LOS ANGELES — Standing in the shadow of the space shuttle Endeavour, a group of retired NASA astronauts announced their plan to travel the country visiting colleges to try to inspire younger generations to get out and vote. This campaign comes as we lead up to the November midterm election.

This past year, a group of retired NASA astronauts teamed up for a single cause: to defend the U.S. constitution. They banded together as part of a non-profit, non-partisan activist organization called Astronauts for America. So far, they have been speaking out, using their astronaut expertise, platforms, cultural relevance and role model status to speak out in support of "science, evidence-based decision-making, public service and the rule of law," their website reads. Now, as the group announced at an event at the California Science Center's new air and space center — home to the shuttle Endeavour — they're hitting the road on a campaign tour of colleges called "Vote for Freedom."

"We have to do what we can to ensure that the country makes it through the challenges that we're dealing with here, and that is the message that we're going to be taking to colleges and universities," Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart told Space.com. "And the agency that we have, the immediate agency, is to vote."

This tour will send astronauts from the group on a four-month jaunt across the country. Astronauts from the group's more than 100 members will visit state and community colleges, county fairs and even town halls, aiming to reach first-time voters and young people who might be new to voting.

"I'm really excited to look a bunch of younger Americans in the eye and make sure that they know that someone that they can trust said: ;Listen, you matter, because our country matters, and our country needs you,'" former NASA astronaut Cady Coleman told Space.com.

"It's with a uniquely American kind of freedom that we were able to go to the moon, and that same freedom launched the spaceship behind us 25 times into space. Now we see those freedoms under heavy threat," former NASA astronaut Steve Smith said during the event. "We're seeing chaos instead of community, violence instead of votes, lies instead of laws, and fear instead of fate. That's how democracy and freedom die."

"The mission is all that matters. Now, our country is the mission, and our message is simple: going to the polls is one small step for you, and one giant leap for our country," Smith added.

This campaign leads up to the U.S. midterm elections this November. Midterm elections happen halfway through every four-year presidency. This election allows voters to decide what Congress looks like, and which political party controls Congress. This can ultimately have a major impact on what laws and decisions are passed moving forward, and whether Congress will reject or change actions by the president moving forward. And this group of astronauts is serious about the importance of getting people out to exercise their right to vote.

"I'm a child of the segregated South; I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina," former astronaut and NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, who also serves as a steering committee member for Astronauts for America, said at the event. "I graduated in 1964. Anybody know what happened in 1964? The Voting Rights Act. So, as a person growing up in my hometown, it wasn't a guarantee that my mom and dad were going to be able to go out and vote. I look at what's going on today about people trying to restrict the ability of people to cast their ballot. That's not who we are. That's not America."

The group of astronauts recently spoke out about voting access after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of protecting the right to absentee voting, in response to attempts by the Trump administration to place restrictions on the current voting process. Especially leading up to the November midterms, each vote carries significant weight. And while this nonpartisan group isn't telling you who to vote for, they do think that everyone who can should vote.

"As astronauts, we signed an oath to our nation, and we are mission-oriented people. And our nation is now the mission," Coleman added. "We need to recognize that everyone's voice is important, and one of the voices that we don't hear very much is the young people. And we want them to understand that, even though sometimes change can seem daunting, their perspective is really important, and, you know, their voice is important."

In satellite data captured over Antarctica, what appears to be a beautiful, colorful hummingbird emerges from the crest of a mountaintop.

What is it?

While there are no hummingbirds flying around Antarctica, we can see what looks like a small, purple bird in a new satellite image of an Antarctic mountain. The dark belly of this "bird" at the center of this image is actually the top of the mountain Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja in East Antarctica.

What looks like a bird's tail is a stream of ice flowing northeast all the way out to the ocean, and what appear to be feathers splaying outward from the mountaintop are actually crevasses down the mountain. These crevasses are formed by a glacier fracturing the mountain's surface as it flows in the icy current toward the ocean.

This view was captured by radar instruments onboard the satellite NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) that launched as a collaboration between NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation). The director of NASA's Earth Science Division called NISAR "the most sophisticated radar we've ever built" in a pre-launch briefing last year.

Why is it incredible?

At first glance, this image is puzzling. What could it possibly be? Its bold colors and sharp lines evoke almost alien qualities. But the strange beauty of the shapes and colors in this satellite image reveal important information about glacier movements on the mountain.

"First, it's a beautiful image, with rich details of features that provide insights to how the glacier is moving. Then, because radar can often see through snow and deep into the ice, NISAR can observe fundamentally different properties of Antarctic ice than can be seen in optical imagery," Seongsu Jeong, the signal analysis engineer who produced the image at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "With NISAR we're seeing what's hidden beneath the surface."

And now anyone can explore NISAR's data. Earlier this week, on July 20, NISAR started making the data from its radar instruments public. Moving forward, mission teams will be rolling out this data so researchers everywhere can use it to study and protect our ever-changing planet.

If you're of a Martian persuasion, "Strange New Worlds"' season 4 opener couldn't have timed itself much better.

Not only does this week mark the 50th anniversary of Viking 1 touching down on the surface of the red planet, new research from University of Oxford scientists recently suggested that Mars once had an active, interconnected system of magma beneath its surface. If accurate, this discovery might have made our Solar System next-door neighbor more habitable in its distant past.

While life on Mars has long been an obsession of sci-fi creators — from HG Wells' "War of the Worlds" to "Doom" via John Carter and John Carpenter — "Star Trek"'s Martians have tended to be human expats. Indeed, by the 24th century of "The Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager", it's home to the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards that would later be destroyed by rogue synths ahead of "Star Trek: Picard"'s debut season.

SPOILERS AHEAD! ANYONE YET TO WATCH "VALLES MARINERIS" SHOULD PROCEED WITH CAUTION TO AVOID VIOLATING TEMPORAL PRIME DIRECTIVES.

Homegrown Martians had traditionally been in shorter supply, however, until "Valles Marineris" paid them a visit. The only catch? Captain Pike and his USS Enterprise crew have to travel a mere 65 million years back in time to say hi.

There's something undeniably delicious (though not, luckily, the crew) about Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn), La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) and Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) getting to visit the real Jurassic Park (technically Cretaceous Park) on an away mission to recover the iridium they need to repair an Enterprise stricken by its accidental trip through a quantum entangled spatial anomaly.

In the tradition of "Planet of the Apes", it turns out that this particular third rock from the sun was Earth all along. It also, according to star Rebecca Romijn, features an actual puppet from the original "Jurassic Park", and gives La'an that rare opportunity to punch a dinosaur in the face. That's definitely one to tell the grandkids — assuming, of course, you can avoid stepping on a bug, unleashing a butterfly effect, and preventing them (and the entire human race, for that matter) from ever being born.

But it's no coincidence that Pike has a copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars" on his bookshelf, because it's what happens in orbit that makes this episode such a pulpy sci-fi joy.

Although Battle Commander Cassell (Saffron Burrows) and her crew have the familiar, human-esque appearance of most "Star Trek" aliens, Martian evolution has got them there millions of years before Vulcans, Klingons, and the rest become top dogs in the galaxy. (Spock notes that Martian DNA is present in many modern-day species, though it's unclear how their family tree aligns with the "Progenitor" origin story of "TNG"'s "The Chase".)

These technologically advanced Martians are embroiled in a bloody ongoing war with a "Starship Troopers"-adjacent arachnid species known as the Dol'Drm, who call the fifth planet of the Sol System home. Science purists will note that this strange new world is not the famously gaseous Jupiter, but an extra, science textbook-rewriting ball of rock located roughly where the Asteroid Belt is now.

Unfortunately, once Cassell has sneaked a peek at a future where her "homeworld is a barren red wasteland", she's in no mood to listen to Federation lectures about finding diplomatic solutions. She subsequently steals some of the Enterprise's antimatter and fashions a makeshift weapon of mass destruction to eliminate the Dol'Drm once and for all. But the shockwaves of this cataclysmic blast will stretch far beyond the fifth planet.

Spock confirms that many of the fragments left behind by the obliteration of the Dol'Drm homeworld will form the Asteroid Belt, essentially a riff on the so-called "Disruption Hypothesis" of the belt's origins.

Originally postulated by German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers in the early 19th century, the theory suggested that a rocky planet, roughly the size of our Moon, existed between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

It was the destruction of this world (by means unknown, though we doubt anyone suggested an antimatter explosion) that led to the formation of the belt. The hypothesis is now largely discredited — current scientific thinking suggests that the belt is the result of dust and rock coalescing due to gravity — but it's a fun revisionist spin on old scientific ideas.

And the Enterprise's involvement in the Solar System's origin story stretches even further. The gravimetric shift caused by the absence of the Dol'Drm planet shifts Mars' orbit, making it too cold to support life. It also launches arguably the most famous asteroid in history, the Chicxulub meteorite, on a collision course with Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs, kickstarting the Cenozoic Era, and sending the planet on an evolutionary journey that will eventually lead to, well, us.

When it comes to interfering with past events, the implications are rather larger than Scotty passing on the formula for yet-to-be-invented transparent aluminum in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home". Even the Borg meddling with a few centuries of history in "First Contact" is small fry next to killing off the dinosaurs.

The intriguing twist here, of course, is that humanity's existence is briefly on a knife-edge, as Pike makes the biggest decision of his (or, indeed, anyone's) life. Standard Starfleet protocol would usually dictate that the Enterprise intervene to prevent the Dol'Drm being destroyed by stolen Federation technology, but its commanding officer sees the bigger picture.

What if the Enterprise was always meant to be there? What if the human race only exists because the ship has gone back in time to answer its own 65-million-year-old Mayday? "In our future there is no fifth planet," he reasons, before allowing the Martians to deliver their deadly payload.

It's a wonderful "what if" that puts 65 million years of history in one man's hands. Indeed, you could tie yourself in knots with all that timey-wimey stuff, but the episode is so much pulpy fun that you barely notice the unbearable weight of those existential dilemmas. Dinosaurs, Martians and an origin story for the human race? What more could you want from a season opener?

New episodes of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" debut on Paramount+ on Thursdays.

The moon's south pole has long been the target of NASA's Artemis lunar landing missions, but one Artemis astronaut is questioning if that's still the best plan.

NASA's Victor Glover, who piloted the Artemis II mission around the moon this past April, proposed a different approach while speaking at the NASA Exploration Science Forum at the agency's Ames Research Center in California on July 21, according to a report published on Space News. "I think we need to be realistic and work our way to the south pole, and maybe not try to go there first," Glover said.

Instead, Glover suggested aiming closer to the moon's equator, where missions can land in areas not at risk of falling out of daylight, and in regions reachable by orbits that allow for quick transfers back to Earth in case of an emergency, according to Space News. That argument aligns with other recent Artemis program changes that NASA has introduced to gradually expand successive mission goals, but whether space agency officials will take his advice depends on what the top priority for Artemis moon landings is deemed to be.

NASA has long targeted the lunar south pole due to its abundance of water ice. Permanently shadowed areas inside craters in this region are believed to harbor large ice deposits, which scientists believe can be used as a resource in the production of several space-travel essentials, like potable water, radiation shielding and rocket fuel. That goes a long way toward achieving the Artemis program's ultimate goal of creating a sustainable, long-term base on the surface of the moon, and using the lessons learned in building that outpost to enable the eventual occupation of Mars.

There is, however, a secondary motivation behind NASA's ramped-up urgency to see its Artemis missions succeed in a timely manner. China has also set its sights on the lunar surface, stoking fears in some U.S. officials about the implications of Chinese astronauts staking some sort of claim at the moon's south pole before American astronauts are able to get there.

During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last year, several space industry experts, including former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, urged lawmakers not to let that happen. Mike Gold, president of civil and international space at Redwire, told senators that China beating the U.S. back to the moon would mean "a global realignment that will impact our economy, our tax base, our ability to innovate and our national security."

If not just getting back to the moon first, but being the first with boots on the ground at the south pole, is the priority, Glover's suggested approach may not get NASA there in time. China is making fast progress with its lunar program; it has already demonstrated robotic landings and sample returns on both the moon's near and far side and begun developing hardware for a crewed landing by 2030.

NASA's next Artemis mission, Artemis III, is scheduled for next year. It will launch four astronauts aboard the Orion space capsule for rendezvous and docking tests with the program's two commercial lunar lander vehicles, SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon. If all goes according to plan on that mission, NASA is targeting late 2028 for the program's first moon landing on Artemis IV. To pull that off, one of the two landers has to be up to the task, and both have faced significant delays that have raised questions about their readiness on NASA's timeline.

To facilitate south pole landings, NASA previously laid out a lunar near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) — a high-altitude, elliptical polar orbit — where Orion would dock with the lunar Gateway space station, and then crews would transfer to and undock aboard one of the Artemis landers to descend to the surface. Gateway is no longer part of the picture, however; the agency has sidelined that outpost to push ahead with a surface base.

But NRHO on its own also introduces some complications that SpaceX and Blue Origin have raised while developing their lunar landers, as well as safety concerns for astronauts facing a potential emergency situation on the moon's surface. Because of its highly elliptical shape and long orbital period, opportunities to launch from the moon's south pole to rendezvous with Orion in NRHO open up just once a week.

To highlight the potential risks imposed by relying on an NRHO, Glover brought up a hypothetical situation — an astronaut health issue that requires a medical evacuation just after landing at a lunar south pole moon base.

"You’re stuck for a week," Glover said. "That’s a big deal to me, and I don’t like that plan … The equator gives me opportunity to save that person."

If the point of Artemis' returning astronauts to the moon as soon as possible is landing there at all, then there's no need for the first of those missions to aim for the south pole, Glover argued. "If you want to go fast, go familiar … If we want to land soon, familiar, daylight, equator."

"I think we need to be realistic and work our way to the south pole, and maybe not try to go there first," he added.

SpaceX is also eyeing an equatorial orbit when Starship flies on the Artemis IV mission, and NASA may already be quietly shifting the mission's landing site to a higher latitude. During a June 9 event that revealed the Artemis III, SpaceX Customer Operations and Integration Vice President Jessica Jensen outlined an Artemis IV mission plan with Starship that didn't involve NRHO.

"We have an updated plan with NASA that includes docking Starship with Orion in Earth orbit instead of NRHO, and then we use Starship to actually do the translunar injection with Orion attached," Jensen said, stressing the same benefits that Glover expressed during the July 21 forum.

"The crew can also abort off the lunar surface nearly any time, versus waiting up to days from NRHO," she said. "In addition to improving crew safety, these new Artemis IV orbits also significantly lower the amount of propellant Starship needs to aggregate in space, since we now just have a more direct route to the moon, and this lower schedule risk overall."

Paleontologists now know that many of the dinosaurs didn't disappear but instead evolved into modern birds, and new research suggests that "cosmic dinosaurs" observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) didn't go extinct either. Rather, they may have evolved into familiar sights in the modern universe: vast conglomerations of densely packed stars called "globular clusters."

Little Red Dots became quite the puzzle for astronomers in 2022, when the JWST began to routinely spot them in abundance around 600 million years after the Big Bang. That is because these objects seemingly disappear before the cosmos gets to around 2 billion years old.

Astronomers have proposed many different explanations for Little Red Dots, including the suggestion that they could be "black hole stars," or black holes wrapped in vast shrouds of dense gas and dust. This team theorizes that a forming globular cluster with a supermassive star, a hypothetical short-lived stellar body with between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of the sun, would also look a lot like a Little Red Dot at its heart.

"These may not be just a strange new JWST population with no connection to the universe around us today," team leader John Chisholm of the University of Texas Austin said in a statement. "Instead, Little Red Dots may persist past the early universe, evolving into something relatively familiar.

"Little Red Dots could be galaxies, they could involve black holes, or they could be something even more unexpected. Our work shows that forming globular clusters with supermassive stars should be part of that conversation."

An unfamiliar side to a familar sight

Globular clusters are generally seen in large galaxies and are densely packed with up to many millions of ancient stars. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is host to at least 150 globular clusters, and though familiar, astronomers still aren't quite sure how they form.

"We usually see them [globular clusters] after billions of years of evolution, at a time when their massive stars are gone, their gas has been cleared out, and dynamical processes have changed their masses and structures," team member Danielle Berg of UT Austin said in the statement. "That makes it very hard to reconstruct the original conditions they formed in."

It is thought that the stars in globular clusters all formed at the same time in the early universe. However, at this time the cosmos should only have had hydrogen, helium and a smattering of heavier elements (which astronomers call "metals") available for star construction. Yet, many stars in globular clusters are strangely abundant in helium and metals like nitrogen, sodium and aluminum, while lacking the expected levels of carbon, oxygen and magnesium.

"This specific pattern indicates nuclear fusion at very high temperatures, much higher than in the cores of even massive normal stars," team member Mike Boylan-Kolchin of UT Austin said in the statement. "A supermassive star is precisely the kind of environment that could produce this combination."

Supermassive stars capable of generating this kind of heat would form in the dense environments of early globular clusters in which stellar collisions and mergers would be expected to occur over and over again. The resultant supermassive stars would be short-lived, lasting just around 1 million years (remember the sun is middle-aged at 4.6 billion years old) — but this would be sufficient time to forge the elements needed to explain the peculiar chemistry of globular clusters.

When these supermassive stars die in supernova explosions, the elements they forged would be blasted out to become the building blocks of the next generation of stars. This would provide the stars of modern globular clusters with their unusual chemical fingerprints.

"In our model, the supermassive star that helps make the object look like a Little Red Dot would live for only a short time," Chisholm continued. "Once that star dies, the object may no longer look like a Little Red Dot, even if the cluster itself survives billions of years."

Strange chemistry isn't the only thing linking early globular clusters with Little Red Dots, however. Not only does the team propose that the distribution of Little Red Dots in the early universe matches the distribution of modern globular clusters, but they also say models of Little Red Dot evolution show that their estimated masses could easily lead to the masses of globular clusters seen in the recent universe.

There is also the issue of timing. Little Red Dots appear around 600 million years after the Big Bang, and that is also the time that scientists estimate that globular clusters would have begun to form.

"There's no single smoking gun at this point that says Little Red Dots are globular clusters, but it would explain a lot of diverse and surprising observations," said Boylan-Kolchin.

This study is currently available to view as a pre-print on the paper repository arXiv.

The world's most powerful solid-fuel rocket just aced its third-ever mission.

Gravity-1, a distinctively squat and stubby rocket, launched Tuesday night (July 21) from the deck of a ship stationed off the coast of Shanghai.

Liftoff occurred at 10:54 p.m. EDT (0254 GMT and 10:54 a.m. Beijing time on July 22), according to the state-run Chinese outlet Xinhua, which further reported that all nine satellites reached "their designated orbits." Details about those satellites were not provided.

Gravity-1 is operated by Orienspace, a company based in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong. The rocket stands about 100 feet (30 meters) tall — less than half the height of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 vehicle.

Gravity-1 consists of three core stages and four strap-on boosters, all of which feature solid rocket motors. The launcher can haul up to 14,300 pounds (6,500 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit (LEO), making it the most powerful solid rocket in the world. (For comparison: The liquid-fueled Falcon 9 can deliver a maximum of 50,265 pounds, or 22,800 kg, to LEO.)

The Chinese vehicle now has three flights under its belt, all of which launched from ships at sea and achieved full mission success. Gravity-1's first two flights occurred in January 2024 and October 2025.

There won't be such a long gap before Gravity-1 flies again, if all goes to plan. The rocket is expected to launch a batch of Chinese internet satellites in the next few months, according to the state-run outlet CGTN.

And Orienspace's ambitions don't end with Gravity-1. The company is also developing Gravity-2 and Gravity-3, larger, more powerful rockets that will feature liquid-fueled core stages and solid rocket boosters.

Gravity-2 could be ready to fly by the end of the year, CGTN reported. And that vehicle will likely lift off from an ocean-based pad as well.

"Sea launch of solid-propellant rockets paves the way for future launch of liquid rockets at sea," said Gravity-1 chief designer Xu Guoguang, according to CGTN. "We are also considering other methods, such as launching from drilling platforms."

The latest "Dune: Part 3" trailer arrived back on July 8, and it was a sumptuous banquet of startling set pieces, intergalactic political unrest, close-quarter combat, and a whole lot of sand and ash. A fine follow-up to the initial March teaser, to be sure.

After letting it marinate in our minds for a while, let’s break down five items of particular interest in this newest preview of the Denis Villeneuve-directed conclusion to his trilogy of far-future sci-fi epics adapted from author Frank Herbert’s novels, "Dune" and "Dune: Messiah."

Set 17 years after Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) has ascended to the Emperor’s throne, "Dune: Part 3" explores the corrupting side of political power as his holy war against the Imperium’s Great Houses advances towards a destructive destiny.

Right out of the gate, Chani (Zendaya) is certainly not shy about displaying her displeasure with his ultimate betrayal, which was first fleshed out at the end of 2024’s Dune: Part 2. It’s also pretty cool to see Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) back as a cloned “ghola” and Paul’s powerful sister, Alia, portrayed by Anya Taylor-Joy.

So behold, our five takeaways from this brand new look at Villeneuve’s "Dune: Part 3".

1. The chilling gaze of Scytale

We already knew that a platinum-haired Robert Pattinson plays Scytale, one of the film’s main villains.

Some might have scoffed at the concept of Pattinson as an intimidating foe, but from these extra snippets in the new trailer, his shapeshifting Tleilaxu Face Dancer seems up to the task of carrying out a careful plan to remove the ruthless Paul Atreides from the throne.

Pattinson has the acting chops to pull off an intimidated foe, so he might just steal the show. And come on, folks, Pattinson was The Dark Knight!! Have a little faith.

