Mike

@centyone

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DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is looking for a private company to build spacecraft to orbit the moon and search for water. A program solicitation that DARPA released on April 14 outlines the plan for the LASSO (Lunar Assay via Small Satellite Orbiter) program, with the goal of developing a system of one or several affordable satellites. The hope is that, in four years or less, the LASSO spacecraft will map the entire surface of the moon — while circling in a very low orbit.

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Recently, a team of University of Cambridge-led astronomers made global headlines after announcing they'd found the "strongest evidence yet" of life beyond our solar system. Their claims were based on the detection of sulfur-based gases in an alien planet's atmosphere — gases typically linked to biological processes on Earth. However, a quick independent analysis of the data now casts doubt on the validity of these findings. Jake Taylor of the University of Oxford in the U.K., who studies atmospheres of exoplanets, used a basic statistical test to identify telltale signs of gas molecules in the atmosphere of the exoplanet at hand, K2-18b. Taylor did this in such a way that the test didn't assume which gases might be present. Instead of the distinct bumps that typically indicate the presence of detectable gas molecules, Taylor saw the data appearing consistent with a "flat line," according to the new study, which was posted to the preprint archive on April 22 and has yet to be peer reviewed.

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Declassified images from U.S. military satellites are helping find forgotten mine fields in Cambodia. From the late 1960s almost until the end of the 1990s, a bloody war between communist groups and democracy defenders raged, with a few short breaks, in the jungles and on the rice fields of Cambodia. The conflict left behind a hidden legacy that keeps increasing the war's death toll to this day. Over 10 million anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines and other explosives may have been scattered across Cambodia's land during the decades of fighting. Over half of them may still lurk in the ground, waiting for unlucky people or vehicles to set them off. Since the war's end in 1998, over 20,000 people have been killed and 45,000 injured in mine accidents in Cambodia. The toll is still rising.

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Firefly Aerospace launched its Alpha rocket for the sixth time ever on Tuesday morning (April 29), but things did not go as planned. Alpha lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base Tuesday at 9:37 a.m. EDT (1337 GMT; 6:37 a.m. local California time) through dense fog. The rocket's second stage appeared to tumble after separating from its booster, but seemed to right itself shortly afterward. However, it appears the second-stage vehicle may have lost its nozzle. "Following a nominal liftoff of Firefly’s Alpha rocket, there was a mishap during first stage separation for the FLTA006 mission that impacted the Stage 2 Lightning engine nozzle, putting the vehicle in a lower than planned orbit," Firefly Aerospace wrote in an update on X following the launch. "We are working with our Lockheed Martin customer, the Space Force, and FAA to conduct a thorough investigation and determine the root cause."

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Astronomers have caught an immensely ancient galaxy piercing the veil of darkness that shrouded the early universe. It's surprising any light from distant galaxy JADES-GS-Z13-1-LA reached Earth at all. Photons coming from the realm that recently landed on the James Webb Space Telescope's mirrors existed when the universe was just 330 million years old — and, at that point in its adolescence, the universe was foggy and dim. A dense haze of gas suffused the space between stars, and even between galaxies, absorbing starlight and muffling the whole universe in darkness. Astronomers call this period the Cosmic Dark Ages, and JADES-GS-Z13-1-LA is the earliest light we've seen (so far) piercing that cosmic fog.

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NASA researchers got a rare chance to study Uranus' atmosphere and rings this month, when the ice giant passed between Earth and a distant star, creating a "stellar occultation." This rare event lasted about an hour on April 7 and was only visible from western North America. The last time a bright stellar occultation of Uranus occurred was 1996, so NASA came prepared. An international team of more than 30 astronomers, led by planetary scientists at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, used 18 observatories to gather data.

