Space News & Blog Articles

The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (aptly nicknamed CUTE) is a new, NASA-funded mission that aims to study the atmospheres of massive, superheated exoplanets – known as hot Jupiters – around distant stars. The miniaturized satellite, built by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder, is set to launch this Monday, September 27th on an Atlas V rocket.

Small-sized satellites like CUTE, known as CubeSats, are nothing new. They’ve long been a staple of collaborative university student projects, as cheap ways to get engineering experience in space. But lately, researchers have been pushing the boundaries of what CubeSats are capable of, putting them to the test with more and more ambitious projects. In 2018, for example, the first interplanetary CubeSats (MarCO-A and-B) left low earth orbit and traveled to Mars with NASA’s InSight lander, providing communications and telemetry for the lander as it descended towards the planet. CUTE, on the other hand, will remain in Earth orbit, but the scope of its ambition is equally lofty for such a small spacecraft.

Its primary mission is to understand the volatile physics around hot Jupiters. These enormous exoplanets have no analog in our solar system: they are similar in size to our gas giants, but orbit much closer to their stars, and can reach temperatures of over 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

CUTE principal investigator Kevin France explains that “because these planets are parked so close to their parent stars, they receive a tremendous amount of radiation.” That radiation heats the planets, causing their atmospheres to inflate and expand. Some of the gas eventually escapes and streams away from the planet.

CUTE will spend its 7-month mission observing as many hot Jupiters as it can (10 at minimum), and measuring how quickly gas is escaping from them. Atmospheric escape is a process that happens to all planets, Earth included, but nothing like as quickly or on such large scales as on these hot Jupiters. Still, understanding how it works on these giants can help researchers understand how it works on rocky worlds too. If successful, the data CUTE gathers will be used to understand the processes of atmospheric escape on a wide range of different planet types.

Star formation is a topic astronomers are still trying to fully understand. We know, for example, that stars don’t form individually, but rather are born within vast interstellar molecular clouds. These stellar nurseries contain gas dense enough for gravity to trigger the formation of stars. In spiral galaxies, these molecular clouds are most commonly found within spiral arms, which is why stars are most often born in spiral arms.

We can observe several of these molecular clouds in our local neighborhood of the Milky Way. The most famous one is the Orion nebula, which is part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, but there are other well-known molecular clouds, such as the molecular clouds of Perseus and Taurus. We can see stars forming within these clouds.

One part of the story we don’t fully understand is how these dense molecular clouds form in the first place. Since they are often found along spiral arms, one idea is that they form within pressure waves along the arms as stars bunch up like a traffic jam. Another idea is that their formation is triggered by supernovae. These massive explosions create shockwaves in interstellar gas and dust, causing them to bunch together. But proving this idea is hard because it’s extremely difficult to pin down the location of a molecular cloud. We can see where it is in the sky, but determining the distance is difficult. But a new study has pinned down the locations of the Perseus and Taurus clouds, and the result supports the supernova model.

Using data from the Gaia spacecraft, the team was able to map the Perseus and Taurus molecular clouds in 3-D. They also mapped other, fainter clouds in the region, and found they were all part of a single structure. They all lie along the surface of a bubble about 500 light-years across. The spherical structure is very clear, and the team has even created an augmented reality version you can check out. Based on the structure of the bubble, the team estimates it was formed by a large supernova or series of supernovae that occurred about 10 million years ago. The clouds we see now, and the stars forming within them, are the result of supernova shock waves.

This work shows that supernovae can play a significant role in the formation of stars, beyond their contribution of heavier elements. With 3-D maps such as this one, we can now compare them to simulation models to better understand both cloud formation and star formation.

Can life spread throughout a galaxy like the Milky Way without technological intervention? That question is largely unanswered. A new study is taking a swing at that question by using a simulated galaxy that’s similar to the Milky Way. Then they investigated that model to see how organic compounds might move between its star systems.

The central question in science is probably “How did life begin?” There’s no larger question, and there’s no answer, so far. A secondary question is more approachable: “Can life spread from star to star?” That’s the theory of panspermia, in a nutshell.