2. Alia’s bloody scream

Alia Atreides, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, is Paul’s sister. The Bene Gesserit Revered Mother Mohiam called her an "abomination" due to the Water of Life that Lady Jessica drank while she was in the womb.

A blood-covered Alia is perhaps unleashing her god-like power on a captive Mohiam in response to a conversation we’re not privy to here, which could be not exactly a scream of peril, but a stern command.

She’s definitely not someone to cross thanks to her otherworldly paranormal skills.

3. Where did Paul’s eyes go?

Towards the end of the 3-minute trailer, we catch a shot of Paul in the aftermath of a nasty Stone Burner radiation bomb detonated by conspirators in the Arrakis capital, Arrakeen, as Paul and his personal Fedaykin guard accompany him outside the palace.

We can see his eyes are severely damaged after the intense detonation flash strikes him square in the face, causing blindness and eventual exile into the deep desert per the Fremen way.

This will open up his prescient sight abilities in new and extraordinary ways as we’ll soon see for ourselves in this third "Dune" installment.

4. Attack of the Clone

Jason Momoa’s master swordsman Duncan Idaho returns here with more sneak peek screen time.

He's shown resplendent in his crisp white uniform, heavily criticizing Paul for the thousands of worlds he’s destroyed during the terror campaign inflicted by his brutal Jihad.

But, as fans of the books will know, this is not technically the same person as his former mentor. He has been resurrected as a Ghola clone named Hayt as a ‘gift’ from the Bene Tleilaxu, and unbeknownst to Paul, he plans to assassinate the crazed ruler who is deemed beyond redemption.

5. Flight of the Navigator

One of the major grumbles coming from fans, myself included, is the lack of the Spacing Guild and its bizarre Guild Navigators in Villeneuve’s "Dune" films, but all that’s seemingly about to change.

In this trailer, we see a hovering coffin tank that no doubt contains one of the mutated human creatures warped by the spice Melange, enabling them to fold space. This former Spacing Guild member is named Edric and is a pivotal player in the plot to overthrow Paul and House Atreides.

Also seen is Edric’s sinister pod sliding silently into one of the gigantic Guild Heighliner starships.

Warner Bros.' "Dune: Part 3" lands on Dec. 18, 2026.

A near-Earth object that astronomers believed was an asteroid for nearly three decades has been unmasked as a faint, active comet, revealing a case of cosmic mistaken identity that could help improve planetary defense.

The object, known since its discovery in 1998 as 1998 SH2, appeared to be an ordinary asteroid. It follows a 4.5-year orbit around the sun and showed no obvious signs of cometary activity, such as the glowing coma or tail produced when sunlight vaporizes surface ice.

However, during a close pass about 2 million miles (3 million kilometers) from Earth in August 2025, researchers using NASA's Deep Space Network planetary radar system noticed something unexpected: The object wasn't where orbital predictions said it should be, according to a statement from the space agency. That discrepancy prompted scientists to take a closer look, and what they found surprised them.

Using decades of precision optical astrometry — measurements of the object's position against background stars — researchers found that gravity alone couldn't explain its irregular motion. Instead, they detected tiny nongravitational forces consistent with jets of gas escaping from the object's surface as hidden ice warmed in sunlight.

"After we measured the nongravitational perturbations affecting the motion of 1998 SH2 and recognized they weren't compatible with the object being an asteroid, we suspected the object could be an active comet," Davide Farnocchia, lead author of the study and navigation engineer with NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the statement.

To test the idea, the team observed the object with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop Mauna Kea. The observations revealed a faint but unmistakable comet tail, confirming the object's true identity.

The discovery earned 1998 SH2 a second designation: P/1998 SH2, officially recognizing it as a comet. Beyond solving the mystery, the finding has important implications for planetary defense.

Unlike rocky asteroids, comets can subtly change course as gas escaping from their surfaces acts like tiny thrusters. Identifying those nongravitational forces allows scientists to more accurately predict an object's future orbit and assess any potential impact risk.

"This work shows the importance of continuously tracking near-Earth objects," Farnocchia said in the statement. "Because of outgassing, the motion of comets is more significantly perturbed than that of asteroids.

"Detecting these perturbations can be an important diagnostic tool for planetary defense that will help understand which objects may be comets rather than asteroids, how their orbits evolve, and how that influences their Earth impact risks."

The study also suggests that 1998 SH2 may not be unique. The researchers noted that analyzing the motions of near-Earth objects with increasingly precise astrometry could reveal more hidden comets that have long been classified as asteroids because they lack obvious tails or glowing comas.

As astronomers continue to monitor the growing population of near-Earth objects, subtle orbital changes may prove just as revealing as spectacular comet tails, uncovering more examples of cosmic mistaken identity while helping scientists better understand which objects pose potential threats to Earth.

Their findings were published July 10 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The launch of NASA's next super telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), may mean there is nowhere left for violent black holes to hide.

In fact, these cosmic cannibals may not even be able to hide from Roman at "cosmic noon," a period of the universe's history that occurred around 11 billion to 12 billion years ago. The study of these gory stellar events so early in the history of the universe could help reveal how supermassive black holes grew so big, so rapidly.

Occurrences of black holes ripping apart stars are called tidal disruption events (TDEs), and they happen when an unfortunate star's orbit brings it too close to the immense gravitational influence of a supermassive black hole. This simultaneously squashes and squeezes the star in a process called "spaghettification," with plasma pasta wrapping around the black hole and being fed gradually to it.

Because supermassive black holes are wrapped in a one-way, light-trapping boundary called an event horizon, the only way to study them is when they are actively consuming surrounding matter. Such matter swirls around them in what are known as accretion disks.

However, lighter supermassive black holes aren't ravenous feeders, making them harder to investigate. That is, until a star gets too close and is shredded in an incredibly bright TDE that can outshine the combined light of every star in the supermassive black hole's host galaxy. TDEs are more common to supermassive black holes with masses of about 100,000 to 100 million suns, because supermassive black holes with masses over 1 billion solar masses tend to immediately swallow their stellar snacks.

Previous research has suggested TDEs wouldn't be common in the early universe, because the first supermassive black holes wouldn't even have a mass of 100,000 times that of the sun and thus wouldn't shred stars. However, a new study has reassessed the frequency of TDEs around 1 billion to 2 billion years after the Big Bang, finding they could be more common than previously estimated. Especially during the crowded conditions found during cosmic noon.

Set to launch on Aug. 30, 2026, scientists are hoping Roman's High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, which will repeatedly revisit a region of the sky equivalent to 90 full moons, will be a powerful tool in the hunt for TDEs in the early universe and their subsequent study. This team estimated that Rubin will detect thousands to tens of thousands of TDEs each year, with 100s dating back to cosmic noon.

"The Roman Space Telescope is going to be transformative for transient science [transients are astronomical events that light up the sky then fade away]," research team leader Mitchell Karmen of the Johns Hopkins University said in a statement. "Thanks to Roman's high sensitivity, we can find multiple tidal disruption events out to greater distances and earlier cosmic times than ever before."

This means Roman is ideally poised to solve a puzzle that has developed since its predecessor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), began beaming data back to Earth in July 2022.

How could early TDEs solve the puzzle of black hole growth

Supermassive black holes with masses equivalent to millions or even billions of suns are found at the hearts of all large galaxies. When they are seen in the relatively local universe, that isn't so problematic; they have had plenty of time to grow via mergers and feeding.

However, the JWST has been routinely spotting supermassive black holes prior to the universe being even 1 billion years old. That is troubling because these early black holes should have had to undergo at least 1 billion years of mergers and gluttonous feeding to reach supermassive status. Scientists have two prevailing theories as to how this growth may have happened.

The first suggests supermassive black holes grow from "light seeds," beginning with black holes with masses just a few hundred times that of the sun that are born from the death and collapse of massive stars.

Such black holes might weigh up to a few hundred times the mass of the sun. These black holes would then merge over time, as well as consume surrounding gas at an incredible rate that facilitates rapid growth. For this theory to be the right one, every young galaxy would have to harbor a massive black hole at its center.

The second theory suggests early supermassive black holes grew from "heavy seeds" created directly from the collapse of vast clouds of primordial gas and dust. This would allow rapid growth because black holes could begin the whole merger and feeding process before the first stars lived and died.

Should this be the correct pathway, however, the fact that collapse events would be rare would make massive black holes at the heart of cosmic noon galaxies less common.

Because TDEs are common to less massive supermassive black holes, counting their occurrence at cosmic noon could give an indication of the masses of black holes during that epoch — the key to determining between heavy seeds and light seeds.

"Tidal disruption events help us probe the population of light supermassive black holes, which can help us discriminate between these models," Karmen said.

"Just by counting the number of TDEs as a function of redshift [a measure of cosmic distance], you can put meaningful constraints on the population of million-solar-mass black holes. Roman will be transformative in that it can probe tidal disruption events out to greater distances, so you can look at how the rate of TDEs evolves over time," team member Suvi Gezari, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, said. “Just like the JWST has transformed our understanding of distant, high-redshift [very distant] galaxies, Roman is poised to transform our understanding of high-redshift transients."

The team's research was published on July 14 in The Astrophysical Journal.

The outgoing head of the U.S. Space Force has some stark words for his international partners.

Speaking at the 2026 Global Air and Space Chiefs Conference on July 15, in what was his last public speech as Chief of Space Operations (CSO), Gen. Chance Saltzman told attendees that if an armed conflict ever reaches space, as military leaders have for years been predicting and planning for, no military or nation in the world will be spared.

"If a conflict extends into space, none of us will be able to avoid the war zone. Unlike a combat zone in the air, land or sea, we will not be able to steer clear," Saltzman said in his remarks at the conference, published by the Space Force. "Whether we want to be in the combat zone or not, orbital mechanics will put all of our space capabilities into the space war zone."

Saltzman's warning touches upon the fact that there isn't an unlimited amount of space in Earth orbit; in fact there are some crowded orbital inclinations that contain thousands of spacecraft. When a satellite or other spacecraft breaks up in one of these orbits, it can create hazards for many other spacecraft  — even crewed ones.

When Russia destroyed a satellite with a missile in a 2022 test, it left a dangerous debris field in orbit that persists today. The ISS has had to dodge it multiple times.

If a conflict broke out or extended to space, and that conflict involved the destruction of even just one satellite, it could potentially create a runaway effect that leaves parts of Earth's orbit unusable.

But despite the grave nature of his warning, Saltzman stressed that ultimately the shared nature of space means that all spacefaring nations should aim toward cooperation.

"We will share the consequences; therefore, we should share the responsibility for a safe, secure and stable space domain," Saltzman said, adding later in the speech that "these widespread consequences of conflict in space should make deterrence a goal for all of us."

Saltzman has stressed the need for international cooperation in prior speeches. The outgoing CSO called defending the peaceful use of space "the ultimate team sport" when introducing Space Force's International Partnership Strategy in 2025. "The domain is too big, too complex, too dynamic, for a single nation to secure alone," Saltzman said.

While head of the U.S. military's newest branch, Saltzman has seen the Space Force evolve into a fully "combat-credible" force, to use the outgoing CSO's own words.

Saltzman touted the Space Force's contributions to recent U.S. military operations earlier this year at the Space Foundation's 41st Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. "We aren't just talking about theories or plans anymore. We're talking about real operational combat, space effects and the Guardians who deliver them," Saltzman told attendees.

Saltzman is set to retire in August 2026 after serving as the Space Force's second Chief of Space Operations since 2022. President Donald Trump has nominated a replacement, Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Schiess, to serve as Saltzman's successor. Schiess has served as Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Operations since November 2025.

During a recent confirmation hearing, Schiess defended the Space Force's $71 billion budget request, stating the funds are needed to deter China's development of military space capabilities. "The 71.1 billion dollars that the president has asked for is exactly what we need," Schiess said, according to Space News.

We’re not going to bombard you with a bunch of "Hasta La Vista, Baby" jokes, but you might want to mark your calendars for Aug. 28, 2026, because James Cameron's Oscar-winning "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" is heading back into U.S. and global theaters later this summer in honor of its 35th anniversary.

While the actual anniversary of the movie's release was back on July 3rd, StudioCanal has a great reason for delaying the re-release until August.

Judgment Day in the sci-fi franchise’s mythology occurs on August 29, 1997. It's when Skynet becomes self-aware and launches a doomsday nuclear attack on the world, so that weekend chosen for the re-release is particularly appropriate and pretty cool. In honor of these big birthday party plans, a special new anniversary trailer and nostalgia poster have been composed to heighten the excitement and anticipation.

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong, and Robert Patrick, "Terminator 2" was unleashed into theaters on July 3, 1991, and was ultimately awarded four Oscars, instantly cementing its legacy as one of the most influential sci-fi flicks ever.

This anniversary re-release presentation utilizes StudioCanal’s 2017 restoration and 3D conversion. For residents in Australia, the seminal classic arrives back on Sept. 3, with a United Kingdom release due to strike beginning Sept. 4. Tickets in the United States for "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" 35th Anniversary have been available online since July 17.

"T2 was made for theatres, and our lovingly-prepared 3D version, coming back to the big screen, is the absolute best way to see the film," director James Cameron added in an official announcement.

"I believe it’s safe to do spoilers after 35 years, so SPOILER ALERT: the good guys win against the AI superintelligence! And maybe that’s a message of hope we all could use this summer."

If you don't want to wait until next month, you can watch "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" on Paramount+

Since the discovery of the first world beyond the solar system in the 1990s, astronomers have become adept at spotting extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. But while NASA's exoplanet catalog has burgeoned to over 6,000 confirmed entries, moons around these worlds, known as exomoons, have proved elusive.

In fact, we have failed to make a single confirmed discovery of an exomoon despite being certain that just as the planets of the solar system have their own natural satellites, worlds in other star systems must have them too.

Now, this controversial drought of exomoons may have become even more confusing and, frankly, weird. That is because while studying a strange star system called CD-35 2722 with the Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have discovered an object that could be an exomoon, or it could be something that forces us to rethink our very definition of what a "moon" is and what a "planet" is.

The star CD-35 2722 is located around 73 light-years away and has around half the mass of the sun. It is orbited by a "failed star" or brown dwarf. These stellar bodies get their unfortunate nickname because they form like other stars but fail to gather enough mass to trigger the fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores. In terms of mass, brown dwarfs are more massive than the largest gas giant planets, but smaller than the smallest stars, usually with around 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, or around 0.013 to 0.08 times the mass of the sun.

The newly discovered object in CD-35 2722 is certainly moon-like, but rather than orbiting a planet as the moons in the solar system do, it orbits the system's brown dwarf.

"This system is somewhat hard to define using solar-system-based words like 'planet' and 'moon.' The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star, though it orbits an object that orbits a star," team leader Kevin Hoy of the Universidad Diego Portales and the Millennium Nucleus of Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS) in Chile, said in a statement.

"Being the third wheel in this system makes us want to call it a moon, even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (July 22) in the journal Nature.

Erm... It's definitely an exosatellite

The team currently isn't able to definitively claim this object in CD-35 2722 is an exomoon, because that would require really nailing down a new definition of what a moon is.

"The satellite we report is a giant gaseous body orbiting a highly massive companion, itself several times the mass of Jupiter. We have a clear delineation between the planets and the sun in the solar system, so defining things like moons is simple," team member Alice Zurlo of the Universidad Diego Portales said. "In the CD-35 2722 system, where we are blurring the lines between stars, planets, and moons, the whole thing becomes more complicated to describe."

Zurlo and colleagues can, however, confidently claim this is an exosatellite, meaning it is a first-of-its-kind detection no matter what the future holds for its classification.

It is hoped that the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) currently under construction in Chile, will make a massive impact in the hunt for exomoons, and now, other exosatellites.

Until these objects begin to be uncovered, one thing this discovery re-emphasizes is something that astronomers have been gleefully discovering ever since the first exoplanet was spotted: planetary systems come in a variety of diverse, weird and wonderful forms.

You're looking at history. What might seem like a simple black-and-white picture of some rocks is actually the first photograph ever taken on the surface of Mars.

What is it?

Bright and early on the morning of July 20, 1976, NASA's Viking 1 lander touched down on the surface of Mars. This moment 50 years ago marked the first fully successful touchdown on the Red Planet, and, pretty much as soon as it landed, Viking 1 captured the first image of the Martian surface.

The Soviet Union had already made multiple Mars landing attempts, all of them failures to some degree. The nation's Mars 3 lander did manage to survive its landing initially in December 1971, but it lost contact less than two minutes later.

Viking 1 did more than just survive. While its mission tasked the lander with studying the planet for 90 days after landing, it lasted over six years on the planet and made some incredible observations. The Viking 1 lander worked in tandem with an orbiter by the same name, and was soon joined at Mars by Viking 2, another lander/orbiter pair.

Why is it incredible?

It has now been 50 years since Viking 1's historic first, which opened our eyes to the Martian surface. And NASA has kept improving technologies and exploring further on Mars ever since. Agency rovers began scouring the planet's surface in the 1990s, so we have gathered data on the planet's surface for decades upon decades at this point.

But in 1976, no one had ever seen the surface of Mars close up. This view was preceded by science fiction like Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles," which painted fantastical possibilities about what it might really be like on Mars. With Viking 1's view, we finally got some concrete evidence of the reality on the planet.

In 50 years, our understanding of Mars, our solar system and beyond has grown tremendously. But with each major accomplishment, we can look back at previous milestones such as this to see the stepping stones that paved the way to get us there.

The fight continues against SpaceX's controversial South Texas land swap.

That deal, which the company made with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), gives SpaceX 727 acres (294 hectares) of public land that's currently part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. In exchange, the company hands over 683 acres (276 hectares) of its territory in the area, not all of it contiguous, to the USFWS.

Last month, a coalition of conservation and tribal groups sued the USFWS over the swap, saying it degrades the refuge and violates multiple laws, including the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act of 1997. And yesterday (July 20), those groups filed an emergency injunction, asking a federal judge to stop the exchange until the courts can rule on the ongoing case.

"Federal officials are racing to fork over America's public lands to one of wealthiest corporations on Earth before the courts can even weigh in," Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement yesterday (July 20).

"This refuge is one of the last places left for the public to enjoy nature in the Rio Grande Valley," Jordahl added. "Why should Texans be forced to surrender even more of their public lands to a trillion-dollar corporation? The court has to intervene now, because once these refuge lands are transferred to SpaceX, they’re gone forever."

The land set to be transferred to SpaceX is near Starbase, the manufacturing and launch hub for the company's Starship megarocket. SpaceX sees Starship as transformational; it's the biggest and most powerful launcher ever built, and it's designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

Starship remains in the development-and-testing phase. It has flown 12 suborbital test flights to date, all of them from Starbase, and is gearing up for Flight 13 this Thursday (July 23).

These launches pose a threat to the wildlife that the 90,000-acre (36,420 hectares) refuge was established to protect, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona.

"A 2024 study found that, after one launch, every single monitored shorebird nest near the launch site suffered egg damage or loss," the organization said in yesterday's statement. "Instead of taking any enforcement actions or working with SpaceX to reduce or eliminate its harm to the refuge, the Service [USFWS] is now citing the resulting degradation as justification for handing the public land to SpaceX."

Some of the land being transferred to SpaceX is part of the Palmito Ranch Battlefield National Historic Landmark, where the final battle of the Civil War was fought. This means the swap also violates the National Historic Preservation Act, according to the Center or Biological Diversity.

The Center or Biological Diversity and its partners also take issue with how the land deal was made.

"The proposed land exchange was first made public in March, but records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show internal agency planning began as early as April 2025," yesterday's statement reads. "In those discussions with the regional director of the Service, the agency developed 'the most expedited schedule possible' for completing a land transfer and recommended hiring additional staff to meet what they described as an 'optimum timeframe.'"

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the USFWS are the Center for Biological Diversity, Save RGV, the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, Inc., and the South Texas Environmental Justice Network.

Swelling from a razor-thin crescent into a cratered world before fading back into the darkness, Mars gave NASA's Psyche spacecraft both a spectacular view — and a 1,000-mph boost toward its namesake asteroid.

A new time-lapse video released by NASA, stitched from images taken throughout May, captures the probe's month-long encounter with Mars. On May 15, Psyche swooped within 2,864 miles (4,609 kilometers) of the surface, using the planet's gravity to boost its speed and adjust its trajectory toward asteroid Psyche, a metal-rich world in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that the spacecraft is scheduled to reach in 2029.

"This gravity assist was years in the making, and the navigation team nailed it — Psyche flew by Mars on exactly the trajectory we needed to set us on a path to rendezvous with the asteroid in the summer of 2029," Bob Mase, Psyche's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement.

Approaching from a steep or what scientists call a "high phase" angle relative to the sun, Psyche initially caught Mars as a slender crescent with just 4 percent of its disk illuminated and its thin atmosphere glowing in scattered sunlight, Hannah Zigo, a Psyche team member at the Arizona State University, said in a NASA video accompanying the statement.

As the spacecraft closed in, the video follows Mars steadily expanding to reveal numerous craters puncturing its surface, the ancient double-ringed Huygens crater and the south polar ice cap before receding in the spacecraft's rearview.

The flyby served a dual purpose. By aiming Psyche's suite of instruments at a well-studied world, engineers say they calibrated and validated the spacecraft's scientific payload ahead of its 2029 destination.

"We didn't anticipate big discoveries, given how extensively the planet has been studied," Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for the Psyche mission at the University of California, Berkeley, said in the statement, "but we did complement Mars science with the data we collected through Psyche's unique perspective."

