating?

Were the observations made by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft less monumental for humanity, or less of an impressive scientific achievement, because this was only a nine-year trip to a dwarf world?

Of course, the answer to all of the above questions is definitely no.

Pluto may not be the ninth planet, but it still sits at the forefront of dwarf planets in our minds and helped to define a whole population of solar system bodies.

Let's give Pluto its due.

Twenty years after Pluto lost its planetary status, people are still arguing about it.

This spring, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman publicly threw his support behind "make Pluto a planet again," reigniting the familiar debate. Social media threads are filled with people arguing over whether Pluto should be grandfathered into the planetary club, whether dwarf planets are simply another kind of planet, and whether the distinction matters at all.

The disagreement dates to August 24, 2006, when members of the International Astronomical Union adopted a definition of a planet that placed Pluto in the dwarf-planet category. The scientific debate over how best to define a planet has continued in the years since, and the public has many thoughts, too — many people still cling to Pluto's identity as a planet. But why?

The planet we grew up with

From its discovery on February 18, 1930 to its demotion, Pluto belonged to one of the first maps of the universe that students learned: our solar system. There were nine planets, usually memorized in order through classroom diagrams, models and mnemonics such as "My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies."

Deana Weibel, a cultural anthropologist at Grand Valley State University, says those childhood associations have staying power long into adulthood. As a planet, Pluto was also particularly memorable: the farthest planet, the smallest planet, and a relatively recent addition to the solar system. "It was the knowledge that new planets could be added, with its story of being discovered in the 20th century," says Weibel.

For people who absorbed that version of the solar system as children, the 2006 decision required replacing something that had been an established fact. Laurie Groh, a licensed psychotherapist and owner of Shoreside Therapies in Milwaukee, says that helps explain why the change could provoke an emotional reaction disproportionate to its effect on everyday life. "People aren't grieving a planet," says Groh. "They're grieving the idea that what they learn is permanent. It isn't. Science changes and evolves."

That attachment may fade as generations raised with eight planets get older — but there's not a black-and-white cutoff date. Rob Crotzer, founder and editor of OuterSpaceTrip.com, has watched his own nine-planet upbringing filter down to his daughter Emily, who was born well after Pluto's reclassification. She learned about Pluto from him, her grandmother, and an astronomy atlas published before the 2006 vote. "My daughter was born into the eight-planet solar system," Crotzer says, "yet she has decided that eight isn't enough."

Why our brains resist recategorization

Nostalgia isn't the only force at play. "Our brains work via comparison and categories. That's how we make sense of anything and everything," says Matthew Leahy, a licensed clinical psychologist who studies memory and cognition. Humans rely on categories to organize enormous amounts of information, and changing an established category requires revising a framework that was already functioning perfectly well.

But Pluto presents an especially curious case because the stakes for most people are so low — its planetary status hardly affects the general public day-to-day. "The emotional meaning of a category can sometimes matter much more to us than its practical importance," says Leahy.

Groh also points to the way the change happened. Unlike Pluto's naming, when the public suggested monikers for the new planet, the public didn't participate in the scientific process of its recategorization. Changes imposed quickly from outside, Groh says, can invite resistance even when there is a solid reason behind them.

Rooting for the underdog

Then there is Pluto itself: small, distant, and lonely. "For many people, the issue is less about astronomy and more about rooting for the little guy, the underdog," says Kevin Schindler, historian and public information officer at Lowell Observatory, where Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930.

The language surrounding the change encourages that interpretation. Pluto is routinely described as having been "demoted," rather than simply reclassified, turning a technical distinction into something that sounds punitive. "We don't like the idea of the 'little guy' getting kicked out," Groh says. "We personify Pluto when we have that reaction."

That personification has helped give Pluto a cultural life all its own. At Lowell Observatory, affection for the dwarf planet is strong enough to inspire the annual I Heart Pluto Festival, a multi-day celebration of its discovery, science, and history. Nearly a century after Tombaugh first spotted Pluto from Flagstaff — and two decades after its reclassification — people still gather specifically to celebrate it.

In other words, becoming a dwarf planet didn't necessarily diminish Pluto's popularity; if anything, it gave people another reason to rally behind it.

Does it matter what Pluto is called?

Scientifically, yes, it does matter how we classify Pluto. Jessica Libby-Roberts, an assistant professor and exoplanet scientist at the University of Tampa, points to Pluto's unusual orbit, small size, and similarities to other Kuiper Belt objects as reasons the dwarf-planet classification makes sense. Categories allow researchers to compare objects and make sense of how the solar system formed.

But Libby-Roberts doesn't view its exclusion from the eight planets as a knock against Pluto. "Honestly, I think Pluto would rather not be grouped in with the boring rule-abiding planets anyway," she says. "It seems much happier doing its own thing."

A scientific label doesn't determine whether Pluto is interesting, either. Libby-Roberts notes that the 2015 New Horizons mission overturned expectations of a relatively generic, cratered world, instead revealing a dynamic one with mountains, glaciers, and an atmosphere.

"In some ways, it doesn't matter what Pluto is called because regardless of what label we humans assign to it, Pluto will keep orbiting the sun and doing its thing," Schindler says.

On Aug. 24, 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided that Pluto wasn't a planet anymore.

Since that date, Pluto has been officially classified as a dwarf planet along with four other confirmed dwarf planets in the outskirts of the solar system.

This decision sparked outrage around the world, and the controversy is still very much alive today. Astronomers in favor of Pluto's demotion argued that a planet by definition should have cleared its orbit around the sun. Pluto and the more distant dwarf planets fail to meet this criterion.

Why it mattered

When Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, many astronomers and scientists weren't happy with the result.

"I'm embarrassed for astronomy," said Alan Stern, leader of NASA's New Horizon's mission to Pluto and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. "Less than 5 percent of the world's astronomers voted."

Stern argued that according to the IAU's new definition, many other planets in our solar system would fail to meet the same criterion. Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune, for example, all share their orbits with asteroids.

But if Pluto were to keep its planetary status, many of the solar system's dwarf planets would also need to be classified as planets  — and there could be hundreds in our solar system.

While astronomers continue to debate the definition of planet and the implications thereof, the public has come together multiple times to defend Pluto's title.

For now, Pluto will just have to be the king of the dwarf planets. And that's pretty cool, too.

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.

The massive glaciers of Greenland are disappearing right before our very eyes in new satellite imagery.

What is it?

Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland connects the Greenland ice sheet to the Arctic ocean. Petermann's "ice tongue" has previously measured 43 miles (70 kilometers) long and 9 miles (15 km) wide. But new satellite imagery has revealed the glacier's floating "ice tongue" has broken apart in the glacier's most dramatic loss of floating ice since 2012.

On August 4, 2026, the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission captured imagery of the glacier that revealed that a 29 square mile (76 square km) section of the ice tongue has broken away. This is the most significant ice calving event (where ice breaks off of a glacier) seen in the Arctic since 2020.

"Satellite missions such as Sentinel-1 provide the systematic, long-term observations needed to track these changes, helping scientists better understand the processes driving calving and the wider impacts on the polar environment, and ultimately the Earth system as a whole," ESA Earth scientist Martin Wearing said in a statement.

Why is it incredible?

It is no secret that worsening climate change is contributing to significant ice loss. Antarctica has lost 5,000 square miles (12,950 square km) of grounded ice over the last three decades. Warming oceans are consistently eroding the arctic ice we have left which, when melted, contributes to rising sea levels.

But knowledge is power, and by studying Earth from the vantage point of space, Earth scientists can gather critical information about our changing planet.

"By studying Arctic ice islands, we will gain knowledge that can be transferred across polar regions. This is critical for understanding how the calving and deterioration of ice islands impact glacier dynamics, sea-level rise and the ocean environment," Anna Crawford, a glaciologist at the University of Stirling, said in the same statement.

In August of 2006, astronomers at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) democratically voted to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet — but 20 years later, with our greater knowledge and understanding of planetary systems, is it time to revisit the controversial decision? Should Pluto be called a planet again?