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Future moon astronauts may find water more accessible than previously thought, according to a new experiment that suggests the sun is replenishing the sought-after resource on the lunar surface. Because the moon lacks a magnetic field like Earth's, the barren lunar surface is constantly bombarded by energetic particles from the sun; these particles make up the solar wind. Scientists have long suspected, based on computer simulations, that the solar wind helps make the ingredients of water on the lunar surface.

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NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) just snapped an off-Earth action shot the likes of which we've never seen before. On Feb. 28, MRO's HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera captured NASA's Curiosity rover making tracks across Mars' huge Gale Crater. MRO has spotted Curiosity before, but the car-sized rover had always been stationary in those cases. The newly released photo "is believed to be the first orbital image of the rover mid-drive across the Red Planet," NASA officials said in a statement today (April 24).

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Astronomers have discovered a long-missing element of a galactic collision involving the Perseus galaxy cluster, located 240 million light-years from Earth. This element, a newly detected "subcluster," is 1.4 million light-years to the west of NGC 1275, the central galaxy of the Perseus cluster. These two elements seem to be connected by a faint "bridge" of material. The structural backbone of this bridge is dark matter, the universe's most mysterious "stuff." Dark matter remains effectively invisible by not interacting with light, but its interaction with gravity has helped to shape galactic structures.

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Our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31, or M31) appears to sport a lopsided arrangement of satellite galaxies that defy scientific models, stumping astronomers who are also trying to figure out why so many of this galaxy's family members point in our direction. All but one of M31's brightest 37 satellites are on the side of the Andromeda spiral that faces our Milky Way galaxy – the odd one out being Messier 110, which is easily visible in amateur images of the Andromeda Galaxy. "M31 is the only system that we know of that demonstrates such an extreme degree of asymmetry," Kosuke Jamie Kanehisa of the Institut für Physik und Astronomie at Universität Potsdam in Germany told Space.com

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While slowly climbing the slopes of Mount Sharp — a towering peak inside Mars' Gale Crater — NASA's Curiosity rover made a remarkable discovery: large deposits of carbon locked away in carbonate minerals. That may sound a little dry at first, but in reality this find could be a major piece of the puzzle in our search for ancient life on the Red Planet. Carbonate minerals form when carbon dioxide interacts with water and rock, making them an important marker of past environmental conditions. Scientists have spotted these minerals before on Mars — by rovers on the ground, orbiters above, and even in Martian meteorites that fell to Earth — but Curiosity's latest data adds exciting new details. "It tells us that the planet was habitable and that the models for habitability are correct," said the study's lead author, Ben Tutolo, associate professor with the Department of Earth, Energy and Environment in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary, in a statement.

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The universe's largest structure, the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, was already a challenge to explain with models of the universe due to its incredibly vast size — and now, using the most powerful blasts of energy in the universe, Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), astronomers have discovered this structure is even bigger than they realized. Plus, the team even found that parts of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall are actually closer to Earth than previously suspected. The Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall is a so-called "supercluster" of galaxies; it's a filament of the cosmic web around which the first galaxies in the universe gathered and grew. Its name was coined by Johndric Valdez, a Filipino teenager who aspires to be an astronomer. That name isn't very literal, however. This is because the round-shaped Great Wall spans not just the constellations Hercules and Corona Borealis but also the region of the celestial sphere from the constellations Boötes to Gemini.

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NASA's oldest active astronaut has redefined traveling "home" for your birthday, landing from the International Space Station on the same day that he turned 70. Don Pettit touched down on Saturday (April 19) with his Soyuz MS-26 crewmates, Aleksey Ovchinin, 53, and Ivan Vagner, 39. The U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts reached the ground in Kazakhstan at 9:20 p.m. EDT (0120 GMT or 6:20 a.m. local time April 20), seven months after they left Earth aboard the same spacecraft. Pettit was born on April 20, 1955, in Silverton, Oregon, but said that the feeling of being home is relative to where you have been.