All three of the spacecraft's science instruments performed as expected, according to NASA. Its gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, designed to determine the asteroid's elemental makeup, detected the predicted surge of escaping neutrons during closest approach, confirming its operational readiness.

The mission's magnetometer, which will search for evidence that asteroid Psyche is the metallic core of an early planetesimal, recorded its first magnetic signature from a planetary body since its launch in 2023, detecting the bow shock where the solar wind meets Mars' magnetic environment.

Psyche's twin multispectral cameras also passed their calibration tests, capturing the frames for the time-lapse while spotting Mars' tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, from a distance, the NASA statement read.

Spotting the moons served as "a practice for the satellite search that we'll use at the asteroid Psyche to look for any moonlets there," Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who leads the multispectral imager instrument team, said in the statement.

With Mars in its rearview and its instruments fully vetted, Psyche remains locked on course for its summer 2029 rendezvous with the metal asteroid.

"The spacecraft is in great shape, and we're on schedule to resume sustained thrusting with the solar-electric propulsion system later this fall," Mase said.

Once again, the "Land Down Under" is on the apparent uptick for falling space debris.

In early July, the Australian Space Agency reported that objects recovered, dubbed "space balls," are likely pressure vessels from a space launch vehicle. Six spherical pieces of space junk were found in the small seaside community of Forrest Beach, near Ingham. Australian Queensland Fire Department crews swung into action to assist partner agencies following the discovery of the potentially hazardous objects. Scientific teams safely secured a number of the items, establishing a 165 feet (50-meter) "exclusion zone" around them to assure public safety. The nature and origin of the debris are still being investigated.

This latest incident is part of an unwanted legacy of being the "fall guy" for space remains, from the U.S. Skylab space station debris that fell into Western Australia in 1979; a chunk of a SpaceX Dragon trunk found in New South Wales in 2022; a pressure vessel that washed up in Perth from an Indian booster in 2023; along with a section of Chinese Jielong-3 rocket in October 2025.

In fact, these incidents are becoming so common that the Australian Space Agency has put together a trio of steps to take if suspected space debris is discovered:

• Step 1: Do not handle the debris. Space objects are built from a range of materials that may be hazardous. They should only be handled by appropriately trained and equipped professionals.
• Step 2: Contact the local authorities if (a) the situation is potentially urgent (e.g. there is a life-threatening situation) or (b) otherwise contact the 24/7 Police Assistance Line for further advice.
• Step 3: Notify the Australian Space Agency, who may support authorities with technical expertise, liaise with foreign counterparts and operators, and advise on the country's treaty obligations. The ASA can advise local authorities on the appropriate response to a confirmed space debris event.

Indeed, if an item is definitely found to be space debris, the Australian Government has worldwide obligations to notify the launching authority of its discovery, and upon request, may be required to return the space junk.

"Even if they heat up, they don't care."

For Marlon Sorge, executive director of the Aerospace Corporation's Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS), it's no surprise that the recent so-called space balls endured their plunge from space.

"Very often they will be made of something like titanium which is really good at surviving," Sorge told Space.com. "In spite of them being metal, they tend to decelerate more than, say, a solid hunk of metal. They can 'float down' a little bit more gently than some other things," he said.

Sorge said that this class of space debris decelerates quicker, and also once on the surface the pieces are also more recognizable than broken up chunks of metal. Furthermore, if made of titanium, "even if they heat up, they don't care." In other words, they tend to survive reentry intact.

There's more awareness in the space debris study community that materials like titanium are potentially an issue, said Sorge. If you go to something like Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessels (COPV), also commonly used in manufactured space hardware, that too is an issue you have to deal with, he said.

Bigger picture

But ultimately, many of these debris concerns could be mitigated with more responsible behaviors from space agencies and launch providers, Sorge said.

"In the bigger picture with [rocket] upper stages," Sorge added, "just don't let them randomly reenter. Bring them down via controlled reentry and then if they are survivable it doesn't matter because you dump them somewhere where there aren't any people."

As for the Australian-found space leftovers, these tanks are clearly coming from non-controlled reentry events, said Sorge, dropping out of the sky and washing up onshore.

Over the years, the Aerospace Corporation has studied recovered pressure vessels like those from the Australian affair. The welcome mat is open for contributions from countries that are on the receiving end of space objects, Sorge advised.

Some information can be gleaned from such appraisals, like what shape the recovered debris is in, what degree of temperatures they were exposed to. Also, such a hands and eyes-on look can point out what they didn't experience, which is also useful data, Sorge said.

If observers could track and observe incoming debris on its way down, it could be extremely helpful in identifying points of origin. That's currently a challenge, Sorge said. "If we get an impact location and a time of reentry that really helps us figure out what's going on," he said.

On the whole, there's a lot more attention being paid to the implications stemming from reentering, human-made, space leftovers.

"The real challenge is that this is still an area that we don't completely understand. We get surprises now and again," Sorge concluded, "because we know only so much. There's certainly a lot more awareness now than earlier years to be proactive in thinking about this."

Atmospheric drag wins

"It may seem surprising that pieces of the same rocket can show up in Australia, Canada or on a farm in Africa, but that's actually what we'd expect," said Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law.

"Objects in low Earth orbit pass over much of the planet as the Earth rotates underneath them. If a reentry isn't controlled, the exact point where it finally comes down can shift by thousands of kilometers depending on when atmospheric drag finally wins," Hanlon told Space.com.

Since most of the Earth is ocean, that's where most debris ends up, Hanlon said. "Every now and then, though, a tough piece survives and lands somewhere people can find it  — or lands in the ocean and gets swept swiftly to shore."

Country of origin?

Hanlon said that the pressure vessels like those found in Australia are a good example.

"They're built to withstand enormous pressures, so they are also among the pieces most likely to survive reentry. That's why they seem to turn up so often," said Hanlon.

Why are recovered space debris so hard to identify, their country-of-origin?

"I'm not sure stamping everything with a country-of-origin is the answer," said Hanlon. "Many of these objects can already be identified by their design, serial numbers or by matching them to launch and registration records. And there's no guarantee a label would even survive reentry."

For Hanlon, the bigger issue is traceability. "Can authorities quickly figure out what the object is, whether it poses any danger and which state should be contacted? Better information-sharing and better tracking would be far more useful than a 'Made in' stamp," Hanlon said.

"One thing I'd also point out is that we're seeing more of these simply because we're launching a lot more things into space. That's actually a sign of how active the space sector has become, not necessarily that it's becoming less safe," said Hanlon.

Even if reentries go exactly as planned 99.9 percent of the time, more launches mean more reentries, which means more chances that a particularly durable piece survives and lands somewhere unexpected.

All-in-all, the Australian incident of space balls is another sobering reminder that space activities don't end when a mission does, Hanlon concluded. "End-of-life disposal is now just as much a part of responsible space operations as launch."

This recent debris incident has a bit of a cosmic coincidence to it, too, Hanon added. "It's funny that we're having this conversation just as 'Spaceballs: The New One' is gearing up."

The sequel is being filmed in Australia.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered the secrets of early galaxies that pumped the infant cosmos full of dust, which would become vital for the birth of new stars and the growth of galaxies.

However, while the JWST is powerful enough to see many of these early galaxies, it is still limited when it comes to delving into them in great detail. So, the team at the heart of this research worked around this by studying a much closer and more modern galaxy with many characteristics that resemble the universe's first galaxies.

In lieu of being able to study the processes that occurred in the early universe that allowed galaxies to be seeded with "metals, (the term astronomers use to describe elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), the researchers turned their attention to a dwarf galaxy just 4.6 million light-years away.

"Directly studying the galaxies that populated the early universe is still very difficult, which is why observing a nearby galaxy like Sextans A, which presents similar chemical conditions, offers us a precious opportunity to understand how the first generations of stars evolved and what role they played in transforming the interstellar medium," team leader Claudio Gavetti of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) said in a statement.

How does Sextans A impersonate ancient galaxies?

The early universe was a pretty dull place in terms of chemistry. That is because it was dominated by the lightest element, hydrogen, with some helium and a tiny smattering of heavy elements, or metals. That means that the first generation of stars, so-called POP III stars, were correspondingly metal-poor.

During their lives, however, POP III stars fused hydrogen and helium in their cores to forge heavier elements. When these original stars reached the ends of their lives, they exploded in supernova explosions that dispersed these metals into the interstellar medium, the vast clouds of dust and gas between stars.

Eventually, dense and cool patches in these vast clouds collapsed under their own gravity, birthing the next generation of stars, POP II stars, which, thanks to the supernova deaths of their predecessors, were richer in metals.

Our own star, the sun, is classed as a POP I star, meaning it is even richer in metals than these second-generation stars. However, not all modern galaxies are so metal-rich; this is especially true for dwarf galaxies like Sextans A, even though it lies at the outer edge of our cosmic backyard, known as the "local group."

Sextans A is so metal-poor that it is estimated to contain only between 1% and 7% of the heavy elements found in the sun. That makes it a great proxy for the study of metal-poor early galaxies.

Using the JWST's NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) instruments, Gavetti and colleagues obtained high-resolution observations of Sextans A that allowed them to map the dwarf galaxy's entire population of stars during an evolutionary phase known as the "asymptotic red giant branch."

This phase occurs when stars larger than the sun exhaust helium in their cores, creating an inert carbon heart, but nuclear fusion continues in outer alternating helium- and hydrogen-burning layers. These stars "puff out" as a result of this and can undergo thousandfold increases in brightness.

The team's findings revealed that around 90% of the asymptotic red giant branch stars they studied were not surrounded by envelopes of dust. However, around 20 or so of these stars were embedded in thick dust shells. They also found that these "dust factories" formed between 2 billion and 3 billion years ago from stars with an initial mass about 1.5 times the mass of the sun.

This research is a leap forward in understanding which stars in the early universe were most likely to create the metal dust that would have enriched the next generations of stars. That means it helps paint a complete picture of how the universe as we see it today took shape.

The scientists behind this study say that this type of research would have been impossible before the launch of Webb.

"The JWST allows us to observe in unprecedented detail environments that until a few years ago were beyond our reach," team member Flavia Dell'Agli of the INAF. "The value of these data lies not only in the images, but in the ability to compare them with theoretical models and verify how correctly they describe the evolution of stars."

The team's research was published on Monday (July 20) in The Astrophysical Journal.

A rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a sun-like star may look like a perfect place for life to thrive — but not if it's too small to hold onto its atmosphere.

So, we may wonder: How much smaller Earth could be and still have its delightfully breathable atmosphere? How small could an exoplanet be to sustain life as we know it?

With these questions in mind, University of California Riverside planetary scientist Michelle Hill and her colleagues recently simulated what happens to the atmospheres of different sizes of rocky worlds. The worlds tested were similar to Earth and orbited in the habitable zones around sun-like stars. It turns out for a world to maintain an atmosphere long enough for life to gain a foothold (a few billion years at minimum), it needs to be at least as big as Mars.

Narrowing down the search for life

The habitable zone — the area around a star where temperatures are right for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface — is prime real estate in the hunt for alien life. It's also a tough neighborhood for exoplanet atmospheres, because the closer a planet is to a star, the more ways in which radiation and stellar wind will try to strip away an atmosphere.

This is why Hill and her colleagues recently simulated how long it would take rocky, Earth-like planets of various sizes, in the habitable zone of a star like our sun, to lose their atmospheres. In other words, how much smaller could Earth, or a similar planet, be and still keep an atmosphere?

The answer turns out to be that an atmosphere-sustaining planet needs to be about 80% as wide as Earth, but could technically be as small as 60%. This offers astrobiologists a clue about which planets to focus on in the search for habitable worlds and signs of alien life.

"The plethora of exoplanets creates an interesting challenge in the search for potentially habitable planets," wrote Hill and her colleagues. "Of the many targets in the habitable zones of their star, which are the best candidates for follow-up observations with the aim of detecting biosignatures?" In other words, astrobiologists now have almost too many planets to choose from and not enough telescope time to search them all. So, it's time to narrow the search.

One way to do that is to figure out which planets are most likely to be habitable — and for life as we know it, that habitability means having an atmosphere.

Modeling atmospheres — and volcanoes

Hill and her colleagues' "Smaller Than Earth Habitability Model" simulates the fate of atmospheres around digital versions of Earth. Some of the simulated worlds are exactly like ours but smaller, with the same chemical makeup and the same proportions of core, mantle and crust. Others have slightly different amounts of carbon, larger or smaller cores, or different starting temperatures. The model traces what happens to these worlds over a few billion years, based on two things: how quickly stellar wind and radiation strip away gas from the planet's atmosphere and how quickly volcanoes pump out gas (mostly carbon dioxide) to replace it.

The model is how the team realized a scaled-down version of Earth needs to be at least 80% as wide as true Earth (0.8 Earth radii) to maintain an atmosphere in the long run. Smaller planets tend to lose gas faster than volcanic eruptions can replace it.

That's because smaller planets have less gravity and weaker magnetic fields with which to hold onto their thin envelopes of gas. They also don't usually release enough gas from within to make up for the loss. Their mantles — the churning layer of magma beneath the crust — tend to release less volcanic gas over time, and their upper layers cool and harden much faster. The latter process cuts off volcanic eruptions much earlier in a planet's lifespan.

Smaller planets clinging onto atmospheres

By changing some of Earth's parameters, the team managed to get planets as small as 0.6 Earth radii to maintain a stable atmosphere. Carbon was the key: planets with more carbon in their mantles tend to release more carbon dioxide gas in eruptions, and that turns out to be the biggest factor (other than size) in whether a planet keeps its atmosphere.

"Carbon dioxide is a heavy molecule," Hill and her colleagues wrote, "which can make it a difficult molecule to lose. We focus on a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere as a best-case scenario for atmospheric retention." Of course, that's only a best-case scenario for some relatively simple forms of life, so your astrobiological mileage may vary.

It took tons more carbon than Earth contains to make a significant difference to the fate of a planet's atmosphere — but because it's theoretically possible for a planet to form with that much carbon in its makeup, that's useful knowledge. Planets with relatively smaller cores, and therefore relatively thicker mantles, also had better luck on the atmospheric retention front. Starting with a larger supply of radioactive elements, which decay and release heat into the surrounding rock, helped keep the mantle molten and the volcanic gases churning skyward.

Starting with a cooler mantle also helps — which sounds surprising. You'd think a hotter mantle would be more likely to spew volcanic gases into the atmosphere. Yet, a cooler mantle takes longer to start erupting in earnest, which means the planet gets to hold onto its reservoir of gases until its star is older and more settled.

Newborn stars are prone to violent bursts of radiation and plasma, which would sweep away the volcanic gas as fast as it erupted. With a cooler mantle and later eruptions, the planet gets to keep more of the erupted gas.

A second chance for airless worlds

There's still hope of life for smaller worlds.

Even planets that lose their initial atmospheres entirely — instead of gradually replacing them with things like carbon dioxide and methane — might have a second chance to build a new atmosphere.

Hill and her colleagues suggest that one way for a planet to regain its lost atmosphere could be comet and asteroid impacts, which might deliver volatile elements like hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. These elements can combine to form all sorts of atmospheric gases.

Such impacts could be especially helpful if they happen later in the star system's life, like after the star is past its youthful phase of intense flares.

"While smaller planets face greater challenges in retaining atmospheres, our model suggests that they can develop atmospheres under the right conditions," wrote Hill and her colleagues, so, "even those that initially lose their atmospheres should not be immediately discounted as potentially habitable worlds."

What's next?

Future simulations using the Smaller Than Earth Habitability Model could study worlds around smaller, cooler stars called red dwarfs — stars like TRAPPIST-1, which is home to at least seven rocky planets, with three of them in the habitable zone. These stars make up about 75% of the stars in our galaxy, and their relatively dim light makes it easier for telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to capture images of starlight filtering through the atmospheres of planets that pass between Earth and their host stars.

Hill and her colleagues also hope to explore what happens to atmospheres around tidally-locked planets, or planets where tidal forces keep the interior hot and seismically active, similar to Jupiter's moon Io.

The researchers published their work in June in The Planetary Science Journal.

The U.S. Space Force is adding three dozen spacecraft to its growing constellation designed to detect and track incoming missiles from orbit. The Space Development Agency (SDA) announced the agreements, worth a combined $1.75 billion, on July 14, naming L3Harris Technologies and Sierra Space as the recipients.

Each company will provide 18 Accelerated Missile Defense Tranche 3 (AMDT3) spacecraft, for a total of 36 satellites that will grow the SDA Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture's Tranche 3 Tracking Layer constellation, part of the Trump Administration's Golden Dome initiative. All 36 are expected to be ready for launch by the end of 2028, according to an SDA statement.

SDA's contracts with each company differ slightly. One calls for "18 missile warning and missile tracking variant space vehicles" from Sierra Space, while the other requests "18 missile defense variant space vehicles" from L3Harris, all equipped with infrared sensors to add to the constellation's global network.

L3Harris will receive up to $955 million for its 18 satellites, which the Space Force describes as "Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor-like" (HBTSS) spacecraft. Sierra Space's agreement has the potential to reach $798 million for its 18-satellite contribution. Altogether, the 36 spacecraft will be distributed across four orbital planes as part of a hybrid missile-defense architecture designed to provide "global stereo coverage" of next-generation missile threats.

The Tracking Layer uses infrared imaging in low Earth orbit to detect and track missiles, and it transfers that data in real time through a low-latency communications network to military forces on the ground. According to the agency, the new satellites will increase the constellation's coverage and integrate into the spacecraft of SDA's first three Tranches.

“AMDT3 expands upon SDA’s previous and current Tracking Layer generations — Tranches 1, 2 and 3," said SDA Director G.P. Sandhoo, "marking another milestone in delivering a resilient, global missile warning, missile tracking, and missile defense capability.”

Sierra Space will base its satellites on the Horizon vehicle, from the company's Eclipse satellite series, which it also used in the design of the spacecraft it provided for the Tranche 2 Tracking Layer program, according to a Sierra Space release.

L3Harris plans to build on the success of the HBTSS satellites the company developed for the Military Defense Agency, according to an L3Harris release. The company "has more than 70 missile tracking and defense satellites on order, including five on orbit, between MDA’s HBTSS program and SDA’s Tracking Layer across Tranche 0, 1, 2 and 3," the company said.

The 36 satellites from L3Harris and Sierra Space are in addition to the 72 Tranche 3 Tracking Layer spacecraft SDA ordered in December 2025, via contracts worth $3.5 billion. L3Harris was included in those agreements as well, along with Lockheed Martin, Rocket Lab and Northrop Grumman. In total, the two rounds of awards bring the Tranche 3 constellation to a planned 108 satellites, worth about $5.25 billion. If all goes to plan, all of them will be available to launch by the end of 2029.

The newly contracted satellites from L3Harris and Sierra Space could begin heading to space sooner than that, however. SDA describes the new contracts as "accelerated," though a launch timeline has not been established to the overall group. Once in orbit, the Space Force will assume responsibility for the satellites' operation and integration "in support of joint force operations and delivering warfighting capabilities," the SDA statement said.

Twenty-four Starlink satellites reached low Earth orbit on Tuesday (July 21), a day later than originally scheduled due to a last-second rocket engine abort.

SpaceX at first tried to launch the broadband internet relay units on a Falcon 9 rocket on Monday morning (July 20), but an unexpected engine cutoff at the point of ignition scrubbed the day's attempt. The company did not provide a reason for the abort.

By Tuesday, whatever the problem was had been addressed and the Falcon 9 was ready to fly. It liftoff off at 10:49 a.m. EDT (1449 GMT; 7:49 a.m. PDT local time) from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. About an hour later, after a normal ascent, the new Starlink batch (Group 17-39) were deployed into their intended orbit.

"Deployment of 24 Starlink satellites confirmed," SpaceX posted on social media.

The Falcon 9 rocket's first stage, Booster 1082, completed its 23rd mission by touching down atop the droneship "Of Course I Still Love You" positioned in the Pacific Ocean.

The Starlink network provides worldwide access to the internet, especially to areas where other means of connection are not possible. The megaconstellation also enables in-flight wifi and direct-to-cell services for select providers.

Tuesday's Starlink launch was SpaceX's 85th Falcon 9 launch of the year. SpaceX experienced a similar but unrelated last-second abort on its first attempt at launching its 13th test flight of its Starship megarocket on Thursday (July 16). That flight has now been rescheduled for Thursday (July 23).

Picture it: A slash of vivid green light splits the starry sky. There for a moment and then gone, leaving nothing but a short-lived glowing trail and a moment of pure joy. You've finally caught it, your first Perseid shooting star of the season.

What you saw was the final moment of a story billions of miles and thousands of years in the making. A story that began with that same shooting star locked inside the icy body of the wandering comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle.

The 16-mile-wide (26 kilometer) giant of a comet spends its life journeying back and forth between the outer and inner solar system, where its frigid body is heated by the sun, triggering dramatic outbursts of activity. While in close proximity to our star, ice near to the surface of the comet is transformed into gas, skipping the water stage entirely as it escapes out into the vastness of interplanetary space.

Embedded within that ice was once a micrometeoroid no larger than a grain of sand, destined to become the Perseid shooting star you saw.

The violence of the newborn micrometeoroid's exile was followed by an epoch of utter silence, as its orbit was subtly influenced by the unseen forces of the solar system. It would be easy to think of this as a lonely existence, but we'd be wrong.

Our cosmic pebble was joined by millions of others, all shed in the wake of Swift-Tuttle. A great stream of primordial material that threads through the inner solar system, crossing the path of Earth before extending in a great swarm that messily traces the elliptical orbit of their comet progenitor, below the plane of the solar system. Beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Each follows its own unique path. Trajectories are shaped by the force of a micrometeoroid's expulsion from the comet's nucleus, along with the gentle push of radiation from the sun and the gravitational tug of the planets.