For several years before the IAU vote, there had been agitators among the astronomical community lobbying for our solar system's nine worlds to become eight, and for Pluto's planetary status to be revoked. In 2000, Neil DeGrasse Tyson even went as far as to remove Pluto from the planets display at the Hayden Planetarium in New York. The questioning of Pluto's status began even earlier, in the 1990s, with the discovery of distant objects in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune which had similar orbits to Pluto.

It all came to a head in July of 2005 with the discovery of Eris, which is a Pluto-size body even further from the sun than Pluto is. Was Eris the 10th planet? If it was not a planet, then how could we still call Pluto a planet? A year later, the issue was debated at a meeting of the IAU, where astronomers from all over the world convened to discuss various conundrums. Numerous proposals and counter-proposals were put forward, some of which even increased the number of recognized planets to as many as 14. But in the end, Pluto became a dwarf planet.

Though Pluto was officially "reclassified," to many in the public it seemed as though Pluto had experienced a demotion. This viewpoint was the one promoted by those scientists who were against the decision such as Alan Stern, who was the principal investigator on the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Stern's spacecraft would launch in 2005 on a journey to a planet, but arrive at a dwarf planet in 2015.

Some argued that Pluto was still a kind of planet, just a small one. This argument is undermined somewhat by the IAU giving Pluto a minor planet number — 134340 — which is typically reserved for asteroids. Nationalistic arguments from some in the United States said Pluto should remain a planet because it was discovered by an American astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, at Arizona's Lowell Observatory in 1930. And when New Horizons reached Pluto, it revealed not a minor body, but rather a complex world in its own right.

What is Pluto?

Nevertheless, for 20 years, Pluto has remained a dwarf planet, but on the anniversary of that fateful IAU vote, is it time to revisit that decision? Paul Byrne, a planetary astronomer at the University of Washington in St Louis, certainly thinks so.

"Yes, Pluto is a planet," he told Space.com. And not just Pluto, but the other dwarf planets too: Ceres, Eris, Makemake and Haumea, not to mention the likes of Sedna and Quaoar that are dwarf planets in all but name.

"Ultimately I think they are all planets and I don't think there's any benefit to not including Pluto as a planet," Byrne said.

To a point this entire debate is semantics, and Byrne accepts this viewpoint, reminding us that: "Nature doesn't care what we call Pluto."

However, perception is another matter, which is where Byrne thinks that the IAU's 2006 decree ultimately failed us. Byrne describes how, when he gives public talks about the planets, members of the audience don't ask questions about Pluto's amazing active nitrogen glaciers or what formed its giant heart-shaped feature. Instead, they want to know why it was demoted. The entire issue has got in the way of presenting the science to the public.

"We've done a massive disservice to the public from a science communication perspective," Byrne said. "The messaging has got in the way of trying to understand what Pluto is."

One of the arguments in 2006 was that models of the solar system's formation predict that there could be hundreds of objects like Pluto and Eris that remain undiscovered in the Scattered Disk and the Oort Cloud, which is a vast unexplored region that could extend up to a light-year from the sun.

"One of the issues people brought up was, how would kids remember the names of 200 planets?" said Byrne. "But just look at how many Pokémon there are that kids know the names of. If ultimately there are 200 planets in the solar system, then so what?"

The IAU definition of a planet

Semantics or not, how we categorize celestial objects has to be grounded in some kind of scientific thinking. In 2006, the IAU came up with a three-point plan on what makes a planet.

First, a planet had to be in hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning that its gravity has pulled it into a spherical shape. Furthermore, its interior will have become differentiated, with the heavier elements sinking to the core. Everyone seems to agree with this part of the planetary definition.

Second was that it must be in orbit around the sun, so a moon isn't a planet because a moon doesn't orbit the sun, it orbits a planet instead (though Byrne notes that if he had his way, he'd call the large moons planets too). Strictly speaking, this rules out exoplanets because they don't orbit our sun, but common sense dictates that they're fine because they orbit their own star instead. However, what about rogue planets that wander interstellar space alone? Astronomers are now beginning to discover very many of these free-floating worlds. It could be argued that most of these did indeed form in orbit around a star only to be ejected, so it's okay to still call them planets, but some rogue planets seem to have formed directly from the collapse of a gas cloud without having a parent star. Such planets fall through the gaps in the IAU's definition.

It's the third point that draws the critics' ire the most. It states that to be a planet, an object must have cleared its neighborhood. In other words, it must be dominant in the region around its orbit, its gravity having swept away any other bodies. Pluto fails at this because its orbit actually crosses Neptune's, and it's accompanied by other Kuiper belt objects in neighboring orbits. But then you could say Neptune mustn't be a planet because it has Pluto infringing on its orbital realm. And what about the existence of near-Earth asteroids? Does their existence mean that Earth isn't a planet because it hasn't cleared those away yet? There certainly does seem to be some sloppiness in this part of the definition of a planet, perhaps resulting from the somewhat rushed nature of the vote 20 years ago.

Planetary processes

But if the IAU decision were to be rejected, what should replace it? How should we classify planets? Byrne has some ideas.

"Being round and having some amount of differentiation makes a lot of sense to me," he said. "Geophysically, if they are big enough to pull themselves into balls, then they are big enough to have undergone some kind of internal chemical processing and are capable of having some kind of active geology, in terms of the outgassing of volatiles to form an atmosphere, volcanism, surface geomorphological processes, even a short-lived magnetic field. That's why I count the moon as a planet because it has had these planetary processes."

Byrne acknowledges that gas giants don't have these properties since they have no solid surface, but no one is doubting Jupiter's planetary credentials, and when it comes to Uranus and Neptune we don't actually know whether or not there is some sort of super-Earth itself lurking deep within them.

The moniker "dwarf" doesn't impress Byrne either. To him, it sounds like it implies there is a hierarchy of planets with the gas giants at the top and the dwarf planets at the bottom.

"There is no natural hierarchy; they don't form according to one," he said. And although Pluto, Eris and the other dwarf planets are made from detritus left over from the construction of the solar system, they still coalesced in the same way as the other planets, in the sense that building blocks came together to form these larger objects.

A counterargument to Pluto being a planet, however, is that if it is just one of 200, then it is nothing special; it would become forgotten and ultimately treated almost incidentally. As a dwarf planet, it is the standard bearer of its kind, the guardian of an entire realm of similarly sized worlds. It's a choice between being a big fish in a little pond, or a little fish in a big pond.

The other 200 planets?

The real test will come when astronomers begin to discover some of these purported 200 or so planets far from the sun. As long as they are all roughly Pluto-size, there will be no debate — but what happens when astronomers discover one the size of Mars, or one even as large as Earth? We would surely think of an object so large as a planet. Perhaps this world would have formed closer to the sun but was kicked out through gravitational interactions with one of the giant planets, but on the other hand perhaps it formed out there in the outer solar system from the same detritus as Pluto did.

"By the IAU definition it would fail to be defined as a planet because it wouldn't have cleared its neighborhood," said Byrne. "If we did find such a planet it would be another nail in the coffin of trying to distinguish these things solely on the basis of where they are and not what they are."

Whatever the case, if Pluto is to be a planet again, it must deserve to be so scientifically. Nostalgia, or nationalistic pride, or giving kids names of planets to remember aren;t sufficient reasons to revoke the original IAU decision. Revisiting the name "dwarf planet" and finding a more appropriate category could be the way to go instead.

Or, perhaps we just don't have the words to describe the things that we are discovering. Concepts such as planets are rooted in history going back millennia when there was no understanding what these wandering "stars" really were, so perhaps it is not surprising that we are now running into difficulty when trying to apply the term "planet" to our modern understanding of the different types of worlds. If there is no way of categorizing these objects that is consistent and satisfactory to everyone, then perhaps we ought to stop worrying so much about it.

Whatever we decide to call it, Pluto will always be Pluto.

