Space News & Blog Articles

Where on the Moon will the first crewed Artemis mission Land? While NASA is still deliberating on the exact location, they’ve chosen several candidate landing sites near the lunar south pole. This new image captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals what the astronauts might see out the window as they approach their destination.

The region shown here is called Malapert massif, and one of the Artemis III candidate landing sites is the relatively flat spot above a 5,000-meter (16,400 feet) cliff. Another 3,500-meter (11,480 feet) cliff would be visible from this vantage point. It would be a spectacular place to visit, but the terrain could pose a challenge for landing – especially for the first human mission to land on the Moon in over 50 years.

“Imagine the view from the summit,” wrote LROC principal investigator Mark Robinson, on the LRCO website. “One could argue that the sheer grandeur of this region makes it a prime candidate. But then again, a landing here might be too exciting?”

The high-resolution camera on board LRO, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) took this photo on March 3, 2023 when the spacecraft was about 170 kilometers (105 miles) beyond Shackleton crater looking towards the nearside. From this viewpoint, we see the back side of Malapert massif. The Artemis III candidate landing region is partially visible from this viewpoint. Shackleton is the crater near the top left. The relatively flat area above the “5000” in the image below is the heart of the Artemis 3 landing region, which continues down the slope toward the Earth-facing side of the Moon, as seen here.

Full panorama (M1432398306LR) showing the context of the Malapert Massif candidate landing region (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University).

NASA has identified 13 candidate landing regions near the lunar South Pole. Each region contains multiple potential landing sites for Artemis III, which will be the first of the Artemis missions to bring crew to the lunar surface, including the first woman to set foot on the Moon.

Venus has active volcanoes, we get a glimpse of NASA’s new lunar exploration suits, and scientists build a completely flat telescope lens.

Active Volcano Found On Venus

Venus holds many mysteries, and one of the biggest is whether or not there are still active volcanoes on its surface. NASA’s Magellan mission gathered radar images of Venus’s surface decades ago, but the observations were inclusive. Scientists have the data more thoroughly and discovered a volcanic vent on Venus that changed shape and increased in size in less than a year. This appears to be conclusive evidence that Venus is still volcanically active. NASA is sending the VERITAS mission to Venus soon, which will capture more images of the planet’s surface and should see if the vent is continuing to grow.

Read more about volcanism on Venus.

Related interview with with Dr Tibor Kremic about developing tech for Venus exploration

Vulcan Is No More

The discovery of a possible exoplanet, which was believed to be associated with Star Trek’s fictional Vulcan homeworld, has been found to be a false positive caused by a wobble in the star’s spectrum rather than an orbiting exoplanet. The discovery was made using the property of radial velocity, which detects a faint push-pull evinced by fluctuations in the wavelength of light coming from the star. However, it is not always easy to tease an exoplanet out of this apparent wobble. As we obtain more data and more detailed data, it’s worthwhile to revisit older, potentially ambiguous detections to clarify the observed signals and ensure our exoplanet detections are as clear as possible.

Sunsets provide some of the most beautiful natural imagery anywhere on Earth. People flock from all over to see sunsets at specific places at specific times, such as when they perfectly align down a street in Manhattan. But sunsets on other planets wouldn’t be nearly as spectacular.

You wouldn’t even be able to see it on Venus, where the sulfuric acid clouds would completely obscure the event. And on Mercury, it would take excruciatingly long, not to mention its sheer intensity would blind you if you tried to watch it. The gas giants farther out in our solar system suffer from the same problem as Venus – their clouds obscure their surface completely.

Then there’s Mars. The Red Planet has a sparse enough atmosphere that the Sun does make it through to the surface, and its rotational speed is close enough to Earth’s that something like the approximation of a sunset on Earth happens every 24.5 hours. We’ve started to collect various images of these events from our robotic vanguards that we’ve sent to explore. And now, one of the newest members of that group provides a new image that shows just how similar Martian sunsets are to those on Earth.

NASA video simulating sunsets on other worlds.
Credit – NASA Goddard YouTube Channel

Ingenuity, the helicopter that launched with the Perseverance rover and has now been on Mars for almost two years, has completed over 45 flights at the time of writing. Some of those flights have even been captured by Perseverance, which occasionally also catches glimpses of its airborne companion on the ground awaiting its next go-around.

On February 22, 2023, the day of its 45th flight, Ingenuity captured an image of the Sun as it approached a dune on the Martian horizon. It used its high-resolution color camera, in which the Sun appears almost white, as it would in space. An artifact of the image-capturing process makes it look like actual sunbeams are falling onto the dune’s surface.

The people of Chelyabinsk in Russia got the surprise of their lives on the morning of February 15, 2013. That’s when a small asteroid exploded overhead. The resulting shockwave damaged buildings, injured people, and sent a sonic boom thundering across the region.

The Chelyabinsk impactor was about 20 meters across. It broke up in the atmosphere in an airburst and sent a shower of debris across the landscape. The event awakened people to the dangers of incoming space debris. Since we experience frequent warnings about near-Earth objects, scientists want to understand what a piece of space rock can do.

These days, there are many observation programs across the planet. For example, NASA operates its Sentry System and ESA sponsors the NEODyS project. They and others track incoming space rock. The observation data help predict the impacts of all but the very smallest asteroid chunks that come our way. Despite those programs, it’s inevitable that something like the Chelyabinsk asteroid chunk will slip through. So, it’s important to understand what happens during such an impact.

Modeling the Chelyabinsk Meteor

Scientists around the world began studying the event almost as soon as it happened. They collected bits of the debris and studied images of the entire event. Researchers with the Planetary Defense program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently released a highly detailed 3D animation of a simulated chunk of space rock modeled after the Chelyabinsk impactor. They based the materials of the object in their animation on meteorites recovered from the ground.

Fully 3D simulation of the Chelyabinsk meteor break up in Earth’s atmosphere. The meteor is shown as a contour of the damage state (white intact, black fully damaged). Shock-heated air nodes are displayed as points colored by their temperature. Initially, fracture begins at the rear of the object. The crack then propagates forward eventually splitting the object into three coherent fragments. The fragments are disrupted shortly thereafter.

Because people recorded the event with cell phones and security cameras, the team compared their model to what everybody witnessed. It turned out to be very close to what actually happened.