It's impossible to know how long our shooting star drifted through the cold expanse of interplanetary space. Was it hundreds or many thousands of years? How many times might it have journeyed around the sun before its fateful rendezvous with our Blue Marble?

We can never know. What we do know is how its journey ended.

Civilizations could have risen to their zenith and crumbled in the time our micrometeoroid spent traversing the unfeeling expanse of interplanetary space, but its demise lasted but a fraction of a second. It collided with our planet's gaseous shell at 132,000 miles per hour (212,433 kmph), cutting a brilliant green trail through the summer sky as atmospheric friction vaporized the cometary shard.

It's that fiery demise that you spotted tonight — an experience that will repeat hundreds of times each and every hour at the height of the Perseid meteor shower, as Earth passes through the densest part of the debris stream cast off by comet Swift-Tuttle.

The Perseid meteor shower is active from now until Aug. 24, with the best viewing window occurring in the early hours of Aug. 13, as the shower's radiant rises to its highest point on the night of the shower's peak.

This year's peak will be particularly spectacular, unfolding as it does in the pristinely dark skies surrounding the Aug. 12 new moon, which will also cause a spectacular total solar eclipse to be visible across parts of Spain, Iceland and Greenland. If you find yourself in the path of totality and have luck on your side, then you might just spot a Perseid fireball brightening the false twilight that falls as the moon hides the face of the sun at the crescendo of the eclipse!

Want to capture a shooting star that will stay with you forever? Then be sure to read our guide to photographing fast-moving meteors, along with our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography if you're looking to upgrade your gear.

Editor's Note: Did you catch a photo of a Perseid shooting star and want to share it with Space.com's readers? Then please go ahead and send your photos along with your comments, name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Orion is getting an upgrade on Artemis III, and the astronauts aboard are getting WiFi (sort of).

NASA is partnering with SpaceX to equip the Orion spacecraft for Artemis III with a pair of Starlink mini laser terminals, designed to operate on SpaceX's existing Starlink network. The two panels will be installed on Orion's exterior, and will augment the spacecraft's existing communications systems.

The added capability is expected to provide a greater data capacity from Orion to NASA's mission control in Houston, which may include high-definition live video from orbit. The mission is currently scheduled for the second half of 2027, and will also include another sizable contribution from SpaceX: a Starship rocket.

SpaceX currently operates more than 10,000 Starlink spacecraft in LEO, which provide satellite internet coverage across nearly the entire globe to commercially-available wireless terminals about the size of a laptop. Combined, those more than 10,000 and counting satellites are equipped with over 25,000 lasers currently in operation in LEO to maintain the network's interconnectedness, according to a NASA update.

The company previously demonstrated the Starlink constellation's use as a communication relay network during the privately funded Fram2 mission that launched the first human into a polar orbit around Earth in 2025. SpaceX frequently utilizes its high-data capabilities to stream high-definition live views of its Falcon 9 and Starship rocket launches from orbit.

Artemis III is the third in a program of NASA missions with the goal of returning astronauts to the moon and establishing a permanent base on its surface. Artemis III is designed as a practice run for NASA's Orion capsule to rendezvous and dock with the program's commercial lunar lander vehicles, Starship, and Blue Origin's Blue Moon spacecraft, in low Earth orbit (LEO). That's a lot closer to home compared to the Artemis II mission that NASA launched in April of this year.

Artemis II was Orion's first flight with astronauts onboard, and flew a 10-day mission around the far side of the moon. NASA used laser communications during Artemis II as well, using terminals on Orion and ground stations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California and White Sands Complex in New Mexico to transmit data loads too big for the agency's Near Space and Deep Space radio networks. With flight sticking to LEO during Artemis III, communication limitations become a lot easier to surmount.

If all goes according to plan during Artemis III, NASA has scheduled the first Artemis moon landing on the following mission, Artemis IV. NASA is targeting 2028 to launch Artemis IV, and has selected Starship as the lunar lander that will return astronauts to the lunar surface.

The first trailer for "Avengers: Doomsday" dropped yesterday, and while it’s jammed full of superheroes, surprises, and our first extended look at Dr. Doom, it is missing one big thing that has been a constant in the MCU ever since "Avengers" was released and the Infinity Stone saga kicked off: outer space.

Believe it or not, the MCU has been very sci-fi heavy for the past decade as the universe expanded into space with "Guardians of the Galaxy", "Captain Marvel", and the entire throughline of Thanos’ quest to bring balance to the universe.

Entire films took place in space, and extended exposition was delivered inside the hulls of spaceships. Alien heroes and villains swung around made-up planets and lived in the skulls of dead space giants. That whole "Eternals" thing. It's safe to say that the Marvel movies were into outer space in a big way. The MCU leaned heavily into science fiction and space for much of its life, but judging from this trailer, that may be coming to an end.

This is a very Earth-based trailer, and while the remnants of years of science fiction still permeate throughout the MCU (superhero comics are almost always dabbling in the genre), the focus on it is clearly gone. This trailer is all about the Earth and superheroes, pulling back hard on the bigger universe. Sure, it opens with the Fantastic Four exiting their spaceship — probably an unintentional visual metaphor for the MCU’s abandonment of the cosmos — but we’re kept mainly on Earth otherwise.

We have absolutely no alien heroes appearing on screen in this trailer outside of Thor and, of course, our main villain is decidedly earthbound even if he may be from a different multiverse (for those not in the know, that’s Robert Downey Jr. behind Dr. Doom’s mask).

There are plenty of reasons that the MCU may be pulling out of space. Introducing all of the X-Men means you’ve got plenty of Earth stuff to mess around with anyway, and there’s very little reason to need space travel when you’ve got time travel, quantum realms, and multiverses expanding your universe in other ways.

To be fair, all of those are sci-fi as well, but it’s not the same as outer space. We do know from casting that some of our favorite space-based heroes will be returning, but what is clear is that space is no longer the focus here. The MCU has been pulling back on space ever since Thanos fell, and this new trailer for "Avengers: Doomsday" just hammers another nail into the coffin of that universe.

Of course, Marvel is a master of misdirection and fake-outs, so anything could change as we get more details and the film finally releases, but for now it seems that the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t so interested in the universe part.

"Avengers: Doomsday" will hit theaters on December 18.

For the first time, scientists may have discovered a binary system—like the twin suns of the fictional planet Tatooine in "Star Wars"—where both stars exploded as supernovas, a new study finds.

Although Earth may orbit around a single star, more than half of all stars are in systems where two or more suns orbit each other. "When it comes to massive stars, the percentage in multiple systems are even higher," study lead author Miltiadis Michailidis, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in California, told Space.com.

When massive stars burn all their fuel, they can die in giant explosions known as supernovas. These outbursts can briefly outshine all of the other suns in these stars' galaxies. They often leave behind expanding super-hot clouds of debris known as supernova remnants. Astronomers have detected about 300 such remnants in our galaxy to date.

Given how often massive stars are found in binary systems, "one can expect many pairs of massive stars where both will explode as supernovas," Michailidis noted. "However, this has never been observed, until now."

One reason supernova pairs may have escaped attention is that "if the stars are too close together when they exploded, the resulting supernova remnants may look like that from a single explosion," Michailidis explained. Another is that one star going supernova may propel its partner far enough away to hide the fact they were ever a duo, he added.

In the new study, Michailidis and his colleagues investigated a supernova remnant known as IC 443, located about 6,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Gemini. IC 443 is also known as the Jellyfish Nebula for how it resembles a jellyfish.

IC 443 is one of the most extensively studied supernova remnants in the galaxy because of how shock waves from the supernova have collided with surrounding clouds of gas and dust to create a set of concentric bubble shells, "much like how a drop of water falling on a lake creates circular waves," Michailidis said. "It is very isolated from its surroundings, without many other objects nearby to complicate its very bright emissions."

The scientists analyzed one of IC 443's much dimmer, long-hidden neighbors, dubbed G189.6+3.3. The German-led ROSAT (Roentgen Satellite) mission first discovered G189.6+3.3 in 1994 via its faint X-ray emissions, and the Russian-German Spektrum Roentgen Gamma (SRG) space observatory later clearly detected shell-like structures within G189.6+3.3, suggesting that it was a supernova remnant.

In the new study, the researchers analyzed more than 16 years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope along with earlier X-ray, optical and radio measurements. They discovered signs that both IC 443 and G189.6+3.3 were both smashing into the same interstellar cloud of hydrogen, revealing they were close together in space, with the centers of their explosions about 30 to 50 light-years apart.

The researchers calculated that the chances of randomly encountering two unrelated supernova remnants at this distance from one another "was about one in 1,000," Michailidis said. "This suggests that our discovery is in fact the first known binary-system supernova pair."

The scientists estimated that G189.6+3.3 was older than IC 443, with the parent star of G189.6+3.3 exploding between 20,000 to 110,000 years ago, while IC 443 was created about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago. The original stars may have been 20 or more times the sun's mass.

These new findings can help shed light on how massive binary stars evolve, interact and die. For instance, further analysis of G189.6+3.3 and IC 443 can reveal how much of a kick the former gave the latter when it died, Michailidis said.

The scientists detailed their findings July 21 in the journal Nature Communications.

A young cluster of galaxies sparkles under a cosmic glow that's 4.4 billion years old. This peek into the past shows the stellar spectacle of a galaxy cluster still forming.

What is it?

The James Webb Space Telescope snapped this image of the galaxy cluster MACS J0553.4-3342 on July 3 using its near-infrared camera (NIRCam). The glorious, glimmering sight is actually a massive young galaxy cluster forming 4.4 billion years ago. A galaxy cluster is a grouping of galaxies held together by gravity. Galaxy clusters can contain hundreds or even thousands of galaxies and are the largest known structures in the entire universe that are held together in this way.

Why is it incredible?

Because light takes time to travel through space, and because the JWST can look incredibly far out into space, this telescope acts as a sort time machine.

This power isn't unique to the JWST, however. Other telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope, for instance, have similarly peered back in time through the cosmos and revealed some incredible, ancient sights. However, the JWST's specialized instruments like NIRCam allow the telescope to pick up incredibly faint light from galaxies remarkably far away. This greatly stretches how far back in time we can see.

But the really incredible thing is, you can look back in time yourself — with only your eyes. While JWST can look exceptionally far out into space and can capture the very faint light of ancient galaxies, the light coming from the stars you can see with your bare eyes also had to travel over incredible stretches of time to reach you. Think about this: the light coming from a constellation you love may have traveled across millions of light-years to get to your eyes.

SpaceX launched a trailblazing satellite-servicing mission today (July 21).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 5:15 p.m. EDT (2115 GMT).

SpaceX called today's launch MRV-MEV, because it's sending up a Mission Robotic Vehicle and three Mission Extension Pods (MEPs). These spacecraft will be operated by SpaceLogistics, a subsidiary of Virginia-based aerospace giant Northrop Grumman.

MRV-MEV is headed to geostationary orbit (GEO), 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth. At this altitude, orbital speed matches the velocity of our planet's rotation, allowing spacecraft to "hover" over the same patch of ground continuously. For this reason, GEO is a popular destination for spy, communications and weather satellites.

The new mission will work to extend the lives of such satellites. The MRV is equipped with two 10-foot-long (3 meters) robotic arms, a system developed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with the help of the Naval Research Laboratory. The spacecraft will use those arms to attach the MEPs — the first three ever to launch — to three separate satellites in GEO.

"Once installed, the MEP uses electric propulsion to provide orbit control and momentum unloading for a client satellite," Northrop Grumman wrote in an MEP fact sheet. "The MEP is controlled by the customer via a self-contained C- or Ku-band telemetry and command system, and [is] capable of providing up to eight years of life extension for a typical 2,000 kg satellite in GEO."

The Australian satellite operator Optus booked one of the MEPs, and Intelsat hired out the other two, according to Tech Times.

The MRV and MEPs will reach GEO separately. When it's rendezvous time, the robotic-armed spacecraft will grab an MEP and ferry it over to its client satellite, Tech Times reported. The MRV will then remain in GEO after it has installed the third MEP, waiting for other such "satellite jetpacks" to reach orbit.

In addition to installing MEPs, the MRV "can relocate, inspect, repair and upgrade spacecraft while in orbit," Northrop Grumman's website states.

"MRV includes a Northrop Grumman-developed Passive Refueling Module (PRM), the first refueling interface standard approved by the U.S. Space Force, which enables MRV to be refueled in orbit," it adds. "With advanced robotics technology and Northrop Grumman's proven experience in satellite servicing, the mission delivers an unprecedented capability and new class of system that can continuously evolve to support novel or increasingly advanced missions for our nation, making assets in space more resilient."

That "proven experience in satellite servicing" consists of two previous Northrop Grumman projects. Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1) — the first-ever commercial satellite-servicing spacecraft — launched in October 2019 and successfully rendezvoused with its target in GEO (the communications satellite Intelsat 901) four months later. MEV-2 launched in August 2020 and docked with Intelsat 10-02 the following April.

Neither MEV-1 nor MEV-2 used Mission Extension Pods, however. Each of those previous efforts employed a single servicing craft, which made its way to the target satellite, docked and performed life-extension duties on its own.

All went according to plan during the launch: The Falcon 9's upper stage deployed the MRV 35.5 minutes after liftoff and the three MEPs at 10-minute intervals after that, according to SpaceX.

In a departure from most Falcon 9 missions, there was not a first-stage landing today.

"Due to the additional performance needed to launch these payloads to geosynchronous transfer orbit, this will be the 32nd and final flight for the Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched CRS-24, Eutelsat HOTBIRD 13F, OneWeb 1, SES-18 and SES-19, and 27 Starlink missions," SpaceX's MRV-MEP mission description reads.

SpaceX's rocket-reuse record is 36 flights, set earlier this month during a Falcon 9 launch of the company's Starlink internet satellites.

MEV-MEP was SpaceX's second launch of the day. The company also sent 24 Starlink craft to orbit atop a Falcon 9 from California this morning.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 5:23 p.m. ET with news of successful liftoff. It was then updated again at 11:05 a.m. ET on July 22 with news of successful payload deployment, and to note DARPA's key role in this mission.

An amateur astronomer's plans for a camping vacation two years ago transformed into a possible crater find in Canada's north.

Amateur astronomer Joël Lapointe, using Google Maps to figure out his route for the 2024 vacation, saw some odd terrain in Quebec's Côte-Nord region centered on Lake Marsal. Lapointe suspected it was an impact crater from a meteorite, and made a report on Impact Earth — a crowdsourcing website for craters with Canada's Western University in London, Ontario near Toronto. Western planetary geologist Gordon Osinski made a visit to the region in 2025, provisionally not only confirming the crater, but saying it's probably one of the biggest discovered in recent years. The 390-million-year old feature is roughly 15 miles (25 kilometers) wide.

In an email interview with Space.com while on travel in Scotland, Osinski — known as "Oz" by the space community — said to his knowledge the last discovery of that scale was the approximately 31-km (19-mile) Hiawatha structure, also possibly a crater, spotted in Greenland in 2018. "However, that structure is completely buried by ice, so its diameter is uncertain and there is still some controversy about its origin," Oz said.

But in the case of the new crater, called Uhackatik with approval from the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit in whose traditional lands the crater lies, there is no doubt at all where the crater came from. Oz's expedition to the area revealed "shock metamorphic effects", which are deformations to the rocks induced by the shock waves and heating produced by a meteorite impact.

"Impact melt rocks are like they sound: large volumes of rock that are melted by the impact event, but then cool and crystallize to look a lot like volcanic rocks," he said. "Finding these preserved — as they are usually some of the first parts of a crater to be eroded — was a big surprise."

While most of the features are microscopic, Oz said in the field he and his collaborators could easily see "shatter cones", which are branching features in rock layers produced by the shockwave of impact. The research is not yet peer-reviewed, but it will be presented at the 88th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Frankfurt, Germany in August.

While 400-million-year-old impact craters on Earth are hard to find, as geologic activity as well as erosion change their features over time, the precious evidence is helpful for scientists to better understand meteorite impacts on the moon, Mars and other rocky extraterrestrial bodies.

In terms of age, Oz noted, the moon's prominent Tycho crater best represents what Uhackatik probably looked like 390 million years ago. But On Earth, one of the best comparisons to Uhackatik is a moon-like crater used to help the Artemis II astronauts get ready for their moon mission this year.

That Earth crater is called Kamestastin (also known as Mistastin) in northern Labrador, Canada. Oz regularly runs expeditions there in consultation with the Mushuau Innu First Nation, as the crater lies within their traditional hunting grounds. Kamestastin includes anorthosite, a common mineral found in craters at the moon's south pole, where NASA hopes to land astronauts under the US-led Artemis program.

Artemis II astronauts Jeremy Hansen (from the Canadian Space Agency or CSA) and Christina Koch (NASA), as well as CSA backup astronaut and lunar-flyby capcom Jenni Gibbons, did an expedition to Kamestastin crater in 2023 alongside Oz and collaborators.

"For comparative craters [to Uhackatik], Kamestastin is actually a great one as the size is very similar," Oz said. "Kamestastin is well-preserved and I've worked there a lot … so in my mind, I was using Kamestastin as a template for exploring this new potential crater."

To fully confirm Uhackatik's extraterrestrial origin, Oz and collaborators are examining samples microscopically for more evidence of shock effects, such as chemistry indicating a high-temperature melt, or deformation effects in the quartz. In the meantime, Oz's lunar work with NASA continues: he will be part of the geology teams supporting the moon-landing astronauts during the Artemis 4 and 5 missions, which will touch down as soon as 2028.

For the first time, astronomers have reconstructed the magnetic field of an entire cluster of galaxies, from its central nucleus to its outer limits.

The record-breaking achievement is the product of the deepest-ever observations of the galaxy cluster Abell 2255, located around a billion light-years away — and those observations are thanks to the European radio telescope LOFAR (Low Frequency Array).

Abell 2255 has long been known for its complexity in radio waves. Its vast, diffuse radio emissions are created by particles called electrons racing at near-light, or relativistic, speeds and interacting with magnetic fields of galaxies in the cluster. Thus, using Abell 2255 as a cosmic laboratory to study the universe in radio waves could lead scientists to a better understanding of how magnetic fields come about and evolve. These observations could also help paint a picture of the dynamics of hot gas in galaxy clusters. This could reveal how the largest structures in the universe are constructed.

As part of the LOFAR Galaxy Cluster Ultra-Deep Field project, this team used 224 hours of radio image collection to discover that the distribution of large-scale magnetic fields throughout Abell 2255 (which itself stretches out for several million light-years) are not randomly distributed. Instead, these magnetic fields seem to be organized by the motion of gas that occurred during the formation of this galactic cluster.

"Obtaining very sensitive images of galaxy clusters at radio wavelengths is crucial to understanding how electrons are accelerated to relativistic speeds and magnetic fields are amplified on large cosmic scales," team leader Andrea Botteon, of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), said in a statement. "The complexity of these studies is due to the elusiveness of the radio signal from electrons moving in very weak magnetic fields. We believe that the mechanism that 'turns on' these gigantic radio emissions is linked to the formation process of galaxy clusters."

Botteon added that for this research he and his colleagues combined the deepest radio observations ever made with an innovative data analysis technique that allowed them to reconstruct the shape of a galaxy cluster's magnetic field for the first time.

"The coherence of the magnetic field lines observed in some regions of the cluster suggests that the morphology of the field is intimately linked to the dynamics of the gas in which it resides, where it can be 'stretched' or 'compressed' by the motions associated with the formation of the cluster itself," Botteon said.

This analysis revealed that, in some regions, the magnetic fields follow very specific directions, stretching radially along extended radio emissions. In contrast to this, in regions dominated by shock waves, magnetic fields are orientated at tangents. This suggests magnetic fields in Abell 2255 are carved out by the same dynamics that allow clusters to accrete gas and grow.

This serves as the first observational evidence that the same mechanisms that allow galaxies to grow and cluster, creating the largest structures in the universe, also shape their magnetic fields.

The team's research has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available as a pre-peer-reviewed paper on the repository site arXiv.

One thing is for certain: there will absolutely be no shortage of superheroes in Marvel Studios' "Avengers: Doomsday", as evidenced by this first full trailer that showcases everyone from the Wakandans and the X-Men to the Fantastic Four and Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the Avengers.

Plus, we get slivers of a metal-masked Victor Von Doom looming over the mayhem to further whet the appetites of MCU acolytes before the Russo Brothers’ epic lands Dec. 18.

"Something's coming," Downey's Doom declares as the trailer rolls out before later stopping Thor's Stormbreaker axe with two fingers. "Something we may not be able to deter. Before this day is done, we shall be faced with an unthinkable decision."

Opening with a blinding explosion witnessed by Professor X, fans are treated to a cavalcade of nearly everyone in the Marvel Cinematic Universe teaming up to stop a series of multiverse incursions and intentional destructions seemingly orchestrated by the mad monarch of Latveria.

"Beloved heroes from three distinct universes will be set on a deadly collision course and face an existential threat unlike anything they've ever encountered," states the official synopsis for the highly-anticipated $400 million tentpole project.

"Put aside your petty squabbles," Chris Hemsworth's Thor demands as we glimpse Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Ian McKellen's Magneto together.

Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man arrives to join the party as a welcome addition, as does Channing Tatum reprising his "Deadpool and Wolverine" role as Gambit, who's having a showdown with Simu Liu's Shang-Chi, and a beaded, long-haired Chris Evans as Steve Rogers is surprisingly seen after an encounter with Tom Hiddleston's Loki and his Time Variance Authority character. It's also fun seeing Rogers display his worthiness by snagging Thor's silver hammer! We're just relieved the tone on display is respectful and serious and not choked with jokes and gags as in the most recent MCU outings.