A misbehaving coronal mass ejection (CME) that blew out a hidden cloud of charged particles aimed at Earth has been tracked by a record 17 spacecraft spread throughout the solar system, revealing the CME to be surprisingly lopsided.

CMEs are "burps" from the sun – huge clouds of magnetized plasma belched out from the sun's hot outer atmosphere, the corona, by the energy resulting from a solar flare. The magnetized CME cloud then expands out into the solar system, and the charged particles that the cloud contains are a significant radiation hazard to astronauts, spacecraft and even passengers on jet liners, but they also have a beautiful side as they can trigger the beautiful lights of the aurora when they intercept Earth.

CMEs occur on a regular basis, but one that erupted from the sun at 00:48 UT (7:48 p.m. ET) on Dec. 15, 2024 proved to be rather special.

"We used observations from 17 spacecraft to track and characterize this CME," Adrienn Luspay-Kuti of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who led the research that drew all the observations together, told Space.com. "This was a record number of spacecraft for tracking and characterizing a single CME, and gave us an exceptionally detailed view of how the CME evolved."

The previous record had been 10 spacecraft, but they had mostly been in a rough line from the sun through to the Earth and beyond, meaning that their measurements were somewhat one-dimensional. This time, for the December 2024 CME, the spacecraft were spread far and wide, not just at different distances from the sun, but also substantially wide of the Earth–sun line.

They revealed that the CME had two asymmetric lobes, one moving faster than the other. One of those lobes, which headed for Earth and Mars, would have gone unseen, obscured by the larger but slower lobe that left the sun at a tangent, were it not for the wide spread of the spacecraft.

"Our observations showed a fast lobe propagating through the Earth–Mars sector and a much slower lobe farther west toward STEREO-A," said Luspay-Kuti. STEREO-A is one half of NASA's two-spacecraft space weather monitoring system known as the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory.

The onset of the CME was seen by the joint NASA–ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observer (SOHO), which has been constantly monitoring the sun for more than 30 years. Yet it only saw the slower lobe that erupted at an angle to Earth; the faster lobe heading for our planet was missed, obscured by the slower, larger lobe.

The CME was next detected at a distance from the sun of 0.35 astronomical units (AU; 1 AU is the distance of Earth from the sun) on Dec. 16 moving through space near Mercury and the European Space Agency's BepiColombo mission (which finally arrives into orbit around the innermost planet in November 2026).

The next detection, on Dec. 17, was of the "hidden" component arriving at Earth, where a multitude of spacecraft picked it up. The CME was not strong enough to produce significant aurorae. Intriguingly Europe's Solar Orbiter mission, on an elongated orbit around the sun and at the time 0.94 AU from the sun and just 10 degrees off the Earth–sun line, did not detect the CME. This non-detection was actually vital since it helped to constrain the shape of the CME.

Then on Dec. 18, the slower moving lobe reached NASA's STEREO-A spacecraft, which orbits the sun at the same distance as Earth — 1 AU —- but substantially ahead of Earth in its orbit. The lobe that intersected the Earth had an average velocity of 522 miles (840 kilometers) per second, but the other lobe dragged its feet, moving at an average of 332 miles (534 km) per second from the sun and past BepiColombo and STEREO-A. In fact, by the time it reached STEREO-A, it had slowed to about 248.5 miles (400 km) per second. Both lobes decelerated as a result of friction with the regular solar wind that the CME was overtaking, and the range of velocities measured in the CME told researchers that the solar eruption was not traveling as a single, unified front.

Beyond Earth NASA's Europa Clipper mission, on which Luspay-Kuti is the Principal Investigator for the spacecraft's Plasma Instrument for Magnetic Sounding (PIMS) experiment, detected the faster moving lobe at 1.19 AU as the spacecraft was cruising to Mars for a gravity assist to help it on its journey to Jupiter. At the red planet, the now-defunct MAVEN mission also detected the CME on Dec. 19 to Dec. 20.

To have not only so many spacecraft follow the progress of a CME but also enough spacecraft off the Earth–sun line to measure the shape of the CME, at least in two dimensions, is a significant step forward in understanding and forecasting the propagation of CMEs.

"This matters for future human exploration because a missed CME can mean losing valuable warning time," said Luspay-Kuti. "Fast CMEs can drive shocks that accelerate high-energy particles, which can pose a radiation hazard to astronauts outside Earth's protective magnetic field. This is why observations from multiple viewpoints, including spacecraft away from the sun–Earth line and planetary missions operating during their cruise phase, will become increasingly important for space-weather forecasting as human exploration moves further from Earth."

The asymmetrical double-lobed structure of this particular CME was certainly a surprise. The cause of the asymmetry remains unclear at present, though Luspay-Kuti told Space.com that researchers are investigating. The main question is, how frequent are asymmetric CMEs?

"In the context of previous observations, this event is at the most extreme end of observed CME variability," said Luspay-Kuti. "Are highly asymmetric CMEs actually fairly common but we fail to recognize them because we don't have enough observational coverage, or are they genuinely rare?"

The 17 spacecraft that detected or imaged the CME across some or all of its various stages – the bow shock and turbulent sheath ahead of the magnetic cloud, the CME itself and the turbulent wake left in the solar wind after its passing – were the following: SOHO (initial imaging), BepiColombo, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, STEREO-A, the four spacecraft of the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, the two spacecraft of the ARTEMIS (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence, and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the sun) mission, NASA's Wind, ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer), GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) and DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) missions, Europa Clipper, MAVEN and Solar Orbiter, the latter of which made measurements but did not detect the CME.

In the future, these missions will be joined by the European Space Agency's Vigil mission that will watch for space weather when it launches in 2031 for the sun–Earth L5 Lagrange point, 60 degrees behind Earth in its orbit and therefore providing additional off-axis monitoring.

The findings were published on Aug. 19 in the journal Science Advances.

The world just got its first good looks at some hardware that will make spaceflight history.

Last Thursday (Aug. 13), Japan unveiled the spacecraft that make up its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission, which aims to snag samples of the Mars moon Phobos and haul them to Earth — something that has never been done.

The big reveal came at Tanegashima Space Center, the site from which MMX will launch toward the Red Planet atop an H3 rocket. And we just got some clarity about when that liftoff will take place.

If all goes according to plan, MMX will launch on Oct. 19 at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT; 4:41 a.m. on Oct. 20 Japan time), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on Thursday (Aug. 20). That's the first day of the mission's launch window, which extends through Nov. 7.

JAXA originally intended to launch MMX in 2024 but had to stand down due to issues with the H3. Mars and Earth align properly for interplanetary launches just once every 26 months, so this was a significant delay.

MMX will spend about a year traveling to Mars. Once in orbit around the Red Planet, the mission will map and study its two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, which are just 14 miles (22 kilometers) and 7.5 miles (12 km) wide, respectively.

Part of this work will help the mission team pick a landing site on Phobos, where they'll drop a 55-pound (25 kilograms) French-German rover called Idefix. That little robot — which is named after the dog in the French comic "Asterix" — will study Phobos' surface in detail using a variety of instruments.

The MMX spacecraft itself will then spiral down toward Phobos, eventually making contact and collecting about 0.35 ounces (10 grams) of material. MMX will leave Mars orbit with these samples in 2030 and deliver them to Earth for analysis a year later.

The mission aims to shed light on the nature and origin of Phobos and Deimos.

"Understanding how Mars and the two moons formed is a heavily debated topic in solar system science," JAXA officials wrote in a mission description.

"Remote-sensing observations by the MMX spacecraft and the detailed analyses of the returned sample will determine whether Phobos and Deimos are remnants of early Mars created from debris produced by a giant impact with the young planet, or whether the moons are asteroids captured by Mars's gravity that brought material from outer solar system," they added.

To date, no spacecraft has returned material from the Mars system. Russia tried to do so with its Phobos-Grunt mission, which aimed to sample the eponymous Red Planet moon, but that effort failed shortly after its November 2011 launch. (The Soviet Union also launched two probes to Phobos in 1988, but neither one of them met its mission objectives.)