Earth’s history poses an important question when it comes to panspermia. Scientists think there wasn’t enough time between when the Earth cooled enough to become habitable and the appearance of life. Not all scientists think that, of course. There’s a range of thoughts on the matter. But the question remains: Was there enough time for DNA-based life to get going independently on Earth, or did panspermia play a role?

While much of the talk around panspermia concerns simple lifeforms somehow moving between stars, more serious talk concerns the movement of organic compounds necessary for life. Scientists have found some of those compounds on comets and elsewhere out in space. We now know they’re not necessarily rare. So can those compounds move around from solar system to solar system?

The new study is titled “Panspermia in a Milky Way-like Galaxy.” The lead author is Raphael Gobat, from Instituto de Física, Valparaíso, Chile. The paper is available on the pre-print site arxiv.org.

NASA’s InSight lander has detected one of the most powerful and longest-lasting quakes on the Red Planet since the start of its mission. The big marsquake happened on Sept. 18 on Earth, which happened to coincide with InSight’s 1,000th Martian day, or sol since it landed on Mars.

The temblor is estimated to be about a magnitude 4.2 and shook for an unthinkable hour-and-a-half! For comparison, on Earth, most quakes last for just a few seconds, although two (one in 1960 and another in 2004) lasted for about 10 minutes. Scientists are still studying the data collected on this marsquake to determine why (and how) it endured for such a long time.

This big quake followed close on the heels of two other quakes that both took place on August 25 (on Earth) that had magnitudes of 4.2 and 4.1. The biggest previous quake InSight detected was a magnitude 3.7 quake in 2019.

InSight scientists also will be able to determine how far away the quake was from InSight. One of the August 25 quakes, the magnitude 4.2 event, occurred about 5,280 miles (8,500 kilometers) from InSight – the most distant temblor the lander has detected so far.

InSight’s Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or SEIS detects and studies seismic waves as they travel through the planet’s crust, mantle and core, which gives scientists a way to “look” inside Mars and learn more about its interior. The instrument, pictured below, is covered and protected by the domed Wind and Thermal Shield,

Mars and water. Those words can trigger an avalanche of speculation, evidence, hypotheses, and theories. Mars has some water now, but it’s frozen, and most of it’s buried. There’s only a tiny bit of water vapour in the atmosphere. Evidence shows that it was much wetter in the past. In its ancient past, the planet may have had a global ocean. But was it habitable at one time?

A new study says it wasn’t. Mars lost most of its water, and it’s all to do with the planet’s size.

“Examining the presence, distribution, and abundance of volatile elements and compounds, including water, on Mars has been a central theme of space exploration for the past 50 years,” the authors write in their paper. Many missions to Mars, whether orbiter, lander, or rover, include understanding Martian water in their science objectives. “Follow the Water!” was the easy-to-rally-around catchphrase for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

Evidence that Mars was once wet goes back decades. The Viking missions sent orbiters and landers to Mars in the late 1970s. The orbiters took images of geological formations on Mars that indicated the presence of large amounts of water in the past. In the same era, scientists studying Martian meteorites found evidence of aqueous weathering products.

More recent missions have gathered ample evidence that Mars once had water. Cameras on modern orbiters like NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the ESA’s Mars Express Orbiter have studied Mars intensely. The Jezero Crater has received a lot of orbital attention, in anticipation of the Perseverance rover’s mission there. Jezero is an ancient paleolake with a clearly visible river delta. So nobody seriously doubts that Mars was at one time much wetter than it is now.

Since the dawn of the Space Age, considerable progress has been made with launch vehicles. From single stage to multistage rockets and spaceplanes to reusable launch vehicles, we have become very good at sending payloads to space. But when it comes to returning payloads to Earth, our methods really haven’t evolved much at all. Some seventy years later, we are still relying on air friction, heatshields, and parachutes and landing at sea more often than not.