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Scientists announced on Friday (April 18) that the newest solar investigator in town has captured its first-light images — or should I say the newest solar investigators. That is, this NASA sun-studying mission, named PUNCH, is technically made up of four small satellites that are strategically distributed in our planet's orbit. The quartet is designed, however, to work together as a single instrument with the power to decode some of our star's biggest mysteries. "All four instruments are functioning as designed. We're excited to finish on-orbit commissioning and get these cameras working together," Craig DeForest, at the Solar System Science and Exploration Division of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.

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Scientists have found further evidence of possible biosignature gases on the nearby exoplanet K2-18b, strengthening the case that it could support alien life. In 2023, researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reported the potential presence of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) on K2-18b, which is nearly nine times more massive than Earth and circles in the "habitable zone" of a star about 120 light-years away from us. Here on Earth, DMS is produced primarily by life — most prolifically by phytoplankton and other marine microbes — so the 2023 study was met with some enthusiasm. The excitement was tempered, however, by the preliminary nature of the find; JWST's observations were consistent with the presence of DMS but did not confirm it. So the study team looked again, but in a slightly different way this time.

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Aurora chasers, get ready! The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has issued a geomagnetic storm warning due to an incoming one-two punch from the sun, and we have possibly received the first blow. The predicted G3-level storm conditions could bring northern lights as far south as Illinois and Oregon (typically 50° geomagnetic latitude) tonight. The incoming "punch" from the sun is expected to arrive in the form of two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that are expected to strike Earth in succession. The CMEs were launched during a rare double eruption of solar magnetic filaments on April 12 and April 13. Arriving hours earlier than expected, a CME struck Earth's magnetic field at 1 p.m. ET (1700 GMT) on April 15, according to Spaceweather.com.

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A stunning new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is allowing astronomers to examine the complex and turbulent final stages of a dying star's life. The snapshot above showcases NGC 1514, a planetary nebula that resides roughly 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. Despite the term, however, NGC 1514 has nothing to do with planets. Instead, at its heart, there are two stars. These stars appear as a single point of light in the James Webb Space Telescope's view, and this point of light is encircled by an arc of orange dust. Of particular interest to astronomers is the nebula's faint, Venn-diagram-like structure — two rings of ejected material shaped by the gravitational influence of the central stars. Scientists say the rings offer a unique opportunity to dissect the complex interplay of stellar outflow over eons.

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In this era of commercial space travel, Blue Origin has become a major player in turning the dream of spaceflight into reality for people with the means — including some celebrities. Case in point: Pop star Katy Perry and journalist Gayle King are part of Blue Origin's upcoming all-female spaceflight, which is set to launch on Monday (April 14). That mission, known as NS-31, also includes Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn, Amanda Nguyen and Lauren Sánchez (the partner of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos), all of them notable figures in their own right.

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The farthest, smallest and faintest full moon of the year rises this weekend — and you can watch it live online. April's full moon — also called the Pink Moon, or Paschal Moon — rises Saturday (April 12) and peaks at 8:22 p.m. EDT (0022 GMT April 13). While it won't appear pink, this month's full moon will look slightly smaller and dimmer in the night sky because the moon will be farthest from Earth, also known as apogee. That's why it's said to be a "micromoon." The Virtual Telescope Project will provide a view of the micromoon using its robotic telescopes in Manciano, Italy. The project's free online livestream will begin at 8:00 p.m. EDT on Saturday (0000 GMT on April 13), as the moon reaches its full phase. You can watch the livestream here on Space.com courtesy of the Virtual Telescope Project or directly on their WebTV page or YouTube channel.

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We've all woken up in a terrible mood from time to time, but a newly observed monster black hole is really having a bad day. The previously inactive supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy SDSS1335+0728, located about 300 million light-years away from us, was seen erupting with the longest and most powerful X-ray blasts ever seen from such a cosmic titan. This active phase marks the start of the supermassive black hole devouring matter around it and erupting with short-lived flaring events called quasiperiodic eruptions (QPEs).

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