NASA plans to collect and haul home pristine samples that have already been collected on the Martian surface by its Perseverance rover, but it's unclear when or if that will happen. The agency has deemed its original sample-return architecture too expensive and is currently investigating other options.

There are good reasons to believe that Japan will succeed where others have failed, however. The country has a history of small-body sample-return success; its Hayabusa mission brought home pieces of the asteroid Itokawa in June 2010, and Hayabusa2 did the same with material from the space rock Ryugu in December 2020.

Update for Aug. 23: Bad weather has pushed the Chang'e 7 launch back considerably, possibly until 2027. Read our delay story.

China's moon exploration program is readying an ambitious robotic mission, one composed of an orbiter, a lander, a rover, a hopper, and a wide range of international experiments including a U.S.-supported payload.

In April of this year, Chang'e-7 hardware was transported to the Wenchang launch site, targeting an Aug. 24 launch atop a Long March 5 Y14 rocket. The lander's destination is the edge of Shackleton Crater in the lunar south pole region.

After launch, the Chang'e-7 orbiter will spend several months orbiting the moon before releasing its lander for an attempted touchdown near the end of the year. While Chang'e-7 will carry out ambitious, groundbreaking lunar science, it will also serve to lay the groundwork for the first Chinese human landing on the lunar surface by 2030.

James Head is a leading moon scientist at the department of geological sciences at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He says China's upcoming moon launch will set a new benchmark for lunar science voyages.

"Chang'e-7 is the most ambitious, comprehensive, and complex robotic lunar mission ever attempted by any nation or entity," Head told Space.

Likewise, Zhang Jingbo, a spokesman for the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) agency, said earlier this year that the mission will "fully leverage the technological expertise and practical experience accumulated over decades" to "spare no effort to strive for the goal of achieving the first Chinese landing on the moon by 2030."

Pockets of water ice

Once unleashed from the Chang'e-7 lander, the hopper is slated to "jump" from sunlit areas to shadowed craters in a quest to find pockets of water ice. The hopper utilizes active shock-absorption technology to safely land on slopes. The lander will also deploy China's inaugural deep-space "landmark image navigation" system.

While scientists around the globe believe there's water ice on the moon, said Ye Peijian, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, no one has definitively found and fully evaluated that resource as yet.

"Now China is going to look for it, [...] And we're using many methods, from searching the surface to exploring inside craters," Ye told China Central Television (CCTV).

Back-to-back duties

The Chang'e-7 mission will adopt an integrated exploration approach, added CCTV, combining orbiting, landing, roving, and hopping, to survey the environment and resources of the lunar south pole, while also carrying out international cooperation.

Moreover, a Chang'e-8 mission is set for around 2028, designed to test technologies for building habitats using lunar soil.

Taken together, the two robotic projects  — Chang'e-7 and Chang'e-8  — are assigned duties to assist in orchestrating China's planned, multi-phased, International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

Variety of instruments

Chang'e-7 mission hardware is outfitted with a variety of instruments from other nations and organizations, such as:

• On the lander, a Russian Academy of Sciences' PmL-Ch7 suite to detect lunar dust and a Langmuir probe to gauge the temperature and density of nearby plasma.
• An Italian laser retroreflector array on the lander is provided by the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati.
• A small, state-of-the-art, wide-field optical telescope mounted on the lander developed by the International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA Hawaii) and the Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong (HKU-LSR).
• LunaHcam, a camera attached to the Chang'e-7 orbiter and jointly developed by the Bahrain Space Agency and the Egyptian Space Agency to churn out high-resolution hyperspectral images of the moon's surface.
• Moon Aiming Thai-Chinese Hodoscope (MATCH) onboard the orbiter and developed by the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand. It will assess high-energy particles related to space weather and cosmic radiation tossed out by the sun.
• Moon-based Dual-channel Earth Radiation Spectrometer on the orbiter has been provided by Switzerland's Physical Meteorological Observatory.

Compact lunar camera

The ILO-C instrument from ILOA Hawaii and the Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong will be housed directly on the Chang'e-7 lunar lander, bound for the illuminated rim of Shackleton Crater.

"The HKU Lab for Space Research is proud to partner with ILOA for this historic lunar mission and we look forward to working with them to maximize the scientific return this exceptional wide field optical lunar camera will deliver," said Quentin Parker, professor emeritus of the University of Hong Kong.

Through visible color imaging, the ILO-C camera project aims to spark public interest in lunar exploration, astronomy, and space science, Parker said, thereby laying a social foundation for future lunar science missions.

Moon-based vantage point

Operating in the extreme lunar environment, the compact camera will conduct first-ever astronomical color imagery from the moon, said Elisa Perednia, President and Chair of ILOA. The camera is designed to capture unprecedented wide-field, full color imagery of the Milky Way's Galactic plane from a stable, moon-based vantage point, she said.

One sad note: The camera onboard China's moon lander was pioneered by ILOA's founding director Steve Durst who passed earlier this year. He was a visionary leader that worked with Chinese aerospace representatives since the 1980s.

The Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics & Electricity (BISME) built the camera to ILO-C team member specifications.

"We are proud to have joined the mission and to help realize Steve's wonderful vision," Parker at HKU-LSR told Space.com.

Microbes from Earth might survive the harsh surface of the moon, albeit in a state of suspended animation, a new study finds.

Previous research suggested the surface of the moon was too harsh for microbes to survive. Specifically, a 2019 study found ultraviolet rays and heat from the sun are the greatest barriers for microbial life on the lunar surface.

However, this prior work did not account for the shelter that hills and valleys might supply on the moon. These could prove especially significant at the lunar poles, where the sun never climbs high in the sky, leading to permanently shadowed regions that can host ice — and perhaps more.

In the new study, researchers analyzed three kinds of bacteria and two kinds of fungus. These are all commonly found on crewed space missions, and include microorganisms that prior work discovered were especially durable in the harsh conditions of space. Previous research found these lifeforms are resistant to vacuum, cold and high-energy particles.

The scientists compared previously compiled survivability data of these microbes with lunar maps that captured ultraviolet and heat readings on the moon's surface. They found that both lunar poles likely have areas where microbes could survive, albeit in a state of suspended animation known as cryptobiosis in which they could not move or grow unless more hospitable conditions appeared.

Microbes might not need much in the way of shelter on the moon. "Even a bootprint or a rover's tread may create a habitable area," study co-author Prabal Saxena, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told Space.com.

NASA's Artemis III mission is planned to be the first time humans will explore the lunar south pole. "Our findings show that we need to be even more thoughtful about the materials that we might unintentionally take with us when we are exploring space, and the impacts that we might have," study co-author Heather Graham, an organic geochemist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com.

In addition to the possibility that missions to the moon might bring microorganisms there, the scientists added it might be possible that ancient cosmic impacts might have blasted rocks bearing microbes off Earth that could have landed on the moon. "The moon might be like Earth's freezer, preserving really interesting bits of evidence of Earth's past if they landed at the moon's poles," Saxena said.

Future experiments may test just how well microbes of many kinds might survive on the moon, Saxena said. "We have this great opportunity to really think about the limits of life and how resilient it is even in incredibly extreme environments," he said.

All in all, "the moon is a really diverse and interesting body, and the lunar poles are really unique regions in terms of how they can trap volatiles like water, and the ability to trap life," Saxena said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 19 in the journal Science Advances.

Europe's Mars Express orbiter has captured new, stunning imagery flying low over a geological region of the Red Planet shaped by ancient waterflow billions of years ago.

Mars Express launched in 2003 and is operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). It's equipped with the High Resolution Stereo Camera, which scans multiple points of perspective across regions of Mars' surface to create 3D color renderings. During a low pass on the spacecraft's highly elliptical orbit, Mars Express flew over the planet's Southern Highlands and Schiaparelli Crater — one of Mars' largest impact sites.