Luckily, there are many solutions that NASA and commercial space companies are currently investigating. For example, SpaceWorks Enterprises, Inc (SEI) is currently working on an orbital delivery system known as Reentry Device (RED) capsules. With support provided by NASA, they are gearing up for a test run this October where one of their capsules gets dropped from an altitude of 30 km (19 mi).

Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Spaceworks specializes in developing state-of-the-art aerospace technology, from the early design phase to rapid prototyping and flight demonstration. Their specialties include advanced concept analysis, systems engineering, product development, and economic consulting. Their product catalog includes technologies ranging from satellite internet-connected sensors and spacecraft to hypersonic flight testbeds and Reentry Device (RED) capsules.

For the sake of developing their RED technology, which includes the RED-25 and RED-4U, SpaceWorks is gearing up for a high-altitude drop test. This will consist of them releasing a RED-4U capsule – designated Suborbital Test Vehicle 2 (STV-2) – from an altitude of 30,000 meters (100,000 feet) and monitoring it as it makes an autonomous landing. For this test, they have teamed up with Earthly Dynamics LLC (EDC) and Aerial Delivery Solutions LLC (ADS).

These tests are made possible thanks to funding provided through NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program. As part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), this program rapidly demonstrates space exploration and commercial space technologies through suborbital testing. With the help of industry flight providers, the program aims to advance NASA mission capabilities and commercial applications.

Earth is a geologically active planet, which means it has plate tectonics and volcanic eruptions that have not ceased. This activity extends all the way to the core, where action between a liquid outer core and a solid inner core generates a planetary magnetic field. In comparison, Mars is an almost perfect example of a “stagnant lid” planet, where geological activity billions of years ago and the surface has remained stagnant ever since.

But as indicated by the many mountains on Mars, which includes the tallest in the Solar System (Olympus Mons), the planet was once a hotbed of volcanic activity. And according to a recent NASA-supported study, there is evidence that thousands of “super-eruptions” happened in the Arabia Terra region in northern Mars 4 billion years ago. These eruptions occurred over the course of 500-million years and had a drastic effect on the Martian climate.

The research, which was recently published in the Geophysical Research Letters, was led by geologist Patrick Whelley of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center. He was joined by researchers from the University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), and the geotechnical engineering consulting firm Landau Associates.

This image taken by the Hi-RISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows several basins in Arabia Terra. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Here on Earth, volcanoes can sometimes produce eruptions that release a tremendous amount of dust and toxic gases into the air, blocking out sunlight and changing the climate for decades. When these eruptions happen, they blast about 1015 liters of molten rock and gas through the surface and spread a thick blanket of ash up to several thousand km from the eruption site. Rather than leaving behind mountainous remains, volcanoes of this magnitude collapse into a giant hole (a “caldera”) that can measure dozens of km in diameter.

In April 2021 Hubble released its 31st-anniversary image. It’s a portrait of AG Carinae, one of the most luminous stars in the entire Milky Way. AG Carinae is in a wreckless struggle with itself, periodically ejecting matter until it reaches stability sometime in the future.

Thanks to the Hubble, we get to watch the brilliant struggle.

Now the people behind the Hubble have released another image, or rather images, of AG Carinae. It’s made up of Hubble observations of the star from 2020, 2014, and also as far back as 1994. AG Carinae is a luminous blue variable (LBV) and its appearance changes over time. The images bring those changes to life.

AG Carinae’s struggle is between the inward pressure of gravity and the outward pressure from fusion. When those two forces are out of balance, stars struggle. Stars always seek equilibrium.

The star is continuously losing mass at this late stage of its life. As the star runs out of fuel for fusion, its outward radiation pressure decreases. This means gravity can take the upper hand. Gravity draws some of the star’s mass inward toward the center of the star. As the matter moves inward, it heats up and is propelled explosively out into space. This will keep happening until AG Carinae loses enough mass to attain equilibrium.

The U.S. Space Force has released prototypes of its service dress uniforms for its Guardians.