"You are far stronger than all of us put together," the Asgardian warns his brethren in the extended sneak peek. "And they died facing enemies and threats; that's going to be far less than this one. Everything that they sacrificed will be for nothing if we do not stand together."

With its countless superhero cameos and callbacks building to a chaotic crescendo, "Avengers: Doomsday" storms into theaters on Dec. 18, 2026.

SpaceX has pushed the next launch of its Starship megarocket back a few more days.

Elon Musk's company is now targeting Thursday (July 23) for Flight 13 of Starship, the giant, fully reusable vehicle it's developing to help get people to the moon and Mars, among other spaceflight tasks.

If all goes to plan, the 408-foot-tall (124.4 meters) Starship will lift off from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Thursday during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time). You can watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX.

It will be the second launch attempt for Starship Flight 13. The first came last Thursday (July 16) and ended in an abort, which occurred just as the giant rocket's 33 first-stage Raptor engines were firing up.

"To be confident of a good flight, 2 Raptors will be removed & replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week," Musk said on July 16 via X, the social media platform he owns.

SpaceX first targeted today (July 20) for Flight 13's second try. On Sunday (July 19), however, the company announced that it had pushed that date back to no earlier than Thursday.

Flight 13 will be the second launch of Starship Version 3 (V3), the latest, most advanced iteration of the megarocket. V3 is the variant that will land astronauts on the moon for NASA's Artemis program and fly SpaceX's first Mars missions, if all goes to plan.

The plan for the upcoming suborbital launch is similar to that of Flight 12, which lifted off on May 22. Starship's Super Heavy first stage will aim to steer itself back to Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Ship upper stage will do the same halfway around the world, off the coast of Western Australia.

SpaceX accomplished the latter objective on Flight 12 but not the former; Super Heavy suffered engine issues during its return to Earth and ended up hitting the Gulf waters hard.

Flight 13 will do a few new things, however. For example, it will carry 20 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink V3 internet satellites, which have never flown to space before. SpaceX plans to build a constellation of 100,000 Starlink V3 spacecraft in low Earth orbit over the coming years, and Starship will do all of the heavy lifting.

These 20 Starlinks won't stay aloft for long, however. Since Ship is flying on a suborbital trajectory, the satellites will come back to Earth relatively quickly — about 20 minutes after deployment, according to SpaceX's Flight 13 mission description.

Starship debuted in April 2023. All of its test flights to date have been suborbital.

Separated by billions of miles and shaped by very different environments, Saturn's smoggy moon Titan and the dwarf planet Pluto have, on paper, little in common.

Titan is a geologically active world cloaked in an atmosphere denser than Earth's, its landscape shaped by seas of liquid methane and vast dunes built from organic particles that rain out of its skies. Pluto, by contrast, is a frigid outpost with a tenuous atmosphere hovering above an icy, frozen surface.

Yet, observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed these two disparate worlds share an identical, unexplained infrared signature on their surfaces — a sign that similar chemistry may be unfolding on both worlds despite their stark differences, scientists say.

Detailed in a new study, the feature appears at precisely the same infrared wavelength on both Titan and Pluto, indicating that it absorbs light identically on both worlds. The signal points to the presence of an unknown compound, or a family of related compounds, that scientists have yet to identify.

"It's rather mysterious," Bruno Bézard, a planetary scientist at the Paris Observatory who led the discovery, told Space.com. "We cannot say what it is."

Chasing the signal

Bézard first spotted the unexplained feature while analyzing Titan observations from November 2022, when JWST gathered infrared light leaking through the haze in very specific, narrow wavelength bands, allowing scientists to peer directly through the otherwise opaque atmosphere.

To make sense of this light, researchers rely on spectroscopy, a technique used to identify compounds by the specific wavelengths of light they absorb. Because every molecule leaves behind a unique spectral fingerprint that telescopes can detect, astronomers can routinely identify substances across the solar system and beyond, ranging from simple water ice to complex molecules.

But the newly detected feature neither matches any of the standard library spectra cataloged so far, nor does it appear to be a fluke of the hardware, the study notes. The exact same absorption feature was detected by two different JWST instruments — the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) — ruling out the possibility of an instrumental artifact.

After failing to find a match with the cataloged spectral fingerprints of the simplest and most common planetary ices, Bézard wondered whether another world with similar atmospheric chemistry might hold a clue. He turned to his colleague Emmanuel Lellouch of the Paris Observatory, who had led a JWST program that had observed Pluto in May 2023.

"I asked him, 'Do you also have a signature [on Pluto] at this exact wavelength?'" Bézard recalled in the interview with Space.com. "So we looked, and we found that it is present there."

The ground truth

There is no evidence that the mystery molecule is a biosignature, Bézard said. Instead, it likely reflects the kind of prebiotic chemistry that has been operating in Titan's oxygen-free environment for more than 4 billion years.

One compelling possibility is that it belongs to a family of hydrocarbons known as allenes, which the study notes are essentially the only organic compounds known to exhibit strong absorption bands within the same 5-micron infrared range as the mystery signal.

But the allene family contains many complex variations for which complete spectra do not yet exist, Bézard said. Alternatively, the signature could belong to a known molecule whose spectral fingerprint has shifted, potentially because it is mixed with other planetary ices that have not yet been fully cataloged.

"We only have spectra for the simplest of them," Bézard said. "But it is possible that within this family you could find one or several compounds which are present together and make such an absorption feature."

Whatever the compound ultimately proves to be, he and his team believe it forms in the atmosphere through photochemical reactions before eventually "snowing" down onto the surface.

Despite their stark differences, both Titan and Pluto possess atmospheres dominated by nitrogen and methane. Scientists know from spacecraft observations and lab simulations that in the upper reaches of the planets' atmospheres, ultraviolet sunlight breaks these molecules apart, triggering a cascade of highly reactive chemical fragments. These fragments then reassemble into complex organic compounds, some of which condense and snow back down onto the surface below, which is where the JWST detected them.

A couple of different lines of evidence support this atmosphere-to-surface pipeline. First, the team analyzed how the signal behaved across Titan's disk. As the JWST scanned Titan from the center of its circular face toward its outer edge, or limb, the mysterious signal steadily weakened, the study notes.

"This is what you expect if it comes from the surface," said Bézard.

Because of the three-dimensional geometry of looking at a sphere, a signal coming from a flat surface will appear strongest at the center and grow fainter near the edge, where the angle of view through the atmosphere becomes longer and more obscured. This specific dimming trait was not shared by atmospheric carbon monoxide the team checked, which remained essentially unchanged from center to limb, Bézard said, which helped the team infer that this mystery molecule likely resides on the ground.

Pluto offered an independent line of evidence to back up this surface theory. Its near-vacuum atmosphere is physically too thin and sparse to generate an absorption feature of the observed depth, Bézard said, leaving the dwarf planet's solid surface as the only plausible source for the deep signature.

To further test their atmospheric-origin hypothesis, the team studied JWST observations of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Because Ganymede lacks a nitrogen-methane atmosphere, it cannot run the same photochemical engine like Titan and Pluto do. Sure enough, the researchers found no trace of the mysterious feature, lending additional support to the theory that the compound is uniquely tied to the chemistry of nitrogen and methane skies.

Mapping Titan's surface

More clarity may arrive in the coming months. Researchers are currently analyzing newer JWST observations that provide a more complete view of Titan as it rotates. The data will allow the team to map the mysterious infrared signature across the moon's surface and determine whether it is associated with specific geologic features, such as Titan's vast organic-rich dune fields, which are continually replenished by a slow drizzle of complex particles produced in the atmosphere, Bézard said.

Further clues may have to wait for NASA's Dragonfly mission, a car-sized rotorcraft expected to launch in 2028 and arrive at Titan in the mid-2030s.

Although Dragonfly does not carry an infrared spectrometer to replicate JWST's light measurements, its onboard mass spectrometer will allow it to "taste" organic molecules across the various geologically interesting areas the spacecraft will fly to. By revealing which compounds are actually present on Titan's surface, the mission could give scientists a shortlist of candidates to replicate in laboratories back on Earth to see if they match the traits of the mystery molecule, Bézard said.

"It's always exciting when you discover something that was not seen before," Bézard said. "It's really the nicest part of our job."

The new study was accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Half a century after first putting hardware down on Mars, NASA is looking to explore the Red Planet's skies.

On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 lander touched down in the western reaches of Chryse Planitia (the "Golden Plain"), a large circular landform that lies 22.5 degrees north of the Martian equator.

It was the first-ever Mars landing for NASA. Viking 1, along with its twin Viking 2, went on to conduct the first fully successful mission on the Red Planet's surface. (The Soviet Union's Mars 3 probe survived its touchdown attempt on Dec. 2, 1971 but died less than two minutes later.) And those missions have left a rich and intriguing legacy.

Viking 1 and Viking 2 — which touched down in a different Red Planet region on Sept. 3, 1976 — were sent to the surface to search for signs of life on Mars. (Each mission also featured an orbiter, which studied the planet from above.)

The landers did this using three different experiments, two of which returned negative results. But the third, called Labeled Release (LR), was different. LR observed a steady stream of carbon dioxide gas coming from dirt into which it had introduced nutrients — a possible sign of microbial metabolism.

Some scientists deemed the LR results a likely life detection. But most disagreed, ascribing them to abiotic reactions and stressing that, overall, the Viking data paint a picture of a dead planet.

That disagreement illustrates one of the main legacies of the Viking program: It showed researchers that hunting for extraterrestrial life is a complicated business, and they needed to learn more about Mars before attempting the search again on the Red Planet.

NASA didn't send a surface craft to Mars for another two decades, a hiatus caused in part by the Vikings' ambiguous results and high price tag, as well as a shifting of funds to the nascent space shuttle program.

The dry spell was broken in July 1997, when the agency's Pathfinder lander touched down in Chryse Planitia, about 530 miles (850 kilometers) from Viking 1. The main goals of Pathfinder's mission were to demonstrate a new "faster, better, cheaper" method of Mars exploration, prove out a new airbag-based landing system and get a mobile robot onto the red dirt.

Pathfinder achieved all of these objectives, notching the third by deploying a small rover named Sojourner. The little wheeled robot stumbled across rounded pebbles — strong evidence that they had been exposed to flowing water.

This discovery helped shape a new NASA Mars exploration strategy, one that aims to make an informed search for alien life after "following the water." Life as we know it depends on water, so the agency built rovers designed to hunt for signs of past liquid water and potentially habitable environments.

The twin golf-cart-sized rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed in 2004, and the car-sized Curiosity followed suit in August 2012. Then came Perseverance, which landed inside Mars' Jezero Crater in February 2021.

All of these wheeled explorers found evidence of past aqueous environments. Curiosity and Perseverance — with their more extensive and sophisticated scientific payloads — delved even deeper, discovering complex organic molecules that may have been produced by life as we know it.

The two latter rovers are continuing their work; both remain active on the Red Planet. (Pathfinder and Sojourner operated for about three months; Spirit was declared dead in 2010 and Opportunity fell victim to a Mars dust storm in 2018.)

Perseverance has collected a variety of Mars samples, which NASA wants to return to Earth for detailed study. As the Vikings' experience suggests, such a level of intense scrutiny may be necessary to make a definitive detection of life on Mars, if it indeed exists. (Getting those samples home is not a foregone conclusion, however; NASA's original plan was deemed too expensive, and it's now looking into a new return strategy.)

Perseverance also carried a little robotic companion, which heralded a new phase of Red Planet exploration — the Ingenuity helicopter.

Ingenuity was a technology demonstration, designed to show that rotorcraft could effectively ply the thin Red Planet skies. (Mars' atmosphere is just 1% as dense as that of Earth at sea level.)

The $80 million mission was a rousing success. The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity was expected to make just five short hops on Mars but ended up flying 72 times over the course of nearly three years of activity. (Its first flight occurred on April 19, 2021, and its last was on Jan. 18, 2024.)

So NASA aimed higher, drawing up plans for future helicopter missions that could collect valuable scientific data. And such a mission is on course to launch in 2028, if all goes according to plan: Skyfall, which will send three Ingenuity-like choppers to Mars on a nuclear-powered rocket.

"Equipped with a suite of scientific instruments, these aerial scouts will map hidden ice deposits and analyze weather patterns," NASA officials wrote in a description of Skyfall. "The mission will also demonstrate how aerial vehicles can generate wide terrain and subsurface maps to identify safe and resource-rich destinations for future American astronauts venturing to Mars."

And Skyfall could be just another step toward even more ambitious aerial exploration on the Red Planet. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built and operated Ingenuity, is looking into larger, more capable Mars helicopters that could do a wider variety of work on the Red Planet.

This is all part of Viking 1's legacy. That historic touchdown on Mars half a century ago lifted exploration up — all the way into the skies of another world.

In July 2016, "Stranger Things" stormed its way into the pantheon of pop culture greats. Finding the sweet spot of '80s nostalgia, horror, and sci-fi, the Duffer Brothers' series established itself as one of Netflix's flagship shows and a favourite water cooler topic for close to a decade.

Much like "Jurassic Park" encouraged an entire generation to suddenly view paleontology through a new set of eyes, the same can be said about "Stranger Things" and science. Seriously, how many of us discovered the many-worlds theory because of the concept of the Upside Down on the show? Even wormholes are easier to understand now because of Mr Clarke's lessons than whatever the heck happens in "Interstellar" that has Matthew McConaughey bawling like he's been forced to sit through a Jared Leto movie marathon.

Parents and government groups have long highlighted the negative effects of entertainment, but not enough is said about its positive influences, especially the ability to inspire. In fact, it's often underestimated how invaluable a show like "Stranger Things" has been to educators who want to turn around the declining numbers in STEM graduates.

For University of Liverpool physics professor Carsten Welsch, "Star Wars" references were no longer cutting it with his students. However, the "Stranger Things" science allowed him to relate to a younger generation of learners. " It's a really good way to talk about science, which can be quite a challenge, especially with teenagers," Welsch told NPR. "Normally, the moment you mention physics or engineering, they run away."

This is something echoed by Louis Bearson, the director of science, business, and education at the Institute of Physics. Bearson mentioned how some of the devices used on the show and its delicate unpacking of complex topics like quantum physics could widen the appeal of science and physics beyond the explanations in the textbooks.

"One of the issues we have is that physics really needs to be more representative of the community at large," Bearson told The Times. "If we can get a broader base of people interested through things like 'Stranger Things', that's only going to be for the good."

It wasn't only the educators who appreciated the power of "Stranger Things" to connect with others, but also government departments like the U.S. Department of Energy.

The official website used the premise of the Upside Down to explain its own work, especially in terms of its search for other dimensions and how this is done in a real-world setting. While the information was always out there for anybody interested in finding out more, how many people would have read and taken an interest in any of it without the influence of "Stranger Things"?Apart from the natural benefit to educators and government departments wanting to increase the interest in STEM education, "Stranger Things" opened up the doors to something else equally important: intelligent discourse among its fanbase — the kind that's often missing in an online world where trolls walk among us and bring their bad manners from under-the-bridge living.

Reddit and social media forums were flooded with young fans discussing what they watched, the possibilities of where it could go, and even providing explanations to others who might not have understood the scientific concepts. It was encouraging, insightful, and fun, as people learned through interaction and exploration, which to this day is still the best way to learn anything.

In 2017, Olivia Richter, a then-student at the School of Communication and College of Arts and Sciences and writer for The Eagle, wrote a column about how "Stranger Things" served as a modern role model for curiosity.

The author explained how the Hawkins gang expressed "a great thirst for knowledge" and dispelled the notion that being smart or nerdy was something to be ashamed of. "It is encouraging a culture of curiosity and learning in its viewers," Richter wrote. "Much of the science in the show is based in fiction, though it is still highly successful in making science look exciting and fun and creating a model for young people that it is cool to be inquisitive."

Fans demonstrated an example of this ultra-curious attitude after the series finale. Science has always been about hypotheses and proving theories, and this approach was applied to the Conformity Gate theory that spread like wildfire online. Sure, some people might call it a conspiracy theory and looking for something that isn't there, but the fans from around the world rallied to find clues and provide evidence for their unique hypothesis about the show's ending.

They might not have been right in the end — maybe even being deliberately misled by Netflix's marketing — but the fact that they questioned, critiqued, and researched to such an extent is a positive sign that the show's message had an impact. It's also proof that critical thinking isn't dead and intelligent life is still out there.

Say what you want about the final season of "Stranger Things" and whether the ending stuck the landing or not, but there's no disputing the Demogorgon-shaped mark it left on viewers around the globe. More than that, it was a show that provoked curiosity and discovery, as well as encouraging a new generation to find out more about science.

In a world riddled with fake news, false information, endless rage-bait, and sustained pushes for conformity rather than curiosity, we desperately need more neuron-firing programming like this.

All five seasons of "Stranger Things" are on Netflix.

That's two last-second launch aborts in a row for SpaceX.

One of the company's Falcon 9 rockets tried to loft 24 Starlink internet satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California this morning (July 20), but the attempt was aborted just as the first-stage engines started firing up.

Something similar happened on Thursday afternoon (July 16), when SpaceX attempted to launch the 13th test flight of its Starship megarocket.

The two events likely have little in common other than a proximity in time. They involved two very different vehicles, after all: The workhorse Falcon 9 is the most reliable and active rocket on the planet; it has already launched 84 times this year, with zero failures.

Starship, on the other hand, remains in the development-and-testing phase. SpaceX has high hopes for the giant vehicle, which combines full reusability with unprecedented brawn. (It's the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.)

The two vehicles are also powered by different engines. The Falcon 9's first stage employs nine Merlin 1Ds, whereas Starship's Super Heavy booster uses 33 next-gen Raptors.

SpaceX decided to swap out two of those Raptors ahead of the next Flight 13 launch attempt, which is scheduled for Thursday afternoon (July 23).

The Vandenberg Starlink launch, meanwhile, is back on the docket for Tuesday morning (July 21). It's scheduled to lift off during a nearly four-hour window that opens at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT; 7 a.m. local California time), according to a SpaceX mission description.

NASA has never flown a mission like Artemis III, and it's shaping up to become one of the most elaborate spaceflights in history.

NASA has provided more details about the Artemis III flight scheduled for next year, and, if all goes according to plan, the objectives the astronauts will be checking off their list will contain more than a few "firsts" for the Artemis program and human spaceflight overall. That includes the first crewed NASA mission to rendezvous and dock with two separate designed to carry crews of their own.

Artemis is NASA's next-generation program to return astronauts to the surface of the moon. Artemis III is designed as a test run for NASA's Orion spacecraft in which it will dock and perform operations with the program's two commercial lunar landers — SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon. The mission will launch a crew of four aboard Orion on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket into Earth orbit, where the capsule will rendezvous with each lander separately over the course of about two weeks. Their success will set the stage for a crewed moon landing on Artemis IV, but NASA must first master the complicated demands of Artemis III in order to confidently set its sights on the lunar surface.

"Artemis III will be a highly choreographed dance with a demanding launch sequence across multiple launch pads and equally demanding mission operations for our ground and flight crews, making it one of the most complex and ambitious missions NASA has ever undertaken," said Artemis Program Manager Jeremy Parsons in a NASA update on July 15.

Only one mission in the course of human spaceflight has flown astronauts to rendezvous with multiple spacecraft capable of supporting crews of their own: Soyuz T-15 in 1986, which launched cosmonaut Leonid Kizim to the Salyut 7 space station, and then flew him to, what was at the time, the Soviet Union's MIR space station.

America's space program has come close to such a milestone. NASA's Gemini 10 mission in 1966 launched NASA astronauts John Young and Michael Collins to rendezvous and dock with the uncrewed Agena 10 probe. After undocking, they flew their Gemini capsule to rendezvous with Agena 8, but did not dock with the probe. Two shuttle missions, STS-72 and STS-51A, also managed to rendezvous with separate satellites during their missions, but none of these required the complex coordination and multiple launch vehicles lined up to pull off Artemis III.

Orion, Blue Moon and Starship are all designed to launch on different rockets from different launch pads at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS), which will all require cross-agency and commercial collaboration for range availability, resource use constraints like nitrogen gas availability across the various ranges and the alignment of several other overlapping hierarchies of infrastructure in order to ensure Artemis is successful.

Blue Moon will launch on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket from Space Launch Complex-36 (SLC-36), which it leases from the Space Force at CCSFS. Blue Moon is the first of the three spacecraft set to make it to orbit, and is capable of remaining in space for up to 30 days, according to the NASA update. That will give Blue Origin and NASA an opportunity to confirm the lander's condition and functionality before committing the Artemis III crew and Orion to launch and join it on orbit.

SLS will be next to get off the ground, lifting off from KSC's Launch Complex-39B carrying the Orion spacecraft. Orion will rendezvous with Blue Moon in low Earth orbit (LEO), and will spend about two days docked with the lander. Part of the purpose of Artemis III is to give both lunar lander providers the chance to mature their designs based on actual in-flight data, so neither the Blue Moon nor Starship that fly on the mission will be the spacecrafts' final, landing-capable versions.

Blue Origin will launch the Blue Moon Mark 2 (Mk2), a graduated design of the company's smaller Mk1 cargo lander, which was scheduled to launch a demonstration mission this year. That may be delayed, however, due to an explosion of one of the company's New Glenn rockets during an engine test at SLC-36 in May. With repairs now well underway, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has voiced confidence that New Glenn will return to flight by the end of 2026.