Schiaparelli Crater is located in a heavily cratered region of Mars' Southern Highlands, where a wetter and warmer climate supported water flows that shaped the planet's geography 3.7 billion years ago, according to ESA's Mars Express video. Schiaparelli measures more than 285 miles (460 km) across, and has a bit of fictional fame. The crater happens to be the site where astronaut character Mark Watney gets stranded in Andy Weir's "The Martian". It also shares a namesake with ESA's real-life Schiaparelli Mars lander, which crashed on Mars' surface in 2016 (but wasn't headed for Schiaparelli Crater).

Both are named for Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910), who made detailed observations of Mars during the planet's closest approach in 1877. Schiaparelli created a map of "canali," Italian for "channels," he saw as dark lines across its surface, which he assumed were filled with water. That was later mistranslated by English-speaking astronomers as "canals," leading to speculation about intelligent life on Mars constructing artificial structures.

Though that hypothesis for Mars' surface features was disproven by later astronomers (to date, there have been no discoveries on Mars that suggest intelligent life once lived there), it has since been discovered that Mars once did have active bodies of water on its surface. Schiarapelli's contributions to the astronomical field were significant enough to land him the honor of a Martian crater in his name.

Despite its massive diameter, Schiaparelli is considered shallow compared to other Martian craters its size. It was once much deeper, but sediment deposited by wind and ancient water flows, volcanic eruptions and asteroid impact debris have filled the crater over the last several billion years.

In addition to showcasing Mars Express' new footage, the ESA video also provides an explanation for how the satellite uses its High Resolution Stereo Camera to observe five simultaneous viewing angles over a four-color spectrum as it flies low over the planet. The low-orbit passes allow Mars Express to capture swaths of 3D data that span hundreds to thousands of miles long and dozens of miles across. Those are then stitched together to form more complete regional maps, which can be added to scientists' increasingly complex model of the entire Martian globe.

The "Eye of Africa" swirls across Mauritania in a hypnotizing snapshot captured from space.

What is it?

A 25-mile-wide (40 kilometer-wide) circular structure made up of concentric ridged rings sticks up from the Earth in Mauritania, a country on the coast of northwestern Africa. While it might look like an elaborate, hand-carved piece of artwork, it's actually a natural geologic feature.

Formally known as the Richat Structure and nicknamed the "Eye of Africa," this geologic formation can be seen clearly from space.

The first time this feature was seen from space was in 1965 when NASA astronauts Ed White and James McDivitt photographed it during the Gemini IV mission.

61 years later, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir has photographed the feature from aboard the International Space Station where she is working as part of Expedition 75.

Why is it incredible?

Meir shared the photo of the structure on social media along with other photographs from that region.

"The Richat Structure (or Eye of Africa) in Mauritania is photographed from above by many astronauts, but something about the lighting and coloring on this day captured my artistic eye. This palette and textures of this region of Africa scream pure Earth Art, at least in my brain!" Meir said in the post where she shared her photos.

Amazingly, because of its massive size, this geologic feature is perhaps most clearly seen from space. While astronauts aboard the ISS are orbiting our planet from hundreds of miles away, theit vantage point actually allows them to see the full, expansive circles that make up the "Eye of Africa." And while we've been seeing it from space since 1965, the view really never gets old.

NASA's veteran moon-circling spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), has imaged the impact site of that errant Falcon 9 upper stage.

The photos were taken on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12, just a few days after the SpaceX rocket body slammed into the moon near Einstein Crater at 5,400 mph (8,690 kph).

LRO's high-resolution camera system, known as LROC, got good views of the aftermath from a variety of angles, snapping away every 117 minutes, the time it takes the orbiter to circuit the moon.

Diameter and depth

According to LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson, who's based at the Houston company Intuitive Machines, the newly formed impact crater is about 60 feet (18 meters) wide and appears to be less than 10 feet (3 m) deep.

"The distinctive V-shaped ejecta pattern on the south side of the crater is consistent with natural impactors hitting the moon at low angles relative to the surface," said Robinson.

The sixth (and final) image in LROC's sequence of the new crater, he added, was acquired with the largest slew angle (68 degrees), presenting a view similar to what an Artemis astronaut would see looking out his or her Orion spacecraft window toward the lunar horizon.

Telling tilts

To capture imagery of the impact site, LRO operators tilted the spacecraft so its cameras would point toward the target region each time the spacecraft passed about 60 miles (97 km) above the moon. In doing so, researchers could see the crater under multiple lighting conditions that revealed impact features.

According to NASA, the LRO imagery shows bright and dark rays stretching out from the crater.

"The darker streaks are made of surface dust and rocks altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. This weathered material was excavated by the collision," with the brighter streaks near the crater rim formed by "fresh material excavated from deeper underground," NASA officials said in an Aug. 18 statement.

Korea's lunar orbiter

The site of the Aug. 5 crash was imaged earlier by the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, also known as Danuri. That mission team used Danuri's high-resolution Lunar Terrain Imager to spot the new crater. After capturing images of the impact zone, the Danuri mission sent updated crater coordinates to the LRO team to help refine their follow-up imaging sequence, NASA officials said.

Wandering through space for over a year and a half, the leftover Falcon 9 upper stage had sent two robotic landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Resilience, built by the Japanese company ispace — toward the moon back on Jan. 15, 2025. Blue Ghost succeeded in its lunar touchdown, but Resilience crashed during its attempt.

People around the world enjoyed stellar views with last week's total solar eclipse.

And the day after we looked up to see the moon obscuring out sun, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover looked up to see its own Martian solar eclipse.

What is it?

Solar eclipses aren't unique to Earth. In theory, any planet with at least one orbiting moon would have times where that moon might eclipse some part of its sun to anyone looking up from the planet's surface.

On Aug. 13, 2026, one day after Earth's total solar eclipse in which our moon temporarily blocked out our sun for skywatchers in some locations, Mars saw its own solar eclipse.

Looking up with its left Mastcam-Z camera, Perseverance snapped this image of one of Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, partially eclipsing the sun. This appears to be Phobos — the larger of the pair — eclipsing the sun.

Why is it incredible?

So far, we humans have only directly had vantage points on Earth, in Earth orbit and on the moon. We have not yet landed humans on Mars, and it remains unclear how long it might be before that happens.

But robotic explorers like Perseverance allow us to travel where we can't go ourselves. Such travelers have taken us into interstellar space and all throughout our solar system. From Saturn's rings to Neptune's distant, icy neighborhood, robotic probes have allowed humanity's reach to stretch far through the cosmos.

And thanks to Perseverance and its two "eyes," the two Mastcam-Z cameras located high on its mast, we can travel right to the surface of Mars, look up and see an alien solar eclipse. What an amazing thing that is.

Imagine orbiting hundreds of miles above Earth and seeing your home planet below — up in smoke.

That was the reality recently for astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) who captured this image of the volcano Mount Rainier covered in smoke from nearby wildfires.

What is it?

This past July, hundreds of wildfires devastated a number of regions across Canada. But unfortunately, this was not the end of wildfires decimating North America this summer.

Recently, wildfires have spread across Washington and Oregon, burning over 84,000 acres (34,000 hectares) as of Aug. 12, according to NASA.

This image, captured by astronauts aboard the ISS, shows smoke blowing from wildfires in central and eastern Washington to the volcano Mount Rainier. The astronauts also captured imagery of Mt. Hood about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south. With Mt. Hood, you can also see thick plumes of smoke coming from the Grasshopper fire, which was ignited by a lightning strike.

Why is it incredible?

This is the worst fire season the Pacific Northwest has seen in over 30 years, CNN has reported. The wildfires have forced many to evacuate their homes, shut down major roads and more. In addition to the immediate dangers presented by the wildfires themselves, as we can see from these images, the smoke from the fires extends far and wide and has created unhealthy air quality levels.

As of Wednesday (Aug. 12), over 2.7 million acres (1.1 million hectares) had already burned, and by Friday (Aug. 14), the region still had dozens of uncontained wildfires, CNN reported.

And higher-than-normal risk for fires to continue through the month of August are expected, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

While tackling the problem of wildfires — which is increasing as climate change worsens — takes place on Earth, we can learn a lot from seeing things from above. The vantage point of outer space allows for views like this, which can give a larger perspective. And satellite views can provide even more in-depth information to support wildfire fighting activities back on Earth.