The reaction on social media revealed that when it comes to uniforms, us space nerds are all fashionistas. But admittedly, the uniforms have a familiar look…

The uniforms, revealed during a conference in Maryland this week, feature a dark navy coat, grey pants and six buttons, which symbolizes the Space Force being the sixth branch of the U.S. military, according to the Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations, Gen. John Raymond.

But there’s a hint of Battlestar Galactica in the design, with the jacket’s high collar and its angled row of buttons. The Space Force uniforms also display the Force’s logo, which looks a lot like the Starfleet emblem from Star Trek.

Lt. Col. Alison Gonzalez, the Space Force deputy chief of strategy, was one of the Guardians who modeled the new uniform. Gonzalez told Millitary.com she helped test the uniforms, ensuring they were designed with women in mind.

One of the best innovations Lego has had in the last decade is leveraging the power of the internet to help choose what kits to create.  Innovative designers can buy piece parts, make their own masterpieces, carefully document how to recreate them, and then lobby Lego to release them at a kit.  One of the more creative recent projects is a Clockwork Solar System designed by Chris Orchard and Brent Waller, and it is absolutely stunning.

At around 3000 pieces and measuring 52cm x 44 cm x 56 cm, their creation is on the larger side of Lego projects.  But, it is surprisingly precise, with the project creators claiming that the orbital timing of the planets is 99.8% accurate to how they are in real life.

That level of accuracy results from hours of design and a whole lot of testing, totaling 15 months of work.  Technic, the Lego system that includes gears, axles, and motors, allows the system to move accurately but is almost some of the most challenging types of LEGO to build.  In addition, each planet has a unique model to represent it, and the clockwork system is brilliantly displayed in an accompanying video the project creators released.

They will need more than a fancy video and a well-written proposal to bring this project to fruition, though. A project needs 10,000 votes on the Lego IDEAS platform to get on the company’s radar for an “Expert Review.” If the reviewers give it the go-ahead, the company could adopt the idea into a kit of its own.

Luckily, the project started strong.  Having only been released three weeks ago, it already has over 7000 supporters as of the time of writing, and almost two full years to collect the next 3000 supporters needed to get it to that review.  With that level of support and the amount of time left, the Clockwork Solar System is a shoo-in to at least get reviewed by the company.  If it passes inspection, space enthusiasts everywhere can look forward to having it in their hands soon.

Supermassive black holes (SMBH) reside in the center of galaxies like the Milky Way. They are mind-bogglingly massive, ranging from 1 million to 10 billion solar masses. Their smaller brethren, intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH), ranging between 100 and 100,000 solar masses, are harder to find.

Astronomers have spotted an intermediate-mass black hole destroying a star that got too close. They’ve learned a lot from their observations and hope to find even more of these black holes. Observing more of them may lead to understanding how SMBHs got so massive.

When a star gets too close to a powerful black hole, a tidal disruption event (TDE) occurs. The star is torn apart and its constituent matter is drawn to the black hole, where it gets caught in the hole’s accretion disk. The event releases an enormous amount of energy, outshining all the stars in the galaxy for months, even years.

That’s what happened with TDE 3XMM J215022.4-055108, which is more readily known as TDE J2150. Astronomers were only able to spot the elusive IMBH because of the burst of x-rays emitted by the hot gas from the star as it was torn apart. J2150 is about 740 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the Aquarius constellation. Now a team of researchers has used observations of the distant J2150 and existing scientific models to learn more about the IMBH.

They’ve published their results in a paper titled “Mass, Spin, and Ultralight Boson Constraints from the Intermediate Mass Black Hole in the Tidal Disruption Event 3XMM J215022.4?055108.” The lead author is Sixiang Wen from the University of Arizona. The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

An archeological dig has uncovered evidence of a massive cosmic airburst event approximately 3,600 years ago that destroyed an entire city near the Dead Sea in the Middle East. The event was larger than the famous Tunguska airburst event in Russia in 1908, with a blast 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The event flattened the thriving city of Tall el-Hammam, located in what is now Jordan.