Completing that Mk1 mission this year will be just as critical to NASA's moon plans as the launch of Blue Moon Mk2 will be during Artemis III. Among the list of requirements each lander must meet in order for NASA to certify the vehicles to land astronauts on the moon, successfully demonstrating an uncrewed lunar landing is of chief importance.

"SpaceX and Blue Origin have put forward a list of aggressive objectives and goals intended to complement upcoming uncrewed demonstration missions at the moon so that we can gain both understanding and confidence in the spacecraft and launch vehicles prior to a crewed landing," said NASA's Steve Creech, Artemis' Human Landing System program manager, in the mission update.

Once Orion docks with Blue Moon on Artemis III, two of the mission's astronauts will be able to board the lander to test out its environmental control systems, avionics and the interoperability between the two spacecraft in flight. A test article EVA (extravehicular activity) spacesuit designed to mirror what astronauts will wear during future excursions across the lunar surface will launch aboard the Artemis III Blue Moon, and provide engineers data about how the suit will interact within the lander's crew cabin.

Starship won't launch until after Orion and Blue Moon have undocked. SpaceX is currently constructing two Starship towers on Florida's Space Coast, one at KSC's LC-39A, and another at SLC-37, but it's not yet clear which pad will support Artemis III. NASA contracted SpaceX to design a lunar lander version of the spacecraft to deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon on Artemis IV, but SpaceX has that and more in mind for the massive vehicle.

SpaceX has performed test flights of its Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage, collectively known as Starship, since 2023. The rocket is designed to be fully reusable, and will provide SpaceX a big upgrade from the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. Once operational, SpaceX says Starship will be capable of delivering more than 100 tons to LEO. But SpaceX is still chasing that operational status.

Despite its dozen launches to space, and counting, Starship is still very much in a developmental stage, and has yet to meet many of NASA's requirements to fly a crewed lunar landing. SpaceX introduced the "Version 3" (V3) Starship on its Flight-12 launch in May, and intends to fly the same design when it launches Starship on Artemis III, with a docking adapter for connecting with Orion. For the astronauts, that means no crew cabin to enter. Instead, Orion and Starship will test communications and maneuvering systems between both vehicles.

Starship's V3 upgrade includes hardware that will be needed for an actual moon landing mission, like docking ports to perform propellant transfers in space — Starship requires refueling from tanker Ships on orbit in order to fly beyond LEO, and NASA estimates at least 15 Starship refueling launches will be needed for Artemis IV. Transferring and storing those cryogenic fuels in space is another capability Starship (and Blue Moon) needs to demonstrate before it can perform crewed lunar landings.

For Artemis III, though, Starship and Blue Moon will each only require one launch to get the job done, and NASA wants to give them ample room to do so. "All three rockets will have more launch opportunities than are available for a lunar mission and will be able to reach the designated mission altitude in a single launch," the NASA update said.

Orion and the Artemis III crew will stay docked with Starship for about a day before detaching to begin preparations for their return to Earth. Similar to the return of Artemis II in April, the Artemis III astronauts will target a parachute-assisted splashdown aboard Orion in the Pacific Ocean, off the United States' West Coast.

Successful operations with both landers on Artemis III would pave the way for NASA's lunar landing plans on Artemis IV, currently scheduled for 2028. Barring any development delays or complications during Artemis III, Starship is the vehicle NASA has selected to carry out the Artemis IV moon landing, the first return of astronauts to the lunar surface in more than half a century.

For ten glorious days starting on April 1, 2026, one human endeavor captivated our home planet across continents and time zones: the NASA Artemis II mission to orbit the moon, the first crewed mission to cislunar space since 1972. In an Easter-Passover week that had especially demoralizing headlines on global conflicts, this mission presented a powerful vision of what journeying together and taking enormous risks for a shared purpose towards a shared future could look like.

Much has been spoken and written about the scientific and personal achievements of the Artemis II mission and its trailblazing astronauts. Their humanity, and what it did for humankind at large, is perhaps a quieter yet just-as-celebratory achievement.

In a time of trillion-dollar AI IPOs, when the seemingly planned obsolescence of humanity itself looms on our collective horizon, the Artemis II astronauts reminded us that they considered it the honor of a lifetime to do this for us - and as us - while transmitting daily that they couldn’t wait to come home to us. As Christina Koch shared at the end of the translunar injection burn (TLI) on day 2, while Artemis II set its course to leave Earth's orbital space for the moon as well as its return trajectory: "With this translunar injection burn, we do not leave Earth. We choose it."

From their morning wake-up music playlists (which inspired many to enquire about submitting their compositions for future crewed missions), to the reading out of their menus and details of their daily workouts or sleep schedules, we were reminded that these astronauts were navigating with us in real time the humdrum work of staying alive while conducting amazing science. This signal reached Earth as a continuous invitation to fellowship, and the record-breaking viewership of Artemis II built like a slow cooker feast, with global engagement increasing from launch to splashdown.

The Artemis II livestream introduced many viewers to the unavoidable aspects of spaceflight missions, such as the timing lag and blackouts in communications that will endure regardless of future technological advancements.

Sometimes this was wonderfully funny, like when the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney sought reassurance from the Artemis II astronauts that they preferred maple syrup to Nutella over their pancakes, with the astronauts bursting into laughter a few seconds after the media in-room chuckles.

At other times, it was the quiet anticipation of unprecedented history like the 40-minute communications blackout when the Orion spacecraft traveled behind the moon, or the heart pounding nailbiters of the 6-minute blackouts during the TLI or re-entry to Earth. In an era that rewards instantaneity over pauses, the globe watched and waited together. Such communication lags will compound dramatically for more distant worlds we explore, yet will still tether us profoundly in real time to one another despite our attention- and time-deprived schedules.

The Artemis II livestream also brought home the challenges of human bodily functions far from home. An inordinate amount of media attention and communications airtime was devoted to the brand new model of NASA toilet which developed issues just hours after launch and later became unfunctional on day 3 of the mission. Panels of NASA and space studies experts were asked by journalists about whether the astronauts were able to do either one or both of "#1" or "#2", or why the toilet gave off burning smells, highlighting the very human realities of boldly going where no one has gone before.

We also saw the rocking of the Orion capsule framed by the darkness of space and the background of the moon or Earth. We watched as each astronaut took their turn with the mandatory daily exercise routine to prevent bone density loss, cardiovascular issues and other health declines in a microgravity environment (only one astronaut can work out at a time, owing to space restrictions and to prevent buildup of exhaled carbon dioxide in an enclosed environment).

The Artemis II mission was full of deeply personal experiences and observations shared by the astronauts, made even more powerful by their unscripted nature. Commander Reed Wiseman's impromptu words of gratitude to the thousands of engineers and staff involved with the successful TLI, and the spontaneous naming of craters on the far side of the moon including - as the astronauts wept and hugged - one for his deceased wife Carroll, connected us in real time to their, and therefore our, evolving scientific and human perspectives.

This gratitude was echoed in a recent interview at the Kennedy Space Center, in which Wiseman shared that he had just received a handwritten note at the airport written on a boarding pass, stating "Thank you for reminding us about joy and hope in the universe again", which he expanded on to thank all the hands that helped the Artemis II mission succeed.

There were also moments during the mission when they simply ran out of words, like when they saw shades of colors on far-side lunar craters on what appears from Earth as a gray barren world. They called for new language to describe what they were seeing.

NASA recently issued a call for filmmakers, documentarians, songwriters, and poets to contribute to mission storytelling, especially encouraging in the wake of the cancellation of the artist-focused dearmoon mission. Perhaps a Dictionary of the Moon and an Embassy of the Moon, as Dutch artist Marjolijn van Heemstra has proposed, will become possibilities in the future.

Towards the end of the 1997 movie "Contact," based on the 1985 book by Carl Sagan, astronaut and SETI scientist Dr. Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) is overcome by the experience of interstellar travel and the dazzling views it brings. She says in a choked voice "they should have sent a poet."

In the case of Artemis II, we sent four.

The Canon 18x50 IS binoculars are ideal for stargazing and are able to deliver clarity on night sky objects, thanks to their image stabilization. The 50mm objective lenses are the benchmark for stargazing binoculars and are able to deliver bright views of the night sky. They are currently 30% off their retail price.

You can get the Canon 18x50 IS all-weather binoculars on sale for $1195 from Amazon.

When it comes to stargazing, image-stabilized binoculars are a cut above the rest. Even at high magnifications, you get detailed views of night sky objects like star clusters and nebulas, instead of shaky worms of light. Our expert reviewer gave the Canon 18x50 IS binoculars four stars and called them 'stargazing ready' thanks to their high 18x magnification and image-stabilization.

• We've got you covered with reviews and rankings of the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, drones, Lego, streaming and more.

Stargazing with regular binoculars or image stabilized binoculars is the same difference as night and day. Especially at higher magnifications, image stabilization becomes a necessity when using the binoculars without a tripod and you can struggle to get a shake-free view without it.

The Canon 18x50 IS binoculars offer a powerful 18x magnification and 50mm objective lenses for great astronomy performance. You don't need to worry sacrificing low-light capability for image-stabilization. The star clusters, galaxies and nebulas are bright without becoming lines of squiggly light. They are brilliant for bird watching and general use, too, with the image stabilization adding to the quality of all views.

The optical technology stands out with ultra-low dispersion (UD) glass elements for virtually no chromatic aberration (color fringing) and doublet field flatteners for sharp stars from edge-to-edge. Optics expert, Jase Parnell-Brookes, gave them four stars in their full Canon 18x50 binoculars review for enabling a relaxing and impressive session of stargazing. They highlighted the strong grip for sturdiness in challenging conditions but even though they are advertised as all-weather, they are not fully waterproof. At 27% off asking price, this is a huge saving on a pair of binoculars we think are among the best for stargazing.

Key features: 18x magnification, 50mm objective lens diameter, 3.7-degree field of view, 15mm eye relief, 41.6 oz (1.2 kg).

Price history: The Canon 18x50 IS binoculars have a retail price of $1,648 but are often discounted from Amazon for $1,549. This deal from an Amazon seller brings the price down to $1,195, with the official Amazon listing on sale for $1,199.

Price comparison: Amazon: $1,195 | BHPhotoVideo: $1,449 | Adorama: $1,149

Reviews consensus: In our Canon 18x50 IS binoculars review, we praised their the premium features that made it perfect for stargazing: 18x magnification, 50mm objective lenses and superb image stabilization.

Space: ★★★★

✅ Buy it if: You want high powered views of the universe from handheld binoculars without the need for a tripod.

❌ Don't buy it if: If you don't need high magnification or image-stabilization, a lower magnification pair might be more suited to you, like the Nikon Action 7x50 binoculars.

Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors, drones, lego and much more.

NASA's Curiosity rover has uncovered evidence of ancient sandstorms on the Red Planet.

What is it?

Scientists think ancient Mars was quite different than it is today. While we might know it now as a barred, reddish wasteland, billions of years ago it actually had an atmosphere. Scientists even think that it had flowing rivers and expansive lakes.

And with observations from the Curiosity rover, researchers are exploring ancient sandstorms they think blew across the Martian landscape.

In this image Curiosity snapped, you can see what experts think is the aftermath of an especially extreme sandstorm in a spot nicknamed "Jawbone Canyon." Winds from this storm were likely so extreme that they pushed sand into rippling waves that eventually hardened into rock.

And if you really look closely at this image, you can almost see how the rocks appear to have ripples on them.

While the image was captured in 2024, a new investigation of the observation and discovery of this sandstorm was described in a study published this year in the journal Geology.

Why is it incredible?

This observation by Curiosity is part of a long history of exploration on the Martian surface that actually began 50 years ago today.

On July 20, 1976, NASA's Viking 1 lander touched down on the Red Planet. Aside from the Soviet Mars 3 lander that lasted only a few seconds on the world before losing contact, Viking 1 was the first Mars lander to survive landing and successfully went on to study the planet.

Viking-1 took the first-ever images on the surface of Mars, studied the planet's soil and really sparked investigation of whether or not the world may have ever supported life. Thanks to the success of this mission 50 years ago, today we have rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance on Mars leading us at the cutting edge of exploration.

The costs of space launch have fallen 96% in the past six decades and have the potential to plummet by nearly as much by 2040, a new study finds.

However, such an improvement might get hampered by a number of challenges, such as the rise of space debris in orbit or a single company monopolizing commercial space launch, researchers added.

Although previous analyses of space launch suggested that costs had dropped over time, one major problem with these prior studies was that they "considered the cost of the rockets, but not how much they launched during their lifetimes," study co-author Francesco Nicoli, an associate professor of political economy at the Politecnico University of Turin in Italy, told Space.com. This meant this earlier work failed to accurately track the average costs of reaching space.

In the new study, the researchers developed the largest dataset of rocket launches to date, covering 4,405 launches from 1960 to 2025. This included more than 330 different rocket configurations devised by developers in the United States, Russia, China, India, Europe, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Israel, Iran, South Korea and Ukraine.

The investigators found that, in 2024 U.S. dollars, the average cost of sending 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) to orbit dropped from $87,023 in 1960 to $3,868 in 2025 — a decrease of 96%.

All in all, the rate at which the space-launch industry learned to reduce costs was among the fastest recorded in any industry to date, the investigators noted. They calculated that each time the cumulative payload of the entire space-launch industry doubled, the average cost of sending 2.2 pounds (1 kg) to orbit decreased by 21.2%.

This learning rate exceeds that seen with solar panels, "a technology that is now frequently taken as the benchmark for cost reduction," study co-author Alessio Terzi, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Cambridge in England, told Space.com.

The researchers suggested two major causes behind this drop in costs. "First, the end of the Cold War and the shift to so-called 'New Space,' meaning the use of space for commercial purpose, seems to have accelerated the rate of learning — in the Cold War era, countries launched with their national launchers no matter the cost," Terzi said. "Second, our data shows an acceleration in the learning rate of space since the launch of the Falcon 9 of SpaceX, and the advent of reusability at scale."

Assuming this trend holds, the investigators estimated the average cost of space launch would fall to $1,600 per 2.2 pounds (1 kg) by 2030 and $300 by 2040. "There is still significant scope for further cost reductions going forward," Terzi said.

Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results. There are at least three factors that could slow or reverse this cost trajectory, the researchers said.

First, space junk poses a growing problem for the launch industry. Space debris is typically zipping at speeds of about 16,800 mph (27,000 km/h), and so can inflict massive damage on anything in orbit. The problem space junk poses gets worse when collisions spawn even more debris, eventually cluttering space with high-speed shrapnel, a scenario nicknamed the "Kessler syndrome" after NASA scientist Donald Kessler, who predicted it in 1978.

Second, at the global level, SpaceX is currently responsible for roughly 75% of the total payload sent to orbit. The investigators noted there are strong economic incentives for a would-be monopolist to charge higher prices to potential clients. This in turn would reduce the total payload sent to orbit, slowing the future evolution of average launch costs.

Finally, the current climate of increasing geopolitical tensions is likely to make governments around the world cautious when it comes to depending too heavily on a single U.S. company for space launch. This may bring back Cold War dynamics, as nations pursue independent access to orbit, even if this means using more expensive home-based rocket technology, the researchers said.

All in all, "there is a strong feeling, perhaps exemplified by the recent record-breaking mega-IPO of SpaceX, that space is at a structural break point — a moment where trends are accelerating," Terzi said. "Forecasting at moments of structural break is very hard in general, and therefore also in our case."

The scientists detailed their findings July 14 in the journal PNAS Nexus.

In looking back and commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Viking missions to Mars, one is struck by the bold and audacious undertaking.

Twin spacecraft missions — each consisting of a lander and an orbiter — made their way to Mars and into the history books. The Viking 1 lander planted its legs on the terrain of Chryse Planitia 50 years ago today, on July 20, 1976, while its Viking 2 counterpart touched down at Utopia Planitia on Sept. 3 of that year.

Among their duties, the dual landers scooped up the first soil samples of Mars and deposited those precious collectibles into onboard, specialized equipment. Viking scientists had designed that gear to help answer an intriguing question: Is there life on Mars?

One of Viking's instruments was a GCMS, a combination of a gas chromatograph (GC) and a mass spectrometer (MS). A positive GCMS detection could confirm the possibility that organics needed for the origin of life as we know it were present.

After interpreting all the data and information gleaned from ingested Martian soil, most scientists at the time concluded that Viking relayed a "no life on Mars" result.

But is it possible that the two robots actually radioed back a very clear comeback: "Can you repeat the question?"

Different techniques

Ben Clark was a member of the Viking science team, and the instrument he designed made the first-ever measurements of the chemical composition of Mars soil. He is now a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

"There were three life-detection experiments, each using different techniques to probe whether they could stimulate biological activity in the soil by adding various selected nutrients," Clark told Space.com. "Two were generally negative in their findings, but a third experiment had an expected strong response when it added nutrient."

Indeed, astrobiologist/inventor Gilbert Levin remained convinced that his Viking microbial detection instrument, called the Labeled Release experiment, did find living microorganisms in the soil of Mars. He held tight to that view until he passed in July 2021 at the age of 97.

Skeptical scientists

Clark recalled that many members of the scientific community were skeptical when geochemists pointed out that certain minerals can cause a similar response.

"Furthermore, when a second amount of nutrient was added, there was no additional response," Clark said. "Did the organisms die between experiments?"

Because of these responses, and especially because no organic molecules could be detected, most biologists concluded there was no life in the dirt that Viking tested. "However, there is also the question of whether the best nutrients were used in the Viking tests," Clark noted.

Microbiologists who study the small organisms that live in Earth soil, Clark added, know that some species are extremely adept at using sulfate as an energy source, by combining it with organics or with hydrogen gas.

"Unfortunately, none of the Viking life-detection experiments added hydrogen gas to their chambers," Clark said.

"Ironically, the instrument which searched for organics in the soil, the GCMS, used hydrogen gas in its analytical technique," he added. "Thus, there was a tank full of hydrogen gas located just centimeters away from the life-detection experiment package, but no connection between it and the GCMS where it was located."

True positive detections?

Even today, there are some scientists who question whether some of the life-detection experimental results were in fact true positive detections, according to Clark.

"Other scientists believe that it was not enough to simply test the loose soil, but that life in fact may be just centimeters below the surface in areas where there is still ice in the ground," he said.

Clark said that no other planet in our solar system so closely matches the early history of our own planet Earth.

"Recent discoveries by the rovers now roaming Mars have revealed some detections of organic molecules, and even some so-called 'reduction spots,' which are interpreted by some geologists as evidence of activity of biological organisms," he said.

Misunderstood results

Steven Benner is an astrobiochemist and director of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida. He is author of the soon-to-be-issued "Meet the Neighbors: Life on Mars and How to Find It" (Penguin Press, 2026).

Benner has long argued that the results from Viking were misunderstood. He contends that the Red Planet remains an easily reached destination to discover a possible independent origin of life and draws upon the Viking records to spotlight how the scientific process has failed in this regard to date.

Tied to Viking's 50th anniversary, "I decided to write a grumpy 'take no prisoners' book that dispenses with politeness and focuses on the facts," Benner told Space.com.

Misbegotten consensus

Benner said that his new book highlights two tales.

"Viking more likely than not found autotrophic microbial life on Mars, roughly 1,000 cells per gram — about what you might expect based on Earth analogs," said Benner.

The other story, he said, is that communities will defend a misbegotten "consensus" long after that consensus ceases to be defensible. They should not be beholden to a half century of mistakes, he emphasized.

The GCMS misinterpretation was 100% of the grounds for dismissing considerable life-positive data, according to Benner. So, he said, "we should then have gone back to the status quo ante, as Gil Levin did. But since 'consensus' in science is powerful, and Levin was polite, the community marginalized him."

Viking preservation

Rachel Tillman is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Viking Mars Missions Education and Preservation Project.

Her late father, James Tillman, worked on Viking 1 and 2 and was a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington.

"There are a variety of reasons it's important to preserve Viking data," Tillman told Space.com. Archiving how and why things were done on Viking from an engineering standpoint is vital, she said, as is safeguarding the science data accumulated during the Viking program.

"Science is dynamic. Instruments and missions are finite in what they collect, so every data is part of a growing body of knowledge coming in pieces of a much larger puzzle. We can't complete the puzzle without all of the data," said Tillman. "So every facet of Mars science is a tiny piece of the puzzle. For that reason, we need to keep all the pieces."

This is true of every engineering success and failure, she added.

"Our organization has records on both. Because of that, we can help industry reduce costs by making the archives available on failed tests as much as successful ones," Tillman said.

It takes many, many missions to get close to answers we theorize on, she pointed out. "And then there is inspiration. By preserving the past — the who, what and how — we inspire youth and the public to support endeavors and even join the workforce," she concluded.

Contaminate and confuse

"The entire Viking mission — orbiters and landers — are one of the most important sets of data about the planet Mars," said Barry DiGregorio, an honorary research fellow for the Buckingham Center for Astrobiology in the United Kingdom. He is author of "Mars: The Living Planet" (Frog Books/1997).

"Indeed, the Viking biology data have become more important today than they were during the Viking mission," said DiGregorio. "Because Viking carried the very first suite of extant biology instruments to Mars, extreme care was given to the extensive heat sterilization protocols for the Viking landers."

Those protocols ensured that the Vikings did not carry large numbers of terrestrial microorganisms that might contaminate and confuse the actual soil sample results in its three onboard life-detection instruments, DiGregorio said.

Warning flag

However, DiGregorio is also waving a warning flag.