On Aug. 17, 1877, American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered Mars's moon Phobos.

Moons of Mars: Amazing Photos of Phobos and Deimos

Hall was working at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. and looking through a 26-inch refractor telescope — which was then the largest in the world — when he first spotted the moon. Six days earlier, he had discovered another, smaller moon that he first described as "a faint star near Mars."

Upon further inspection, not only did he realize that this star was actually the Martian moon Deimos, but he also discovered a second, larger moon now known as Phobos. He announced both discoveries the following day, on Aug. 18, 1877.

Phobos is the largest moon of Mars. Its dimensions measure 10 by 14 by 11 miles (17 by 22 by 18 kilometers) across and orbits Mars three times each Martian day at a distance of about 3,700 miles (6,000 km).

Why it mattered

Over the century and a half since this discovery, there has been an enormous amount of scientific progress in the study of Mars. In addition to many decades of studying the planet from afar, we have seen a variety of different orbiters and rovers explore the Red Planet over the past few decades. We have sampled bits of Martian material, seen up-close photos of the planet and the rocks which scatter across its surface. It might be easy to take for granted how much we know about our planetary neighbor, and this 19th century discovery was groundbreaking.

As we look to the future with new technologies and new discoveries on the horizon, it is important to also look backward to see and understand the history and work that made all of this progress possible.

Chinese researchers have presented a new map of the moon, updating a previous edition based on new scientific findings and recalibrating the moon's ancient geologic eras.

The comprehensive map of the moon, with a scale of 1:5 million, was unveiled by the Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences (IGCAGS) on Aug. 6. The map is an update of a 2024 edition and puts forward new boundaries for the ancient Aitkenian, Nectarian and Imbrian lunar periods. (The researchers use the term Aitkenian, whereas the term pre-Nectarian is often used to describe the lunar geologic period from roughly around 4.5 billion to 3.9 billion years ago.)

The map also uses reprocessed spectral data to update areas of KREEP terrane, which features crustal material enriched in potassium (K), rare-earth elements (REE), and phosphorus (P), and is found to be more continuous and abundant than previously estimated.

"The lunar geologic history has indeed been rewritten — more precisely, refined and systematized," the state-run outlet Xinhua quoted Yang Zhiming, director of the IGCAGS, as saying.

Both the United States, through the Apollo missions, and the Soviet Union delivered lunar samples to Earth more than 50 years ago, greatly shaping research on and understanding of the moon. China's own robotic sample return missions, Chang'e 5 and Chang'e 6, launched in 2020 and 2024, respectively, have provided fresh materials and new insights.

Chang'e 6 was the first sample-return mission to the lunar far side. Chinese researchers say the returned material will provide a new starting point for scientific discussions on the nature of that hemisphere of the moon, which is hidden from view on Earth.

The map "introduces a proprietary cartographic standard," according to Xinhua, amid a wider, Chinese government-driven initiative to influence global standards. In terms of space, aspects of the map such as the color scheme, geologic logic and an aesthetic "lighter for younger, darker for older" principle will be applied more broadly as China looks to expand its exploration beyond the moon and into the outer solar system.

"This goes beyond showcasing technological soft power. This standard will be extended to future planetary geologic mapping, establishing an independent intellectual property framework for China's deep space exploration," Yang said.

Both China and the United States have interests in setting standards as humanity renews its interest in exploring the moon. While on Earth everyone agrees on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the two countries currently disagree about what time it is on the moon, where clocks run faster due to weaker gravity. This suggests that leadership in space will be contested not just through missions and firsts, but via whose technical standards are followed, with China's new map playing into these efforts.

An 8,800-pound (4,000 kilograms) Falcon 9 rocket stage hit the moon last Wednesday (Aug. 5), stirring lunar regolith in a massive plume of dust observable all the way from Earth.

The rocket joined some 3,000 manmade objects scattered on the surface of our planet's companion. Some experts think it's about time we start treating the pristine lunar environment with a bit more respect.

Around 200 tons of Earth stuff have been either deliberately left on or crashed into the moon since the beginning of the space age. Some of this material has a prominent place in history books: The descent modules from all six Apollo landing missions, Soviet Lunakhod rovers from the 1970s and China's 2010s Yutu 1 and 2 robots still sit where they had been left or ran out of power.

But there is also a lot of stuff on the moon that wasn't really meant to end up there. Astronomer and space historian Jonathan McDowell says that many rocket stages and other objects left in orbit between Earth and the moon since the first lunar missions in the 1960s may have ended up on the gray dirt. Four years before the Falcon 9 upper stage crashed near Einstein Crater, for example, part of a Chinese Long March 3C rocket slammed into the moon's far side. And experts think such incidents could become increasingly common in the coming years, as exploration of the moon intensifies.

"We're in a transitional moment," McDowell told Space.com. "From the era when there was rare lunar exploration mostly by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, we've seen over the past decade other nations landing on the moon and the beginning of commercial missions. But governance has not kept up with this. We don't have an international set of agreements on how to operate near the moon, how to coordinate activities near the moon, and we're really going to need it because, not only is the amount of activity at the moon increasing, but the number of different players is greatly increasing, too."

Human activities on the moon are governed by the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty, Marieta Valdivia Lefort, a policy officer at the Royal Astronomical Society in the U.K., told Space.com. Article IX of that treaty binds countries to "conduct the exploration of outer space in a way that avoids harmful contamination," she said. But what exactly constitutes such contamination is unclear, she added.

"There are international legal frameworks that apply to activities on the moon and include obligations concerning harmful contamination, but there is no dedicated international 'waste law' or comprehensive 'rubbish-management' system for it," Lefort wrote in an email. "The Outer Space Treaty does not define when contamination becomes 'harmful.' It does not set numerical waste limits, create approved disposal sites or require every object on the moon to be removed."

The moon is big. Its surface area, around 14.7 million square miles (38 million square kilometers) rivals that of Asia, Earth's largest continent, which covers 17 million square miles (44 million square km). But the moon's low gravity — around 17% that of Earth — means the dust that an impact stirs up travels a long way and takes a long time to settle, McDowell said.

"It's not just a local event," he said. "It's an equivalent to a continental-level event. In the future, when you have permanent human bases and scientific experiments on the moon, you don't want rocket stages smashing into the moon on a regular basis, creating big plumes of dust that could contaminate instruments or disturb gravitational wave detectors."

Moreover, the artificial material introduced and the craters that arise when heavy rocket stages smash into the lunar surface are altering the lunar environment, potentially erasing yet unexplored scientific material.

"The moon is naturally struck by meteoroids, and those impacts form part of the geological record that scientists are trying to understand," Lefort wrote. "The main concern is the alteration of the moon's physical and chemical environment, particularly where repeated disturbances could damage or obscure valuable scientific evidence."

Gregory Radisic, a space law expert at Australia's Bond University, told Space.com that the Falcon 9 crash was timely, as it can stir debate about responsible behavior in space before the moon gets too busy.

"It's not by good planning that this didn't hit something important," he said. "It's by pure luck that we're only having a conversation about theoretical problems down the line and that this did not destroy a million-dollar experiment or an important site of scientific study."

He added that spaceflight companies may start paying attention to the risks only after human lives are lost or expensive infrastructure suffers, resulting in tangible fines and consequences.

"When there is a loss of life or a loss of investment, the industry will start to care," Radisic said. "As long as things are losing aesthetic or scientific value, the industry is not likely going to care."

The Falcon 9 rocket stage that hit the moon was left in a high-altitude orbit around Earth in January 2025, after it propelled Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience landers to the moon.

McDowell explained that, as the rocket stage was left relatively close to the moon, it got repeatedly influenced by lunar gravity, eventually spiralling into its surface.