Using evidence unearthed in the dig along with an online impact calculator, the researchers estimate a space rock approximately 50 meters wide exploded about 4 km (2.5 miles) above the Earth, sending a blinding flash and a wave of heat at 2,000 degrees (3,600 F). This would have immediately incinerated wood structures and bodies, and melted any metal objects like swords or spears, and even pottery and mudbrick structures.

But the destruction wasn’t over. A few seconds later, a massive shockwave leveled everything, including a 4-to-5-story palace complex and a large 4-m-thick mudbrick fortification wall.

The authors of the paper, published in Nature Scientific Reports, say that although this doesn’t fall into their area of expertise, “an eyewitness description of this 3600-year-old catastrophic event may have been passed down as an oral tradition that eventually became the written biblical account about the destruction of Sodom.” Sodom was the city, which, according to biblical texts, was destroyed for its lecherousness, with stones and fire falling from the sky. However, this story originates from a time when many natural disasters were blamed on the anger of the gods.

In many sites in the Middle East, archeological digs or studies reveal several layers of past habitation that have religious or nationalist significance for more than one ethnic group, where the victor of wars or conquests built upon the ruins of the city or buildings it just conquered – with the cycle repeating over the millenniums. The region around Tall el-Hammam is different however, in that since the end of the Middle Bronze Age, this region in eastern Jordan suffered some sort of civilization-ending calamity, and remained unoccupied for the next five-to-seven hundred years. Additionally, this area was originally one of the most productive agricultural lands in the region, and which had supported flourishing civilizations continuously for at least 3,000 years. But suddenly the soil in the region was inundated with salts where nothing would grow.

About 25 years ago, astrophysicists noticed something very interesting about the Universe. The fact that it was in a state of expansion had been known since the 1920s, thanks to the observation of Edwin Hubble. But thanks to the observations astronomers were making with the space observatory that bore his name (the Hubble Space Telescope), they began to notice how the rate of cosmic expansion was getting faster!

This has led to the theory that the Universe is filled with an invisible and mysterious force, known as Dark Energy (DE). Decades after it was proposed, scientists are still trying to pin down this elusive force that makes up about 70% of the energy budget of the Universe. According to a recent study by an international team of researchers, the XENON1T experiment may have already detected this elusive force, opening new possibilities for future DE research.

The research was led by Dr. Sunny Vagnozzi, a researcher with the Kavli Institute for Cosmology (KICC) at the University of Cambridge, and Dr. Luca Visinelli, a Fellowship for Innovation (FELLINI) researcher (which is maintained with support from the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship) at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Frascati, Italy. They were joined by researchers from the Institute de Physique Theórique (IPhT), the University of Cambridge, and the University of Hawai’i.

Both DM and DE are part of the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model of cosmology, which posits that the Universe is filled with cold, slow-moving particles (DM) that interact with normal matter via the force of gravity alone. The Lambda represents DE, which is accelerating the expansion of the Universe. Because neither force interacts with normal matter via electromagnetism or the weak or strong nuclear force, they can only be discerned by observing their effect on the large-scale structure of the Universe.

As a result, astrophysicists and cosmologists are unclear about how DE fits in with the physical laws that govern the Universe. So far, candidates include a modification of Einstein’s General Relativity (GR), the presence of a new field, or a Cosmological Constant (CC). As Dr. Visinelli told Universe Today via email:

Shock testing is commonly used throughout engineering to determine how a product will do when impacted by something.  That something could be anything from the ground to a cruise missile.  Like so much else in space exploration, engineers at NASA are performing the same type of test, just scaled up.  Instead of simply dropping the object under test, as is common in most settings, they shoot it with a steel ball going 3000 ft/second.

Researchers at the Ballistics Impact Lab use a 40-foot-long gun to simulate what it would be like to be hit by a micrometeorite in space.  Recently, the team has focused on testing different types of fabric for use in space suits.  A rapid decompression from a micrometeorite strike anywhere on a suit would be fatal to any astronaut unlucky enough to suffer one.  

Ballistics Lab technical lead Mike Pereira sets up a drop test.
Credit – NASA

Understanding how a piece of fabric would fail in such a situation is critical to improving its design.  Some forms of failure are worse than others. The lab has a series of high-speed cameras and sensors surrounding the material under test to ensure it can capture as much data about those failure modes as possible.  

