Space News & Blog Articles

Visualizations shape how we perceive space exploration.  Whether it’s the Pale Blue Dot, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, Earthrise, or any other myriad images captured as part of this great endeavor, they all help inspire the next generation of explorers.  Now, with advances in image capture and processing technology, we can finally start to take the next step in those visualizations – video.  Ingenuity was recently captured on video during its first flight a few months ago.  And this week, NASA released a breathtaking video of Juno’s view of Jupiter and Ganymede, one of its moons, as it flew past the gas giant.

The views themselves are stunning, with lightning flashing on Jupiter’s night side and Ganymede’s textured terrain coming across in full force.  However, Juno was still busy capturing scientific data in addition to these spectacular images.   

After arriving in the Jupiter system in 2016, Juno has spent the past five years swinging its suite of scientific instruments across the system.  It is coming up on its 35th Perijove – the point where it is closest in its orbit to Jupiter – on July 20th, which also happens to be the end of the first mission extension.  That mission has now been extended again through September 2025, with more than 40 more Perijoves expected in that time frame, more than doubling the current scientific data haul.

That data haul has included plenty of stories we’ve touched on here before at UT, including finding a meteor strike and solving a mystery Galileo had found.  But this new mission extension is allowing Juno to do something it has never done before – visit Jupiter’s moons.

Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, is the first of those, and Juno visited it in June. The images form part of the video from NASA, but also are also breathtaking as still images.  But yet again, Juno’s suite of instruments aren’t only interested in visible light, but are also busy collecting data in other spectra as well, including trying to learn more about Ganymede’s potential subsurface ocean, which might potentially be the largest in the solar system.

Early this morning, from their Launch Site One facility in West Texas, Blue Origin made history as it conducted the first crewed flight of its New Shepard launch vehicle. The crew consisted of four commercial astronauts: Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, aerospace pioneer Wally Funk, and 18-year old student from The Netherlands Oliver Daemon.

The flight was a major milestone for the company, for commercial aerospace, and for civilian spaceflight. It was the culmination of years of development, which entered a new phase when Bezos announced that he was stepping down as CEO of Amazon to take a more hands-on role. The flight was also historic because it involved the oldest (Wally Funk, 82-years old) and youngest (Oliver Daemon, 18-years old) astronauts to ever take flight.

The flight began at 08:12 AM CST (06:12 AM PST; 09:12 AM EST) and saw the New Shepard lift off from the company’s facility in Van Horn, Texas. By 08:15 AM, mission control reported the successful separation of the RSS First Step capsule from the first stage booster, which returned to the launch site shortly thereafter. A minute later, the capsule reached its apogee of 100 km (62 mi) – the Kármán Line – where the crew experienced four minutes of weightlessness.

By 08:22 AM, the capsule made a soft landing about a minute after the chutes deployed and slowed the capsule’s descent to a smooth 26 km/h (16 mph). By 09:45 AM, the post-flight press conference (which was also broadcast live via Blue Origin’s website) began and featured the crew sharing what the experience was like, getting their commercial astronaut pins, and showing some of the mementos they took with them to space.

While every member of the crew had inspiring words to share, it was Wally Funk’s infectious, energetic nature that really roused the crowd. Funk was a very special guest on the flight, having been a member of the Mercury 13 – aka. the First Lady Astronauts Trainees (FLATs) program – in 1960/61. Like her fellow trainees, Funk went through the same medical tests and training as their male counterparts who went on to become the Mercury Seven.

On the anniversary of the first Moon landing, Blue Origin became the second commercial space company in just nine days to send people just past the edge of space. During the seemingly flawless 10 minute and 10 second flight, the four passengers on board the New Shepard rocket whooped with glee and exhilaration. The crew included Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, and the oldest and youngest people to ever fly to space.

Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pioneering female aviator and member of the so-called “Mercury 13” women astronaut-hopefuls made the flight, along with Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch physics student.

Bezos’ and Blue Origin’s flight comes after fellow space billionaire Richard Branson launched in his own Virgin Galactic rocketship on July 11.

“Blue Control, Bezos. Best day ever!” Bezos said during the flight, with a near-constant chatter of the crew could be heard during the live webcast. “You have a very happy crew up here!”

The New Shepard vehicle lifted off from the company’s facilities in Van Horn, Texas, shortly after 8 a.m. CT. The crew had approximately four minutes of weightlessness during the flight. The suborbital mission passed the Karman line, the point 100 km (62 miles) above Earth’s surface where some international organizations consider where space begins.

Update: Hubble took its first picture since it went into safe mode on June 13th! More info here.

On Sunday, June 13th, the Hubble Space Telescope gave the astronomical community a fright when its payload computer suddenly stopped working. This prompted the main computer to put the telescope and its scientific instruments into safe mode. What followed was many tense weeks as the operations team for the HST tried to figure out what the source of the problem was and come up with a strategy for turning Hubble back on.

On Friday, July 17th, after more than a month of checking, re-checking, and attempted restarts, the operations team for Hubble identified the root of the problem and restored power to the telescope’s hardware and all of its instruments. Science operations can now resume, and the pioneering space telescope that gave us over thirty years of dedicated astronomy, cosmology, and astrophysics, still has some life in her!

The problems began when an unspecified issue caused Hubble’s payload computer, a NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer-1 (NSSC-1) system, to stop working. As part of the telescope’s Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SI C&DH) module, the purpose of this computer is to control and coordinate the scientific instruments aboard the spacecraft.

As a result, the main computer stopped receiving the “keep-alive” signal from the payload computer and automatically placed all of Hubble‘s scientific instruments into a safe mode. A day later, the Hubble operations team restarted the payload computer, but it halted again. That’s when the operations team began investigating different SI C&DH components and attempting to switch over to backup modules.

Ever since the announcement last September that astronomers found evidence of phosphine in the clouds of Venus, the planet has been getting a lot of attention. It’s not surprising. Phosphine is a potential biosignature: On Earth, it is produced by microbial life. Might a similar biological process be taking place in the skies of our sister planet? It’s a tantalizing prospect, and is definitely worth examining closely, but it’s too early to be sure. Microbes aren’t the only way to get phosphine. A new paper published on July 12th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science suggests that volcanism might instead be to blame for the strange chemistry in the Venusian cloud tops.

The Story So Far

Early last fall, a research team led by Professor Jane Greaves (Cardiff University) announced the discovery of phosphine to worldwide fanfare. The team’s findings were based on data from two telescopes: the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), both of which suggested the presence of phosphene in a quantity as high as 20 parts per billion (PPB) in Venus’ atmosphere.

Phosphene (PH3) is not a very stable gas and tends to decay quickly, meaning that for it to exist on Venus (or on Earth for that matter), there must be an ongoing process replenishing it. On gas giants like Jupiter, the high heat and pressure created by the planet’s enormous gravity well can easily produce phosphene, but such conditions do not exist on smaller rocky worlds. Here on Earth, microbes and industrial processes can create it, and so can volcanos.

On Venus, the sheer amount of phosphine detected seemed to suggest that geological processes like volcanos were not sufficient to be the source of the gas. Greaves and her team were careful to rule out, as best they could, any known geological and chemical processes before making the dramatic claim that it could be a sign of alien life. As far as they could tell, biology was the only known process that fit the data.

Of course, the claim attracted intense scrutiny, and within a few months several attempts had been made to duplicate the result. As often happens, these additional studies complicated the picture. Some researchers suggested that what Greaves thought was phosphine might actually be sulfur dioxide (SO2) in a different layer of the atmosphere. The discovery of a software malfunction at ALMA brought the data further into question.