The recent discovery of never-before-detected extremophile microbes in spacecraft assembly clean rooms has made it important to take planetary protection protocols to a new level, said DiGregorio.

"Unfortunately, the search for extant life on Mars has been made much more difficult by unwittingly sending Earth's hardiest extremophile microorganisms there for the last 30 years," he said.

If Mars life is indeed spotted, extra effort will be required "to make sure it isn't earthly extremophile microbes we are detecting," DiGregorio added.

Both Viking landers ceased operating more than four decades ago. But they could still aid the Mars life search today, according to DiGregorio. Perhaps, he said, "comparing any new data found with archived Viking Lander biology data will be crucial in determining their interpretation."

A bright "Saturn's ring" of satellites could circle the night sky if plans to launch a million data center spacecraft and tens of thousands of space mirrors come to pass. This ring, traversing the sky for hours after dusk and before dawn, would outshine every star and planet, and be visible from every spot on Earth.

Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham in, the U.K., told Space.com that the only way to accommodate the high number of data center constellations that have been proposed is to stack them above another in orbit above the boundary between day and night, creating an artificial "Saturn's Ring" of satellites around the planet. That ring would show in the sky as a luminous band much brighter than any star or planet and even the full moon.

"If you were to look up at night, they would be all in one plane, really close together, going in the same direction," said Lewis. "The impact on the night sky would be absolutely catastrophic."

The next time you're away from urban light pollution, spend some time outdoors after dark and enjoy the view of the Milky Way and the constellations that have inspired awe since humankind woke to consciousness. Chances are those views are not here to stay forever.

Such a notion would have seemed like science fiction only a few years ago, but since the orbital data center frenzy kicked off last year, the once-fanciful prospect has become a distinct possibility.

A flurry of companies including SpaceX, Starcloud, Cowboy Space, Orbital and Blue Origin have applied to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for licenses to launch more than a million data center satellites combined. China has already jumped on that bandwagon, too, with plans to develop an orbital data center network within the next five years.

On top of those projects, California-based Reflect Orbital wants to launch 50,000 orbiting mirrors into space to reflect sunlight to solar power plants on Earth after dusk. Reflect Orbital received its license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Friday, July 10, to fly the first of these mirrors — a 60 by 60 feet (18 by 18 meter) demonstration satellite named Eärendil-1, which is expected to launch by the end of this year.

Lewis explained that all these data centers and mirrors would have to orbit Earth in the same orbital plane to have access to constant sunshine. This orbital plane follows the terminator line — the boundary between day and night — and takes the satellites over the planet's north and south poles.

"Orbital data centers and Reflect Orbital all tend to rely upon what these operators call 24 hours of sunlight in space," Lewis said. "To have that, you have to be in a particular orbit, which follows the dawn-dusk line. It's not like the Starlink megaconstellation, which is distributed around the Earth."

Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at University of Regina in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, agrees with Lewis. Lawler and her colleagues used computer modelling to visualize the impact of several of the proposed data center fleets including SpaceX's Starmind, Blue Origin's Project Sunrise and the Stampede constellation proposed by Cowboy Space.

In those visualizations, satellites visible from the planet's surface not just outshine the visible stars, they also outnumber them. Lawler explained that as Earth turns under the terminator orbit, the Saturn's ring of satellites would move across the sky twice a day — in the early evening hours between 6 and 8 p.m. and just before dawn.

"[The ring] would pass overhead at the same time every night," Lawler said. "That means its effect would be worse during winter time than the summer time."

Lawler cautions that the visualizations are based on publicly available data and may not reflect the exact technical specifications of the satellites involved. The work has also not yet been peer-reviewed.

However, Lawler added that the scattered light from that ring would continue brightening the sky for up to two hours after it would sink below the horizon, just like the sun keeps illuminating the firmament after it sets.

"It would make our taxpayer-funded telescope time much less effective," Lawler said. "We could do a lot less science for the same cost, and many science cases, including the search for dangerous near Earth asteroids, would be seriously compromised."

There would be no escape from the view of the ring anywhere in the world.

The modelling shows that some of these constellations — Blue Origin's Project Sunrise in particular — would fly their satellites in an additional orbital inclination that would create the shape of X on top of the main "Saturn's ring."

"If you were close to the equator, you would virtually have this X shape of crawling satellites come up in the sky early in the morning and after sunset," said Lawler. Further up north, you would see this as two separate bands. One band would come up in the morning and the other would emerge as the sun sets."

The actual brightness of this "Saturn's ring" would depend on the exact number of the satellites in it. But researchers warn that as each Reflect Orbital's space mirror is bound to be at least as bright as Venus — the brightest object in the sky after the full moon — the luminosity of this band would be extreme.

An earlier study by the European Southern Observatory concluded that a constellation of 50,000 Reflect Orbital mirrors would increase the brightness of the night sky by up to 300 percent, making the world's most expensive telescopes effectively useless.

"Humanity has already fundamentally altered the cosmos to the point where Earth is now an artificial 'ringed planet' choked by satellites and space debris," astronomer and dark sky advocate John Barentine, told Space.com. "But projects like Reflect Orbital will turn those mostly now invisible rings into bright reflective tracks. We aren't talking about a just scattered field of bright, moving dots anymore.

"Rather, this is a permanent, artificial 'ring of Saturn' effect cutting right through the most critical twilight observing windows for global astronomy."

On paper, many of these projects seem to make sense. Data centers on Earth take up precious land. They require enormous amounts of water for cooling, strain power grids and generate greenhouse gas emissions. In space, cooling and access to electrical power would be free.

Reflect Orbital wants to deliver sunlight to Earth after dark to increase the yield of solar plants and agricultural farms, provide free, sustainable lighting to construction sites and illuminate disaster zones in search of missing persons. The company maintains that it works to minimize disruption to astronomy and intends to cooperate with the scientific community.

"Every stage of our development is guided by data — testing, measuring, listening and adapting," the company's spokesperson said in an email. "We are actively commissioning independent, third-party research on the impacts of our technology."

The astronomers who spoke to Space.com, however, unanimously claim that the Reflect Orbital constellation and astronomy cannot coexist. "If we have mirrors in orbit, astronomy is over," Lawler said .

The American Astronomical Society (AAS), issued a statement criticizing the FCC's decision to grant Reflect Orbital a license to fly its test satellite.

"Reflect Orbital's proposed satellite, which would reflect sunlight back to Earth at night, carries the potential for significant harm to our members and the broader community of those who depend on a dark night sky," the AAS wrote. "This harm could include damage to sensitive research telescope equipment, potential flash-blinding of pilots and drivers, and — as Reflect Orbital stated in its own FCC filings — potential permanent eye damage to anyone looking through a mid-sized telescope."

In the past, astronomers praised SpaceX for attempts to dim the Starlink satellites by using dark paint and special visors to reduce reflectiveness. But Lawler said that many of these attempts have been undone by SpaceX's gradual increase of the satellites' size. While first generation Starlinks were about 570 pounds (260 kilograms) in mass, the latest generation weigh more than 4,400 pounds (2,000 kilograms) each.

"They did a lot of work to make the satellites darker, but then they also made them bigger and put them on lower orbits, and that has made them much, much brighter," Lawler said. "You can see Starlink satellites everywhere even with the naked eye. They are very visible and they are all over the sky."

In its Order and Justification of Reflect Orbital's mission license, the FCC stated that "impacts on optical astronomy fall outside [FCC's] review and authorization."

"The Commission's rules do not address the protection of optical astronomy, and thus we decline to interpret commenters' concerns in connection with the Commission's mandate," the FCC wrote.

The astronomers, however, point out that no other regulatory body in the U.S. and outside has a say in awarding satellite licenses to US companies and reviewing applications with respect to impacts on the night sky and the wider environment.

"The FCC is the only agency that's regulating American satellite launches," said Lawler. "But if the FCC says that this is not their problem, then whose problem is it?"

The AAS in its statement called on the FCC to "consider all of the impacts of the satellite's use case."

"In the absence of another licensing agency that could take these considerations into account, we believe that it is critical for the FCC to consider all of the impacts of the satellite's use case," the AAS wrote.

Robert Massey, the executive director of the U.K. Royal Astronautical Society added: " This is setting a bad precedent and opening up to the full deployment of the constellation that could get to the 50,000 satellites in a few years. It's really disappointing that the FCC authorized this."

Where does James Cameron's "Aliens" rank among the other Alien movies? That depends on who you ask. Some might say it's the best, while others put it just behind the original (spoiler alert: it's the best). Regardless, there's no denying that this 1986 film shifted gears, moving the franchise from horror to horror-tinged sci-fi action and paving an alternate path for the future.

As Cameron stated in an interview with Lofficier, the plan always was "to do a film that was not as scary... it's scary, but it's not as scary, but more intense, and I like to use the word, exhilarating. Because I think you get exhilarated by the intensity of the kind of action that's in this film."

In terms of story progression, the sequel's shake-up makes complete sense. Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley survived the Xenomorph in "Alien", but now she must conquer her fears and face the grim creature once again. This time, she has allies and firepower on her side, though most of those Colonial Marines turn out to be about as useful as French kissing a beehive.

"Aliens" exploded into a monster hit, both financially and critically, suggesting that Cameron has a Midas touch when it comes to sequels. Famous movie critic Roger Ebert called it "a superb example of filmmaking craft", and it's tough to argue that point. Yet what's amazing to ponder is how "Aliens" nearly fell apart several times before it actually happened.

Despite 1979's "Alien" turning a big profit on paper, Hollywood's accounting practices are more baffling than Palpatine's return in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker".

Somehow, "Alien" was deemed a flop, and 20th Century Fox remained conflicted about a sequel – so much so that it almost sold the rights to the "Rambo" producers of all people (imagine the crossover potential, though, as John Rambo guns down a horde of Xenomorphs while Jerry Goldsmith's iconic score blares in the background).

After much oohing, aahing, and handwringing, the studio relented and selected Cameron to put together a treatment based on the impressive nature of his script for "The Terminator".

In 1983, Cameron only needed three days to put together a 45-page treatment, which can be read here. The nuts and bolts of what would become "Aliens" are mostly present in this document, but Fox turned its nose up at the filmmaker's proposal. The studio certainly wasn't escaping allegations that it looked for more reasons not to do the movie than to proceed.

What "Aliens" required was a champion from within – somebody to convince the studio execs that they were leaving money on the table by ignoring this franchise. This came with the hiring of producer Larry Gordon, who pushed for the sequel in the four walls of the boardroom.

After the success of "The Terminator", Cameron returned to the fray as writer-director, while his then-girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife Gail Anne Hurd boarded the film as a producer.

With the script submitted and Cameron cocked, locked, and ready to shoot in 1985, a new problem arose: budget. Cameron's camp argued that "Aliens" could be done for $15.5 million, but Fox's bean counters feared it would be closer to $35 million, and nobody considered the poor billionaires at stake.

Fox offered $12 million. "We walked out and said, 'Thanks, we'll do something else,'" Cameron told the Los Angeles Times.

Behind the scenes, Gordon managed to convince his bosses to fork out the extra money for the production. With that hurdle successfully navigated, Cameron was back in the driver's seat and ready to head off to LV-426.

Next though, Fox decided to suggest the unthinkable at the time: "Aliens" without Sigourney Weaver. It's a decision that reeks of a straight-to-video sequel, the kind of thing you'd expect to be fronted by a Kevin Sorbo type.

Cameron, on the other hand, was under the impression that Weaver had been contractually locked in for a sequel, but that wasn't the case at all. Now it was up to Cameron to convince Weaver to do the film. He met with Weaver, and the meeting seemed positive enough, but her agents wanted a big payday for her – and rightfully so. Fox refused, and so Cameron and Hurd quit… again; they weren't going to make the movie without Weaver.

Frustrated but trying to roll the dice on this flailing project one last time, Cameron pulled a sneaky trick, as he revealed to GQ years later. Weaver shared the same agency as Arnold Schwarzenegger, so Cameron phoned Schwarzenegger's agent and told him how he was about to start rewriting the "Aliens" script to remove Ripley entirely. The news travelled faster than a Xenomorph through a ventilation shaft.

"The deal was done in 12 hours after that," Cameron said. "So I never wrote a word of that hypothetical story that I said I was gonna do, that I had no intention of writing anyway. So anyway, it worked, and Sigourney got her million bucks, and everybody was happy."

As far as most movie productions go, "Aliens" was mostly smooth sailing when it began to shoot. Deadlines were met, it didn't go over budget, and the studio let them get on with it. The biggest challenge involved the final cut – with Fox wanting the picture to have a two-hour runtime to secure more theatrical screenings.

Cameron relented, taking out his scissors and cutting a few superfluous scenes, but the film still wasn't quite at the magic mark. Having cut everything that he could, Cameron explained that any further amendments would destroy the story and damage the integrity of the movie. This time, Fox didn't argue and stuck with the filmmaker.

History confirms the right call was made here. The franchise now follows the blueprint laid by Cameron's "Alien" more than Ridley Scott's "Jaws in space" foundation. While there's always a survival element in these movies, the action-centric approach is a critical part of the series' DNA. Sure, the protagonists remain scared, but they receive the opportunity to light up the Xenomorphs and show those ugly monsters who's the boss.

Looking back now, it's unbelievable to think that Fox almost tanked "Aliens" with its studio shenanigans. A classic emerged from the chaos of inflated egos, penny-pinching, and blood pressure-raising frustration.

It's proof that in Hollywood, no one can hear you scream (nor do they care), so it's up to you to find a way to survive.

Artificial intelligence could easily fall into the trap of identifying non-life as life on other worlds, claim two researchers from Michigan State University who have tested AI on simulated life in a computer program.

"We had previously seen that AI has a big Achilles heel when it is trying to classify things that are unlike the things in its training examples," Michigan's Christoph Adami told Space.com. "We call these 'out-of-distribution' samples and it is just incredibly easy to get AI to misclassify."

Adami is a computational biologist who uses computers to apply information theory to the study of evolution and biology. One of his leading tenets is that life can be defined by its ability to encode information and replicate it. To this end, he devised the Avida computer program in 1993. It runs digital organisms written as code that can replicate by copying themselves and competing for resources — in this case, CPU time — just like real life organisms. Although the use of digital life in evolutionary studies remains controversial, what it does provide Adami with is a huge dataset of simulated lifeforms that AI can be tested on.

Spending three months of computer analysis on a thousand parallel machines, Adami and his student Ankit Gupta asked AI to determine which programs in Avida had the properties of life, and which didn't. The life and non-life programs have very similar coding, so the difference is not obvious — and this might very well be the case on another planet where life could have differences in biology to Earth life.

Adami and Gupta started out with programs representing a random sequence of molecules and asked the AI to classify them. They then set about tweaking that sequence of molecules to try and fool the AI into thinking it was seeing life, one change at a time, each time checking whether there had been a change in how confident the AI was that it was life or non-life.

"Within about 15 changes or so we can get AI to be perfectly confident of a life classification when in fact not a single time when it was being 100% confident was it actually life," said Adami.

Furthermore, no matter the sequence they started with, the AI was constantly fooled.

Many in the scientific community stand by AI as an invaluable tool because it can process huge amounts of data and search for patterns in that data. Adami himself believes that AI has an important role to play, but as we see in everyday life, AI is prone to making things up and identifying patterns that don't exist.

This really comes down to what the AI has been trained on, said Adami. If you ask an AI about data it has been trained on, it usually provides a correct answer. For example, if you train AI to identify pictures of apples and then ask it to pick out the fruit from a dataset that also includes pictures of non-food items, it will answer correctly virtually all the time. However, if you replace the apple pictures with photos of bananas and ask it to identify the fruit, it will struggle and start to misidentify things.

That's because the bananas represent "out of distribution" data. The AI wasn't trained on bananas, which are a very different shape to apples, and therefore the AI doesn't know what to make of them.

Similarly, we don't know what alien microbes will look like, and they could be quite different to the terrestrial microbes that the AI has been trained on. In other words, the alien life would be out of distribution, and the AI would have no context for saying whether any particular collection of molecules is life or not.

"You need to know your training data, and if you know that your testing data is part of the same distribution as the training data, then you'll be fine," said Adami. "But you can't guarantee that with extraterrestrial life."

This could pose a problem for missions designed to look for life.

If a Mars rover goes to the red planet and cuts open a rock and directly sees something that looks like microbial life as we know it, then the answer will be clear-cut and can be tested using traditional methods. However, many attempts to detect life will probably not be so hands-on, relying on mass spectrometry data to identify molecules and processes related to life. This could range from attempts to detect life in the atmosphere of Venus, or in the ocean of Europa, or on exoplanets via the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which NASA aims to launch in the 2040s to directly image exoplanets in the habitable zone of stars.

"This means that if there were an AI on a mission looking at particular mass spectrometry samples, then there's a very great chance that while it has been trained on the ground on a number of biotic and abiotic samples, it could still return a positive verdict when it has absolutely nothing to do with life," says Adami.

Caleb Scharf of NASA Ames, who along with Carnegie Science's Michael Wong is spearheading a NASA-sponsored five-year, $5 million project to develop AI tools to help search for life on other planets, thinks that Adami and Gupta's findings are rather interesting. However, Scharf suggests that machine-learning algorithms can be honed to avoid falling into this trap by allowing for unknown categories rather than the limited binary options of life or not life available in the Avida experiment. 

"Gupta and Adami's study points astutely to a critical challenge in life detection that might undermine the hoped-for gains from AI and machine learning: what do we do with the unknown unknowns?" Scharf told Space.com. "We think the answer may lie in allowing algorithms to notice situations where things look askew, andthere are methods from data science to tackle this very probllem, which we're actively exploring."

The next step, said Adami, is to move out of the digital world and run the same test with real-world data.

Adami and Gupta will be presenting their findings in August at the 2026 Conference on Artificial Life, which is being held in Waterloo, Canada.

The biggest blockbusters of 2014 threw up a varied rogues' gallery of bad guys. In "Transformers: Age of Extinction", it was a reincarnated version of Optimus Prime's perma-nemesis, Megatron, while Captain America faced off against a reborn Hydra infiltrating the upper echelons of the US government in "The Winter Soldier". For Spider-Man, it was Electro, while Maleficent showed up in live-action to give Sleeping Beauty nightmares.

Christopher Nolan has never been one to go with the Hollywood crowd, however, and in his outer space opus "Interstellar", the antagonist was time itself — or, to be more specific, Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Nolan, whose Homeric epic "The Odyssey" makes landfall in theaters this week, has always been obsessed with time, and our perception of it. From "Memento"'s backwards narrative to "Tenet"'s time-flipping terrorists, the director has tended to steer clear of linear narratives. Even the three interweaving plotlines of his World War II drama, "Dunkirk", unfold at completely different speeds. In short, Nolan is not a filmmaker you should ever set your clock by.

But time has never been as cruel as it is in "Interstellar", where the fundamental constants of the universe combine to wreak havoc with human emotions. "Time is relative," explains Anne Hathaway's biologist/astronaut Amelia Brand. "It can stretch, and it can squeeze, but it can't run backwards. It just can't."

She's summed up "Interstellar" in a nutshell, so it's not hard to see why this was the story Nolan wanted to tell when he added his own entry to the canon of cerebral cinematic sci-fi.

At one point in "Interstellar"'s evolution, it seemed set to be a Steven Spielberg movie. Physicist Kip Thorne had originated the project with producer Lynda Obst, and the "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" director spent a year developing the movie with them. He even hired Nolan's younger brother, Jonah (whose credits include "The Dark Knight" and "Westworld"), to write a script.

Spielberg ultimately dropped out — "It just didn't stick with me, and I don't know why," he told Empire magazine — but Jonah knew the ideal replacement. "Jonah actually said, 'If there comes a point where you decide not to make this movie, I can tell you who's gonna grab it. He's already bugging me about it. And that's my brother Chris.' The second I decided not to make it, Chris jumped on board, probably the next day. 'Interstellar' was a much better movie in Chris Nolan's hands than it would have been in mine."

In the film's near future, humanity is literally running out of time. The Earth's ecosystem is breaking down, with dust storms killing crops across the United States and causing major health issues among the survivors. Nolan even uses talking head footage of real-life survivors of the Dust Bowl that ravaged the US Midwest in the 1930s (taken from Ken Burns' 2012 documentary "The Dust Bowl") to add to the urgency of the situation.

But the remains of NASA — now forced into hiding — have a plan. They've discovered a stable wormhole near Saturn, and it leads to another galaxy. Probes have found planets on the other side, and some of them might — just might — be capable of supporting life.

So when former pilot-turned-farmer Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) stumbles on NASA's clandestine base (for reasons that will later become clear), he's recruited for a mission checking in on the brave pioneers sent to investigate these strange new worlds. Unfortunately, this means leaving his kids behind.

And this is where relativity becomes one of the harshest antagonists in movie history. The Endurance crew's first destination, "Miller's Planet", orbits a black hole known as Gargantua. Its gravity is so intense that anything in its vicinity experiences extreme time dilation — to the extent that an hour on the planet's surface is equivalent to seven years for everyone else. "We need to think of time as a resource, just like oxygen and food," Brand says before they make landfall.

But in that old Hollywood tradition, not everything goes to plan on the surface, and by the time Cooper and Brand escape Gargantua's influence — minus their late crewmate Doyle (Wes Bentley) — decades have passed on Earth. In an extremely powerful sequence, we see Cooper catching up on the last 20-plus years of life back home via video messages from his son, Tom (the young version played by Timothée Chalamet, the older version by Casey Affleck).