Those failure modes can be caused by more than just steel balls.  A different test rig shoots a piece of simulated moon rock (primarily made of basalt) vertically down onto the fabric.  Also, the fabric isn’t the only material that has to undergo such testing – other material that could be used on the exterior of habitats, or even material specifically designed to capture space debris, must also undergo similar violent testing.

A new study shows a way to use quasars to gauge distance in the early Universe.

The simple question of ‘how far?’ gets at the heart of the history of modern astronomy. Looking out across our galactic backyard into the primordial Universe, different yardsticks—often referred to as ‘standard candles’ —are used to gauge various distances, from near to far.

Now, astronomers may have another tool in their Universe-measuring arsenal. A recent study out of the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) looked at X-ray measurements of 2332 quasars in the Chandra Source Catalog compiled by NASA’s prolific Chandra X-ray telescope, versus their luminosity in the ultraviolet as seen in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The team found a tight correlation between the two factors… a correlation that extends back to quasars in the early Universe.

Whatever quasars are, they’re an exotic feature of the early Universe that we don’t see in the nearby cosmos today. The first quasar discovered was 3C 273 in 1963. With a high redshift (z=0.158) astronomers knew they were looking at something extremely distant and therefore intrinsically luminous. To give you some idea just how bright 3C 273 actually is, it has an absolute magnitude value of -27. That is, if you placed it at a distance of 10 parsecs away, it would compete with the Sun in the sky (and spell a bad day for the Earth if it were that close!)

The first ‘rung’ on the cosmic distance ladder is parallax, using observations from two different points in space and basic trigonometry to gauge distance. Using the Earth’s orbit as a baseline is also the basis for the parsec which—despite what Han Solo will tell you in a Mos Eisley Cantina—is a measure of distance, 3.26 light-years long.

OK, all you meteorites that are falling to Earth … You are being watched!

The ever-expanding use of security cameras, doorbell cams and vehicle dashcams have increased the number of fireballs that have been spotted streaking across the skies. And sometimes, all that visual data provides the side benefit of allowing rocks from space to be tracked and found.

Back in February of 2020, hundreds of people across Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Austria and Hungary reported seeing a bright ball of light hurtling across the morning sky, along with a loud explosion and a visible trail of dust in the sky. The event was captured by several cameras, including one that was on a cyclist’s helmet.

“By combining observations from several cameras around 100 kilometers apart, a fireball’s position can be pinpointed to within 50 meters, and it’s usually fairly easy to compute its atmospheric trajectory and pre-atmospheric orbit this way,” said Dr. Denis Vida from the University of Western Ontario, who presented a paper on finding the meteorites at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2021.

Vida and his colleagues estimate the initial stony object that streaked through the sky was about one meter across and weighed roughly four metric tons. But it broke apart into at least 17 pieces.

Interferometers are some of the most highly advanced sensor instruments that humans have made.  They are used in everything from astronomy to quantum mechanics and have profoundly impacted our understanding of science.  But not all interferometers have to be functional. A Dutch astronomer named Frans Snik has just designed one that, while it isn’t function, is inspiring all the same – and it happens to be made out of Lego.

Mr. Snik is a prolific Lego builder, initially designing a model of the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) European Extremely Large Telescope back in 2014.  He then created a model of one of the Unit Telescopes that comprise ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Using 3104 pieces that cost around 500 euros, this custom-built assembly is approximately a 1:150 scale model of its inspiration.

VLT Lego model with a laser guidance system.
Credit – ESO / Frans Snik

What’s even better – Mr. Snik made an instruction guide so that Lego enthusiasts the world over can recreate his build, including a list of the bricks needed to do it.  While the VLT itself is impressive, his latest addition to it is even more so.

