Space

In 2018, a supermassive black hole about 665 million light-years away ripped a passing star apart. At the time, it was “the most boring, garden-variety event,” one researcher recalled. Years later, the same object, AT2018hyz, has become an extreme late-time radio source, with its 5–7 GHz flux climbing from about 1.4 mJy to 33.3 mJy…

NASA says its Perseverance rover has completed the first rover drives on another world planned with the help of AI-generated waypoint plans, a demonstration aimed at reducing the time human rover drivers spend mapping routes, as NASA noted. The demonstration involved two drives on the rim of Jezero Crater in December 2025. On Dec. 8,…

How do you keep data flowing when your network has minutes-long delays and regular dropouts? NASA Glenn’s High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN) Network Operations Release is built for exactly that scenario. HDTN is a high-rate, delay-tolerant networking software stack that uses the Bundle Protocol’s store-and-forward approach to help data move reliably across challenging links. NASA…

A team using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found a new type of astronomical object, a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud considered a remnant of early galaxy formation. The object, nicknamed “Cloud-9,” is the first confirmed detection of such an object in the universe.  “This is a tale of a failed galaxy,” said the program’s principal investigator,…

The NASA rover Perseverance, which has been on Mars since 2021, detected electrical discharges in the Martian atmosphere, researchers reported in Nature. The researchers documented 55 instances of “mini-lightning” over two Martian years, about four Earth years, detected by a microphone on the rover. The instances primarily occurred during dust storms.  The “lightning” strikes were…

High-Rate Delay-Tolerant Networking (HDTN) is software for streaming and networking communications in space. The software has the potential to enable a solar system internet, allowing space exploration teams to receive data from rovers and other space vehicles and to maintain connections between spacecraft and Earth.  The software can transfer data up to 10 times faster…

Researchers from Johns Hopkins published a study providing evidence for the theory that mysterious gamma rays emanating from the center of the Milky Way originate from dark matter particles colliding.  Steps towards solving decades-long mystery These gamma rays were first detected in 2009, and their origins have stumped scientists ever since. Some have theorized that…

Stoke, a rocket startup company, raised $510 million in Series D funding, the company announced last week. The new financing more than doubled the company’s total capital, which is now $990 million. Stoke plans to use the funds to “accelerate product development and expansion,” according to the press release.  In March, the company was selected…

Astronomers have reported a previously unknown moon orbiting Uranus in James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) imagery from February 2, 2025. The object, provisionally named S/2025 U 1, is roughly 6 miles (about 10 km) in diameter, making it the smallest known Uranian satellite and the 29th overall. NASA notes the result is science in progress…

SpaceX’s NASA-funded CRS-33 aims to launch no earlier than 2:45 a.m. EDT Sunday from Cape Canaveral with research focused on organ engineering, stem cells and space-based computing. The manifest features Wake Forest’s blood-vessel-containing liver tissue, Cedars-Sinai stem cell studies and Axiom Space’s Red Hat Device Edge demo, plus student experiments from Genes in Space and…

This week in R&D: the first quantum computer in space is now orbiting the Earth; a potential new treatment for Alzheimer’s, thanks to cancer drugs; a startup is breaking ground on their first fusion power plant, they say they are on track to deliver fusion energy by 2030; Google DeepMind announced their AI Earth mapping…

At the University of Colorado Boulder campus, undergraduate students are using digital twin technology and robotics to advance the future of lunar studies. They published their study in the journal Advances in Space Research.  While “Armstrong”, the robot created by the undergrads, wouldn’t survive a trip to the moon’s surface, it can be used for…

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory unveiled its first images today, showcasing a 3,200-megapixel digital camera that promises to capture more data about our universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined, according to Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. In 10 hours of test observations from its mountaintop perch in Chile,…

Tokyo-based startup ispace lost contact with its Resilience lander during a landing attempt at the Moon’s Mare Frigoris, a lunar mare located in the northern hemisphere also known as the “Sea of Cold.” The mission’s likely failure marks a significant setback in the company’s second bid to achieve a commercial lunar touchdown. The first Hakuto-R…

SpaceX successfully launched Starship Flight 9, marking the first re-flight of a Super Heavy booster, the reusable first stage of its Starship system. Lifting off from Starbase, Texas, after a couple of brief, and later resolved, holds at 7:30 p.m. Eastern, the mission prioritized aggressively testing the reused first stage. While the Super Heavy booster…

Not all solar flares are created equal. On one end of the spectrum are A-class solar flares, which are near background levels. And then there is the X-class, where an X1 event is 10,000 times more powerful in X-ray output than an A1 event. Early Wednesday, there was an X2.7 flare, the ‘2.7’ indicating it’s…

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected thermal emission from WD 1856 b, a Jupiter-size body circling a white dwarf 81 light-years away. At 186 K (−87 °C), the planet is the coldest ever seen in emitted light, confirming its mass below six Jupiters and its survival inside a star’s post-mortem “forbidden zone.” Prior estimates…

NASA has partnered with Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) to upgrade an Antarctic ground station and connect it to a cloud network, ensuring data from the SPHEREx near-infrared space observatory can be efficiently relayed to scientists. The collaboration, which involved upgrading KSAT’s Troll station antenna on Antarctica, supports the SPHEREx mission’s quest to explore the origins…

Over the past two years, 218-year-old publisher Wiley has repositioned itself in the AI landscape, focusing on specialized “vertical” models over general chatbots. Explaining the company’s proactive strategy, SVP Josh Jarrett stated Wiley’s view is “we learn more by doing and potentially help shape AI’s development, rather than just be shaped by it.” This approach…

NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) is in the process of undergoing critical environmental testing at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. After its arrival on March 18, 2025, IMAP was moved into the X-ray and Cryogenic Facility (XRCF) on March 19, where it began a 28-day thermal vacuum test to simulate…

Matteo Paz, a Pasadena High School senior whose interest in astronomy was sparked by Caltech public lectures, used AI to develop a computational model while participating in Caltech’s Summer Research Connection outreach program. Under the mentorship of IPAC astronomer Davy Kirkpatrick, Paz analyzed over a decade’s worth of NASA’s NEOWISE infrared survey data. While the…

Berkeley Lab’s Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has released a dataset mapping a whopping 18.7 million celestial objects. The dataset is the largest 3D cosmic survey ever made available to the scientific community. This astronomical treasure trove, containing information on roughly million stars, 13.1 million galaxies, and 1.6 million quasars. The newly released 270-terabyte dataset…

A major question in cosmology is how the first galaxies released enough high-energy radiation to ionize the neutral universe after the Big Bang. Now, advanced analysis of X-ray data from the starburst galaxy Haro 11 sheds light on how galaxies contribute to cosmic reionization. Using principal component analysis (PCA) on observations from Chandra and XMM-Newton,…

Tapping more than a decade of Hubble Space Telescope observations, astronomers have determined Uranus’s rotation period with ultra-high accuracy — roughly 1,000 times greater than previous estimates — by tracking the planet’s unique ultraviolet aurorae. This new measurement refines the Uranian day to 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 52 seconds, establishing a vital baseline for…

Humanity’s return to the Moon, and eventual journeys to Mars, hinge on our ability to build reliable, permanent structures. Think habitats, landing pads, power stations and the like. But transporting fully assembled structures from Earth is prohibitively expensive and complex. The logical alternative is in-situ assembly, and a fundamental process for joining metal components is…