"If you leave [an object] in an orbit that's in this middle region that is far enough that the moon's gravity is affecting it but not far enough out to go into orbit around the sun, then that orbit is very hard to predict," McDowell said. "The orbital uncertainties multiply over many passes and, eventually, if you get unlucky, the moon tugs it into an orbit where it's going to hit either the moon or Earth in a completely unpredictable way."

McDowell said that, since the January 2025 launch, SpaceX has been pushing its moon-mission rockets farther out into orbit around the sun.

"I hope that we're going to see a new norm evolve, and that what we have seen now is not how you dispose of your rocket stages in the future," he said. 


NASA has formally invited India to participate in its effort to build a permanent base near the moon's south pole, adding a new dimension to the deep-space cooperation between the two countries.

The invitation was extended last week at the Indian space agency ISRO's headquarters in Bengaluru during the ninth meeting of the U.S.-India Civil Space Joint Working Group. The CSJWG was established in 2005 as a mechanism for bilateral space cooperation and for addressing challenges and pursuing mutual spaceflight goals.

"Building on our successful collaboration in science, NASA reaffirmed its interest in @ISRO joining Moon Base. We're going back to the moon to stay — and we're bringing our partners with us," NASA officials said via X on Tuesday (Aug. 11).

Beyond the lunar base invitation, "the two sides also agreed to advance discussions for cooperation on open scientific data sharing under the Accords," reads a Tuesday statement by the U.S. Embassy in India.

"The Accords" are the Artemis Accords, the U.S.-led diplomatic framework outlining principles for safe and responsible exploration of the moon and beyond. India signed on as the 27th signatory in 2023, joining a coalition that has now grown to 70 nations.

Official statements have provided few details on what India's participation in the Moon Base program would entail in practice. The meeting, however, brought together senior space officials from both countries, including V. Narayanan, the chairman of ISRO and secretary of India's Department of Space, and Sergio Gor, the U.S. Ambassador to India, who addressed the opening session, according to the statement.

The meeting was co-chaired by M. Sankaran, director of ISRO's U.R. Rao Satellite Centre, on the Indian side, and two people on the U.S. side — Wesley Brooks, assistant secretary of state for the U.S. Department of State's Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, and Kathleen Karika, NASA associate administrator for International and Interagency Relations, the statement reads.

Over the coming decade, via its Artemis program, NASA plans to build out a sprawling, city-like base near the moon's south pole, a region of particular interest thanks to permanently shadowed craters there that are thought to contain substantial deposits of water ice.

Details of the planned architecture shared by NASA in May envision hilltop habitats to take advantage of sunlight and nuclear power systems located farther away to mitigate radiation risks. The space agency also plans to use small, hopping robots starting in 2028 to scout the south polar region ahead of moon base construction.

This effort to gather information and secure access to the surface is the first of three planned phases. Phase 2, from 2029-2032, is intended to establish the base's initial operating capability. Phase 3, from 2032 onward, aims to achieve a semi-permanent crew presence on the lunar surface, NASA said during the May update.

To prioritize infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the moon's surface, increase launch cadence and keep pace with China's lunar ambitions, NASA earlier this year paused development of its long-planned Gateway space station.

For India, the invitation to join NASA's Moon Base program comes as the country pursues its own ambitious lunar exploration and human spaceflight roadmap. Its plans for the 2040s include developing a moon base, establishing a space station in lunar orbit and sending Indian astronauts to the moon, with the broader goal of building long-term human presence beyond Earth.

The moon dust has settled after a 4.5-ton SpaceX rocket body slammed into terrain near Einstein Crater on Aug. 5.

That impact site was imaged by South Korea's moon-orbiting Danuri spacecraft, as well as by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Reportedly, a Chinese commercial space debris monitoring satellite tracked and recorded the 5,400-mph (8,690-kph) moon punch, too.

Wandering through space for over a year, the leftover Falcon 9 upper stage had sent Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost-1 lander on its way to the moon back on Jan. 15, 2025. Also sent moonward on that flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2's Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace. While the moon has reclaimed its serenity, the implications of the uncontrolled collision continue to reverberate.

Close encounter

Interestingly, there was also the prospect of a too-close-for-comfort conjunction of the Falcon 9 upper stage and Danuri.

"We noticed roughly late June that there is an incoming Falcon 9 upper stage toward the moon, and also knew that it would be close to Danuri," Eunhyeuk Kim, a senior researcher at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), told Space.com.

There was a huge uncertainty in the predicted trajectory of the upper stage, Kim said, while the orbit information of South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter was quite accurate. "Therefore, we could not neglect the probability of an incoming and close encounter."

Spacecraft maneuver

However, around mid July, the KARI/Danuri team performed a maneuver of the spacecraft in preparation of a near-total lunar eclipse on Aug. 28, said Kim. That eclipse will see 96% of the moon's visible surface passing through Earth's dark umbral shadow.

Kim said that the orbiter's maneuver brought a slight change in the phase of the spacecraft's orbit, which canceled the probable conjunction between the upper stage and Danuri.

At the time of the Aug. 5 impact, Danuri was flying over the moon's south pole area, far away from the hit zone, said Kim.

High-speed ejecta

Dean Sladen is a quality manager and aerospace engineer in the United Kingdom for Accu Components, a high-precision manufacturing firm.

"As space agencies and private companies build out permanent lunar infrastructure, uncontrolled rocket stages evolve from a minor nuisance into a tangible operational risk," Sladen told Space.com. "A direct hit is the obvious worst-case scenario, but distant impacts also generate ground shocks and high-speed ejecta that can degrade sensitive equipment over time."

Sladen noted that lunar impacts have been a constant throughout history, with meteorites and comets bombarding the surface unhindered by an atmosphere. "Over the past 65 years, artificial objects have added a new dynamic to these events," he added.

Genuine hazard

Even modest hardware impacts permanently alter the lunar landscape, said Sladen. Given the moon's lack of a substantial atmosphere, there is no air resistance to slow debris down. An impact therefore hurls high-speed ejecta (fine regolith and rock fragments) across vast distances at bullet-like speeds.

"While this isn't a major threat to isolated missions today, as we establish permanent lunar infrastructure, high-velocity ejecta poses a genuine hazard to surface habitats, solar arrays and working astronauts," Sladen said.

To mitigate this issue, Sladen suggested that the industry will likely need designated impact zones or strictly controlled, targeted de-orbit protocols to ensure that spent hardware lands far from active installations.

"That said, human-made debris is only half the equation," Sladen continued. "Natural meteorites remain an ongoing background threat, and, while massive natural strikes are rare, they hit at significantly higher speeds and carry far more energy," Sladen said. "Controlling our own hardware is simply the part of the risk profile we actually have the power to manage."

Plume detections

In the meantime, while the Falcon 9 impact was tough to see from Earth, several observations from our planet reported the detection of sodium and lithium gas above the crash site.

The European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, for example, saw the aftermath of the impact. The ESO reported that a chemical fingerprint of the impact was visible for five to 10 minutes, with an enormous plume of lunar material stirred up due to the hard-hitting hardware.

"I'm happy that ESO recorded some evidence of it through VLT, and Danuri has found the exact impact location," said William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas, Austin who performed some pre-strike computer simulations.

"What we've learned so far is that the plume was too faint to see against the bright lunar surface, and only a large observatory telescope could pick some parts of it out against the dark sky, which is exactly what happened," Jo told Space.com. "The plume must have shot out high," he said, "and I'd like to know how high, or even whether we can replicate the signals."

Targets of opportunity

"Telescopes make the best spaceships," pointed out Elaina Hyde, director of the Allan I Carswell Observatory at York University in Canada. "We are always on the lookout for 'targets of opportunity' like this event."

Hyde organized a livestream event, training the observatory on the collision locale. They were unable to spot the impact, however.

"The lunar collision was not on our regular research program, but when it happened, we put it as a high-priority item to observe if the weather was clear," Hyde said. "Anything that happens quickly like this is often a target of opportunity, because you do not get a long time to plan the observation."

"However, since it was not visible from our location in Toronto, our 'null' or non detection can actually help to limit the estimates on how big the dust plume was and perhaps some of its properties," said Hyde.