The VLT’s interferometer connects the four 1.8m Unit Telescopes that comprise the VLT itself.  There are currently three functional instruments on the VLT that combine the four beams from the telescopes and try to parse out the individual wavelengths of interest to astronomers.  In the Lego build, these beam channels are funneled underground in a series of tunnels that connect four of the Unit Telescope models at the site.  The surrounding infrastructure includes brown bricks for dirt and green LEDs for some lighting effects.

NASA says its VIPER rover will head for the western edge of Nobile Crater near the moon’s south pole in 2023, targeting a region where shadowed craters are cold enough for water ice to exist, but where enough of the sun’s rays reach to keep the solar-powered robot going.

Today’s announcement provides a focus for a mission that’s meant to blaze a trail for Artemis astronauts who are scheduled to land on the lunar surface by as early as 2024, and for a sustainable lunar settlement that could take shape by the end of the decade.

“Once it’s on the surface, it will search for ice and other resources on and below the lunar surface that could one day be used and harvested for long-term human exploration of the moon,” Lori Glaze, director of the planetary science division at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said during a teleconference.

Scientists say that cometary impacts have deposited millions of tons of water ice in the lunar soil over the course of billions of years, with much of that ice persisting in permanently shadowed regions of the moon’s craters near the poles. Theoretically, that frozen H2O could be extracted and converted into drinkable water and breathable oxygen as well as hydrogen for powering a lunar base and refueling rockets.

VIPER — which stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover — is expected to provide ground truth for the scientists’ suspicions and give engineers the data they need to design water extraction systems.

The night sky is a part of humanity’s natural heritage. Gazing up at the heavens is a unifying act, performed by almost every human that’s ever lived. Haven’t you looked up at the night sky and felt it ignite your sense of wonder?

But you can’t see much night sky in a modern city. And the majority of humans live in cities now. How can we regain our heritage? Can quiet contemplation make a comeback?

It may be possible, and a team of researchers from Spain, Portugal, and Italy have tackled the problem. In their new paper, titled “Can we illuminate our cities and (still) see the stars?” the team outlines how we could not only keep cities well-lit at night but also make the night sky open to contemplation. The paper is available on the pre-print site arxiv.org.

The Dark Sky Movement is a worldwide effort to reduce light pollution and change the way we light our cities. Its proponents argue that our cities are over-lit and that it’s not only bad for humans and our circadian rhythms but bad for nocturnal animals, too. They also say that we waste too much energy lighting our cities, and much of the light is directed up into the sky haphazardly for no good reason. That creates a phenomenon called sky glow, which is an impediment not only to quiet contemplation but also to scientific astronomical observations.

The authors claim that their paper shows how we could create reasonably dark skies, even in the center of large metropolitan areas, by controlling both the light emission levels and the direct glare. “These results may support the adoption of science-informed, democratic public decisions on the use of light in our municipalities, with the goal of recovering the possibility of contemplating the night sky everywhere in our planet,” they write.

Even meteorologists who forecast the weather on Earth admit that they can’t always accurately predict the weather at a specific location on our planet any given time. And so, attempting to forecast the atmospheric conditions on another world can be downright impossible.

But a new study suggests that an oft-used forecasting technique on Earth can be applied to other worlds as well, such as on Mars or Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

“I believe the first accurate forecasts of perhaps a few Mars days may be only a decade away,” said lead author of the study published in Nature Astronomy, J. Michael Battalio, a postdoctoral researcher from Yale University. “It is just a matter of combining better observational datasets with sufficiently refined numerical models.

The technique uses a phenomenon related to Earth’s jet stream, called annular modes. Annular modes are variabilities in Earth’s atmospheric flow which are not related to seasonal changes. Annular nodes can impact the jet stream, cloud formation and precipitation across the world.  These modes also explain some of the lack of consistency in wind eddies, or the air circulations in New England’s blizzards and severe Midwest storms.

Battalio wondered if there were similar weather patterns on places like Mars and Titan. He and his colleagues analyzed 15 years of atmospheric observations from Mars and discovered that, similar to Earth, the Red Planet has annular modes. Juan Lora, Battalio’s professor at Yale, also developed a global climate model to search for annular modes on Titan.