Impact response

Also on the moon impact watch were observers using Lowell Observatory equipment in Arizona.

These researchers managed to measure a response from the rocket stage impact, spotting a sizable sodium and lithium gas plume that lasted between five and 10 minutes after impact, reported Carl Schmidt, an assistant research professor at Boston University's Center for Space Physics.

Observers at the 4.3-meter Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT) in Happy Jack, Arizona used a long slit spectrograph to detect the plume. Graduate students from Boston University continue to analyze data gleaned from the moon wallop.

Bright lithium plume

"At LDT, we saw a bright lithium plume from the rocket body and fainter sodium [signature], likely from the surface itself," Patrick Lierle of Boston University told Space.com. "The bright lithium plume extends more than halfway up our field of view." The LDT results are also credited to Emma Lovett, a Boston University graduate student.

William Jo said he's looking forward to the release of observational data about the impact before he and colleagues can refine their lunar ejecta simulation model.

"That data, combined with our simulations, could tell us things like the composition of the lunar material, what orientation the impact hit at, and so on," Jo said.

What a view. Astrophotographers in Namibia have captured a bright green comet soaring overhead in a spectacular new photograph.

What is it?

In this incredible new photograph is the comet 220P/McNaught.

Discovered by Australian astronomer Robert H. McNaught, the comet orbits our sun once every 5.5 years. Back in June, the comet reached perihelion, or the closest point in its orbit around the sun. Around that time, the comet experienced a large outburst, which brightened it about 8,000 times.

The comet brightened back up this August to about 600 times its normal brightness — and it was during this period when astrophotographers Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger captured it streaking across the night sky over Namibia.

To capture the moment, the pair used a 12-inch Astrograph telescope with a ZWO ASI 6200 MM Pro camera.

Why is it incredible?

It's not every day you see a comet in the night sky. Even if one is overhead, often they're too tricky or too far away to spot without a telescope, and even then it can be a challenge.

It's also incredible that the moment captured in the new image showcases the comet 220P/McNaught with such spectacular clarity and detail. It must have been something truly special to witness.

While spotting a comet like this might not happen every day, we can sometimes see the debris trailing behind a comet as its tail burns up in our atmosphere. These burnt comet bits are actually the "shooting stars" we see in the night sky during a meteor shower.

Right now, the Perseids meteor shower is on its annual parade across the night sky. This meteor shower is made up of debris shed by the comet Swift-Tuttle as it swoops by on its annual trip across the solar system. Under dark skies, skywatchers can see up to 100 shooting stars thanks to Swift-Tuttle.

A newly found Mars meteorite is revealing the secrets of a previously hidden time period of Red Planet geological history.

The 1.27-billion-year-old space rock, called Northwest Africa (NWA) 13441, was discovered in Algeria in 2019 — but its age was not confirmed until recently. Now scientists say the meteorite helps answer questions about a huge gap in the Martian geologic record: a span of time between 600 million years ago and 2.4 billion years ago.

This vast timespan has no known examples of meteorites containing igneous (solid magma) shergottites, which are the most abundant type of Martian meteorites, chunks of the Red Planet that were blasted away by impacts, ejected into space and eventually fell to Earth. The only meteorites known from this time range, roughly 1.3 billion to 1.4 billion years ago, are rarer types known as chassignites and nahklites. As such, the newly analyzed meteorite is opening new insights already about this time period.

"The characteristics of this meteorite were entirely surprising," stated Boston College Earth and environmental sciences professor Ethan Baxter, co-author of a study published Aug. 1 in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. "No other Martian meteorite like this has an age of 1.27 billion years old."

NWA 13441 was surprising to researchers in two ways. The first was its composition — while it is a shergottite, the space rock also contains isotopes (element types) of a rare-Earth metal called neodymium. Neodymium is usually found in chrondrites — another kind of meteorite made up of unmelted rocks — and chondrites were common in the solar system when it was formed 4.56 billion years ago.

This blended composition of shergottite and chrondrite suggests deeper parts of Mars have remained relatively untouched since the planet was formed, Baxter stated. That finding aligns with what scientists already know about Mars, which likely formed only five million years after the solar system was formed. (Mars also has no plate tectonics, making it different from Earth and which allows the earliest bits of it to remain undisturbed by the types of geologic processes that take place on our planet.)

Peering deeper at the chondrites added a second surprise: the composition of the isotopes, or element types, are helping establish "new boundaries on the processes that happened in the very early solar system as Mars formed," the authors stated. The paper's abstract added this information suggests the meteorite may have come from a "previously unsampled" reservoir on the Red Planet lying between "enriched and depleted shergottite sources."

Scientists hope that more analysis of this meteorite will reveal "magmatic and volcanic activity on Mars," Seal said in the same statement. Next up will be looking at the meteorite's isotopes to figure out its connection to other meteorites formed early in Martian history.

A total solar eclipse isn't just a spectacular sight to witness for those lucky enough to lie in the path of totality (or travel to it, as many dedicated skywatchers do). It also gives scientists a rare chance to study the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, during the day.

As such, NASA plans to take full advantage of the opportunity for the upcoming total solar eclipse happening on Aug 12.

The space agency's WB-57 high-altitude research jet will chase the moon's shadow across the globe, which will extend the agency's ability to capture data from the eclipse. The NASA-supported Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project will also coordinate teams to release balloons that will help us know how our atmosphere changes when an eclipse turns the sky dark during the day.

"From our unique perspective on Earth during a total solar eclipse, scientists can study the sun's corona in a way we can't from anywhere else in the solar system," Kelly Korreck, eclipse program manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in an official announcement.

"The sun impacts our daily life, satellites, and astronauts in space, and we can take advantage of this moment to advance our understanding of that influence," she continued.

Inside the research jet's nose cone, four cameras will capture images of the corona's structures, outflows, and changes. This data may help scientists gain a better understanding of how materials within the corona relate to solar winds.

"The sun is always changing," Amir Caspi, principal investigator for the study at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in the announcement. "Every eclipse is different. So we could see things we didn't see before. And we learn from each eclipse how to better observe the next one."

Angela Des Jardins at Montana State University will lead the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project, with the help of students from universities in the U.S., Iceland and Spain.

By releasing balloons in anticipation of the eclipse, scientists will be able to look at the ozone levels in the atmosphere during the eclipse and study how the eclipse impacts the "boundary layer" of the Earth, which shifts due to temperature and moisture in the air.

Both the research jet and balloons were used to collect data during the total solar eclipse in April 2024. These new projects will use what NASA learned last time to sharpen up the methods, and hopefully provide new insights into the relationships between the sun, moon, and Earth.

Scientists have captured the sharpest image ever of our sun's surface. This view has revealed incredible new details about the inner mechanisms driving stellar activity.

What is it?

An international team of researchers using the U.S. National Science Foundation's Inouye Solar Telescope has captured the highest-resolution view of the sun's surface.

In analyzing observations from this telescope, the team, made up of researchers from the National Solar Observatory, the NSF NCR High Altitude Observatory and the German Max Planck Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, discovered strange patterns on the sun's surface. The whirling patterns, they found, are actually evidence of what's called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI), or instability that happens when there is a change in velocity of fluids.

Why is it incredible?

This image is groundbreaking. Capturing the highest-resolution view of the sun's surface is a massive accomplishment, and in the time-lapse video above, you can even see the fluid dynamics on the surface of the sun in motion.

But this view is much more than a beautiful, high-resolution image. These observations have revealed swirls on the sun's surface at the edges of the magnetic areas, allowing the team to identify KHI on the sun's surface. This fluid instability has long been suspected on the sun, but these observations are the first time they have ever been directly seen like this.

“We believe that the discovery of Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability in the solar photosphere, backed up by analysis of numerical simulations, is a major step forward in our understanding of the dynamics and evolution of solar and stellar plasma, and will serve as a basis for future discoveries," David Boboltz, the deputy director at the National Solar Observatory, said in a statement.

A paper describing these findings was published recently in the journal Nature.