In a matter of minutes, Cooper learns about the birth and death of a grandchild, as well as the passing of his father-in-law. At the end of the reel, his heartbroken daughter Murphy (young version: Mackenzie Foy; adult version: Jessica Chastain; elderly version: Ellen Burstyn) sends her first message since he abandoned her for outer space. The reason for breaking radio silence? She's now the same age he was when he left; her childhood vanished in the blink of an eye.

"Interstellar" makes a mockery of the myth that Nolan's films are cold and emotionless. Relativity shows no mercy for family bonds, and McConaughey, Chastain, and Hathaway all deliver towering performances as they deal with its consequences. This is a human story told across a multi-dimensional canvas.

Even beyond their lives being thrown out of sync by time dilation — at the end of the movie, a still-40-something Cooper comes face-to-face with a nonagenarian Murph on her deathbed — they're coming to terms with the fact that the whole mission was built on a lie.

NASA boss Dr Brand (Michael Caine) may have thought he was doing the right thing by pretending that his gravity equation could be solved and giving false hope that humanity might one day find a new home among the stars. But it doesn't make it any less of a kicker when he confesses his grand betrayal, admitting on his deathbed that "Plan B" — sending embryos into the cosmos to extend the human race — was "Plan A" all along. Of course, whether he's right or wrong, he's a second-tier 'bad guy' compared to relativity.

Nolan went to extraordinary lengths to give his film a sound scientific footing. He consulted extensively with Thorne in order to generate a scenario where relativistic effects would be so extreme that minutes on a planet's surface would equate to years back on Earth. "Kip, apart from being an incredible mind, is actually a very good explainer of difficult concepts, and he was very patient with all of us lesser beings," producer Emma Thomas told SFX magazine. The Oscar-winning VFX team at D-Neg, meanwhile, turned their work modelling the accretion disc around Gargantua into an actual scientific paper.

By the time the film enters its endgame, it's embracing tesseracts and five-dimensional superbeings, as Cooper uses gravity to communicate with Murph across time. In the process, he reveals that the "ghost" that helped him find NASA all those years ago was actually a future version of himself. Such diamond-hard sci-fi concepts are probably not, however, the reason that "Interstellar" has since — despite mixed reviews on release — become one of Nolan's most popular films a decade later.

"What I've found is that people who let the film wash over them get the most out of it," Nolan admitted in "The Nolan Variations" by Tom Shone, and the director may just have a point. While a cynic might have issues with the notion that love is a quantifiable force transcending the universe (anyone know the SI unit for that?), it's impossible to deny the genius of "Interstellar"'s use of high-level physics to explore the human condition.

It's unlikely any of us will find ourselves in the vicinity of a black hole, but all of us know what it means to want more time with the people we love.

"The Odyssey" is in theaters from Friday, July 17. "Interstellar" is available to stream on Hulu and Paramount+ in the US, and Sky Cinema and HBO Max in the UK.

Aug. 12, 2026, offers a rare double-header for skywatchers across northeastern North America: a partial solar eclipse during the afternoon followed, hours later, by the peak of the Perseid meteor shower beneath dark summer skies. The eclipse is part of a total solar eclipse happening in eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain.

"The neat thing about seeing a partial eclipse, especially one that is total somewhere else, is that you get to join in with the whole event that's going on," Tyler Nordgren, astronomer and eclipse artist at Space Art Travel Bureau, told Space.com. "It is a worldwide event, and you can get a sense of the three‑dimensional nature of the universe."

Together, the two events make a perfect excuse for an overnight astronomy road trip — whether that means heading into the mountains, camping beside a lake or escaping to a remote coastline. Pack a reclining camp chair, warm layers and plenty of bug spray, but before you do anything else, book a campsite because peak Perseids night can be one of the busiest camping nights of the year.

Do take precautions with the solar eclipse. "It will not be safe to look at with the naked eye, and it will not be safe to photograph with a camera that doesn't have a solar filter on it," Nordgren explained. "If you've got eclipse glasses left over from 2024, take them out, point them at a bright light bulb, and make sure there is no light coming through any pin pricks or scratches."

Eclipse timings and sightlines are from Xavier Jubier's Interactive Google Maps; cloud cover is from Time and Date, and Bortle and sky quality meter (SQM) data come from the Light Pollution map. Bortle and SQM ratings indicate darker skies and better stargazing conditions.

REMEMBER: During a partial solar eclipse, it is never safe to look directly at the sun without proper solar viewing protection, such as certified eclipse glasses or approved solar filters. Read our guide on how to observe the sun safely.

1. Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland

Gros Morne National Park combines relatively dark skies with the deepest eclipse in eastern North America, with nearly half of the sun obscured at maximum. Coastal viewpoints, lakeshores and elevated trails offer wide southwest-facing horizons for the afternoon eclipse, while the park's low levels of artificial light make it well suited for Perseid viewing after midnight. The main drawback is Newfoundland's often variable weather and relatively high average cloud cover.

2. Mount Carleton Dark-Sky Preserve, New Brunswick

Mount Carleton Provincial Park has some of the darkest skies in Atlantic Canada, with Bortle 2 conditions across much of the preserve. Open areas around Mount Carleton and nearby lakes provide unobstructed southwest views for the eclipse, while the remote setting is perfect for Perseid observing later that night. Campgrounds inside the park make it practical for an overnight trip.

3. Fundy Dark-Sky Preserve, New Brunswick

Fundy National Park offers reasonably dark skies and accessible observing locations along the Bay of Fundy coast. Open areas around Wolfe Lake and Chignecto Campground provide good visibility toward the southwest during the eclipse, while the surrounding dark-sky corridor supports decent Perseid observing conditions after dark. Coastal "Fundy fog" and changing maritime weather can occasionally affect visibility.

4. Kejimkujik National Park, Nova Scotia

Kejimkujik National Park remains one of the darkest accessible observing sites in Atlantic Canada, with low light pollution and broad lake horizons that are well-suited to meteor observing. The partial eclipse here approaches 30%, and the park's lakeside campgrounds provide convenient overnight access for Perseid watching later that evening. Compared with many coastal locations in the region, Kejimkujik also has somewhat lower average cloud cover.

5. Acadia National Park, Maine

Acadia National Park combines relatively accessible dark skies with open coastal horizons facing the eclipse. Elevated viewpoints around Cadillac Mountain and the Schoodic Peninsula offer clear sightlines toward the southwestern sky, while overnight observers can expect reasonably dark conditions for Perseid viewing by northeastern U.S. standards. Summer crowds and vehicle access restrictions around Cadillac Summit mean you should make a plan well in advance.

6. Mont Mégantic Dark Sky Reserve, Quebec

Mont-Mégantic is one of the best-established astronomy sites in eastern North America, with protected dark skies and extensive observing infrastructure around the observatory and national park. Although the eclipse magnitude is moderate, the reserve's dark nighttime conditions and elevated observing areas make it a strong location for Perseid observing after dark. Cloud statistics are less favorable than farther south in New England.

7. Adirondack Mountains, New York

The Adirondacks offer some of the darkest skies in the northeastern U.S., particularly around remote lakes and higher-elevation observing sites. While the partial eclipse will be modest, the region's low artificial light levels and broad rural horizons make it a strong overnight option for the Perseids. Public campgrounds and astronomy events at local observatories may fill quickly around peak Perseid night. Check the Adirondack Sky Center & Observatory for events.

8. Catskill Mountains, New York

The Catskills provide relatively accessible dark skies within a few hours of major northeastern cities, making them a practical option for short-notice observing trips. The partial eclipse will be small, but reservoirs, ridgelines and open viewpoints offer decent southwest sightlines during the afternoon event. Overnight conditions are darker than much of the surrounding northeast region, particularly away from populated valleys.

9. Cherry Springs Dark Sky Park, Pennsylvania

Cherry Springs State Park is one of the best-known observing locations in the eastern US, with very dark skies and unusually open horizons in all directions. Although the eclipse itself will be very shallow, the park is among the best suited for the Perseids later that night, when low light pollution and established observing fields provide excellent meteor-viewing conditions. Expect heavy attendance around the shower peak.

10. Assateague Island National Seashore, Maryland

Assateague Island offers unobstructed coastal horizons and relatively low light pollution for the mid-Atlantic region. The partial eclipse here will be a technical affair, but the island's open beaches provide excellent naked-eye conditions for Perseid observing after dark, especially looking away from nearby coastal development. However, humidity, sea haze and mosquitoes can be significant factors during August observing sessions.

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have been given a glimpse of the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves. The observations could help scientists discover how supermassive black holes with masses millions, often even billions, of times that of the sun grew so fast so soon after the Big Bang.

While all large galaxies have supermassive black holes at their hearts, some are slumbering giants, consuming little surrounding gas and dust, while others are ravenously feeding and acting as the engines of bright central galactic regions called active galactic nuclei (AGN). These feeding black holes also blast matter from their poles in jets that can drive gas and dust — the raw material needed for star formation — out of their host galaxies, thus cutting off star birth and effectively "killing" these galaxies.

Plus, the powerful cosmic titans get really puzzling when astronomers using the JWST spot them before the universe was even 1 billion years old. That's because the mechanisms by which black holes devour matter to grow and then merge to create even more massive black holes should take at least 1 billion years to achieve supermassive status. This is even more confusing because theories also say the most ravenously feeding black holes (and thus the fastest growing) should also push the matter they use for this growth away, in effect putting themselves on a diet. So, with all this in mind, how did supermassive black holes grow so rapidly in the early universe?

One explanation suggests supermassive black holes push away gas, starving themselves as predicted, but also that this matter eventually cools and falls back to the black hole. That would allow for another period of feeding and thus growth.

This explanation further suggests that as this gas cools down, it forms "streamers," or filaments, of gas just a few hundred light-years wide but which stretch thousands of light-years long. These would fall back to the center of the galaxy and form a swirling disk around its incumbent black hole, once again feeding it and triggering a new period of growth. This would then restart the jets from the black hole, which would again cut off the cosmic titan's food supply, allowing the whole process to begin once more.

The process would in essence be a self-regulating cycle of feasting followed by fasting. However, the connection between these filaments and supermassive black holes has been elusive, meaning this mechanism has resisted confirmation.

"What JWST is revealing is that black holes may be the ultimate cosmic recyclers," team leader Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of the Université de Montréal said in a statement. "They release enormous amounts of energy that heat their surroundings, yet that same gas can later cool into thin filaments that fall back inward and feed the black hole again. We are finally seeing this self-sustaining cycle in action."

A dieting supermassive black hole

To solve the mystery of feasting black holes, the JWST turned its attention to a relatively close AGN situated at the heart of the central galaxy of the Centaurus Cluster, NGC 4696, located just 145 million light-years from Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope previously studied this galaxy, uncovering a strange, hook-shaped swirl of gas near the central supermassive black hole of NGC 4696.

The JWST followed up this discovery by producing a detailed map of gas flowing at the heart of the galaxy. This revealed the hook-shaped feature is around 800 light-years wide and is composed of gas moving at incredible speeds of around 1.3 million miles per hour (600 kilometers per second).

More excitingly, the swirl of gas appears to be connected to a vast filament of material falling in toward the central supermassive black hole.

The team tested the JWST observations against a computer simulation, finding gas in the infalling filament scenario would indeed take a shape similar to that seen in NGC 4696.

"JWST is now showing us the final link of this closed loop," team member Helen Russell of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. said in the statement. "The vast filamentary network of gas flows ultimately funnels gas down to a disk that fuels the black hole."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (July 16) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft returned spectacular images of a near-Earth asteroid following a super-close flyby on July 5, but heated debate was needed before teams signed off on the daring attempt.

When images of the asteroid Torifune arrived on the morning of July 6 Japan time, Makoto Yoshikawa and his team at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) got two surprises at once. Torifune turned out to be a contact binary, in which two chunks of rock have come together under gravity, and the returned images were also larger than hoped.

"We did not imagine such a contact binary," Yoshikawa, former mission manager of Hayabusa2, told scientists gathered at the Asteroids, Comets and Meteors conference in Poznan, Poland, on July 10. "Originally, we didn't think we could have such a very big image. Maybe we will take a very small one, but the image was much larger than we expected."

The double surprise was the payoff of months of debate between science and engineering teams, and a last-minute proposal that alarmed some of the scientists it was meant to serve. In the end, the flyby was so close as to be at the very edge of what the aging spacecraft was designed to conduct.

Hayabusa2 launched in December 2014 and rendezvoused with the asteroid Ryugu four years later. The spacecraft collected samples and delivered them to Earth in 2020, completing its primary objectives. JAXA then made plans for an asteroid flyby and a rendezvous with the tiny asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031.

Usually for flybys, the closest distance is 100 kilometers (62 miles), Yoshikawa said, but in Hayabusa2's case this would not be close enough to gather good images. Hayabusa2 was designed for rendezvous and proximity operations, including hovering, correcting and landing — not for a high-speed pass at 5.3 kilometers per second (3.3 miles per second). Its cameras were also not designed for high-speed slewing.

According to Yoshikawa, science team members pushed back. At a distance of 100 kilometers, Hayabusa2's cameras would barely resolve the asteroid's global shape. Engineering responded with a proposal of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). Science said that was acceptable, but the team kept pushing. Eventually, engineers confirmed they could get to within 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) of the asteroid's center. "Science people were very happy, because they could have a nice photo," Yoshikawa said.

Then, just one month before the flyby, extended mission team leader Yuya Mimasu proposed going even closer. "Yuya Mimasu said the closest distance should be 800 meters," Yoshikawa recounted. "Some science people said 'No, it's too dangerous,' and a very heated discussion started."

One major issue was the unknown size and dimensions of Torifune and the safety of the spacecraft. The team had assumed a worst-case asteroid size of 1,400 meters by 400 meters (4,600 by 1,300 feet) based on ground-based observations. A pass 800 meters (2,625 feet) from the center of the target would sit just outside that exclusion zone. The spacecraft's optics had also been affected by dust from sampling Ryugu. The final navigation analysis put the targeting error ellipse at around 200 meters (656 feet). "The distance fixed is 800 meters," Yoshikawa said, "but this is quite a big challenge for us."

Hayabusa2 detected Torifune on June 19. The spacecraft used ground-based guidance up to three hours before the flyby, before switching to onboard guidance. "This is quite new," Yoshikawa said. "We developed software for this, and we sent it to the spacecraft."

The result was the stunning, up-close imagery of the dual-lobed Torifune, captured by the probe's Optical Navigation Camera Telescope (ONC-T). But all four of Hayabusa2's science instruments returned data. The Thermal Infrared Imager (TIR) captured nine seconds of thermal imaging between 09:29:50 and 09:29:59 GMT on July 5, just a second before closest approach, independently confirming the contact binary structure in heat emission.

The Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRS3) and laser altimeter (LIDAR) also got data, with the latter delivering what Yoshikawa described as possibly the first successful LIDAR ranging measurement during an asteroid flyby. But while the most urgent 25 MB of data was downlinked, teams will need to wait months for the rest of the 300 MB of total science data. Hayabusa2's ion engine system restarted on July 9 to begin the cruise toward two Earth flybys in 2027 and 2028 and will fire for around four months. Only after this can the rest of the data be sent to Earth.

Yoshikawa explained that the Torifune flyby was more than just a bonus milestone and photo and science op. The successful super-close flyby means that "JAXA has acquired the technology to collide spacecraft with a small celestial body," he said in his closing remarks at ACM, drawing a parallel to NASA's DART mission. "This flyby mission can be said to serve as a demonstration of the fast reconnaissance concept in planetary defense," verifying the ability to characterize an unknown asteroid rapidly — a capability that could provide crucial information ahead of an impactor mission.

This is not the end for Hayabusa2. The ultimate destination for the spacecraft's extended mission is the tiny asteroid 1998 KY26, a roughly 36-foot-wide (11 m), rapidly rotating rock with which it is scheduled to rendezvous in 2031.

Japan has succeeded in the first-ever flight test of its RV-X experimental reusable rocket prototype.

The launch — or hop, considering its duration and distance — took place at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Noshiro test facility on July 11 and lasted about 40 seconds. The 24-foot-tall (7.3 meters) test vehicle, powered by a single engine, rose just over 33 feet (10 m) in the air and traveled a horizontal distance of approximately 50 feet (15 m) across the site's concrete pad before touching down softly on the side opposite its liftoff point.

The short test flight went exactly as planned and puts JAXA and its partners one step closer to the development of a technological spaceflight achievement only ever accomplished by a small handful of orbital rockets — SpaceX's Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Starship, Blue Origin's New Glenn and, most recently, China's Long March 10B.

JAXA's RV-X is being developed and operated in conjunction with Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and is a precursor vehicle to a single-stage reusable flight experiment project called CALLISTO. CALLISTO is a joint venture involving JAXA, France's space agency CNES and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to design and build a single-stage rocket capable of vertical launch, landing, refurbishment and reuse. That vehicle will itself be a pathfinder rocket as JAXA seeks its own entry into the cost-saving playing field of reusable launch services.

Japan's most advanced rocket in operation, the H3, was introduced in 2023 but wasn't designed for reusability. The H3 is more efficient and cost-effective than its H-2A predecessor, which was retired last year. But two of the new rocket's eight launches have not been fully successful, and it falls short in its cost-effectiveness compared to more advanced reusable rocket stages. So JAXA is hard at work on the H3's future replacement.

"Reusable rockets require consideration of operational feasibility," JAXA's website says. "By repeatedly verifying maintenance, operation, vehicle movement and launch pad setup using an actual experimental vehicle in preparation for flight tests, we were able to establish operational procedures that will contribute to the repeated operation of future rockets."

The test, and the RV-X vehicle itself, slightly resemble a similar flight article from SpaceX's early Starship development days. The "Starhopper" Starship prototype was compared to a water tower during its first "hopper" test in 2019. The first time the stumpy, three-legged, steel Starhopper jumped off the ground at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas, it flew about 65 feet (20 m) straight up and back down.

Starhopper's success paved the way for higher jumps for longer durations as SpaceX honed Starship's early design, and the same is planned for RV-X. Now that JAXA's test rocket has completed its first 33-foot (10 m) hop, Japan's space agency is looking higher, too. RV-X's next launch is expected to fly as high as 330 feet (100 m), with another lateral crossover and hover included in its flight before landing.

On Episode 219 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik discuss the space headlines for the past few weeks.

It's been busy, and some exciting things are happening! A couple of companies are moving into the space solar power arena — something we've long advocated — and that's welcome progress. Starship is set to fly Starship test number 13, and a lot is riding on this — the system is overdue for some proof of concept to keep up with NASA's HLS contract.

An exoplanet spotted a decade ago has shown signs of a potentially habitable atmosphere; there are landslides — big ones — on Pluto, and evidence of "space candy" sugars in an interstellar cloud are in the news. Finally, SpaceX is doubling down on their big defense contracts with a well-funded US Space Force. Join us for all the latest!

Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space.

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Space news of the week

• SpaceX's Starship Flight 13 test launch aborts at last second
• Meteorite that crashed through New Jersey house could hold the clues to life's origins
• Astronomers discover 1st atmosphere around a rocky Earth-like planet in the habitable zone
• How NASA’s Artemis III Lander Test Will Pave Way for Moon Landings
• NASA Taps SpaceX’s Starlink to Deliver Artemis III Imagery from Orion
• Blue Origin continues work on lunar landers during recovery from New Glenn explosion
• SpaceX launches 21 'data transport' satellites for US military
• The FCC just gave Reflect Orbital permission to launch its 1st space mirror to orbit. Tens of thousands more could follow
• A “disaster waiting to happen”? Industry officials worry about Crew Dragon availability.
• Spacecraft Commissioning On Track for Mission to Boost NASA’s Swift
• Raspberry sugar spotted in interstellar space, a sweet discovery that could reveal clues about life's origins
• Defense Innovation Unit - Space Power Beaming
• Nature study identifies a new way to spot nuclear weapons in orbit

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This Week in Space covers the new space age. Every Friday we take a deep dive into a fascinating topic. What's happening with the new race to the moon and other planets? When will SpaceX really send people to Mars?

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It's almost inconceivable that 40 years have passed since what's been called the greatest sci-fi action film of all time (and not just by us) assaulted theaters with the juiced-up sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 classic, "Alien."

Director James Cameron's propulsive vision for a gung-ho military-style movie would call upon Stan Winston Studio's elite creature effects crew from 1984's "The Terminator" — a team that would later work on "Predator," "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," "Jurassic Park," and "Predator 2."

Cameron's "Aliens" greatly expands upon the xenomorph life cycle with the inclusion of a matriarchal beast that his screenplay described as "a massive silhouette in the mist, the ALIEN QUEEN glowers over her eggs like a great, glistening black insect-Buddha. Her fanged head is an unimaginable horror. Her six limbs, the four arms and two powerful legs, are folded grotesquely over her distended abdomen."

The brilliant filmmaker and Winston's energetic gang would craft and operate this 14-foot-tall articulated hydraulic puppet fabricated from fiberglass, foam rubber, and plastic. It contained two stunt performers in the torso and puppeteers on the ground manipulating legs and limbs.

Production was led by Stan Winston, Shane Mahan, Alec Gillis, John Rosengrant, Tom Woodruff Jr., and Lindsay MacGowan, the core wizards who’d later found the acclaimed Legacy Effects firm with J. Alan Scott following Stan Winston’s unfortunate death in 2008. Gillis and Woodruff would eventually split off to form Amalgamated Dynamics in 1988.

We caught up with Mahan and MacGowan to have them offer memories of working on "Aliens" at Pinewood Studios and specifically constructing this magnificent drooling, hissing monster that's spawned countless nightmares since the blockbuster landed on July 18, 1986.

"It was 1983 when I started at Stan's on the first 'Terminator,'” Mahan tells Space. "I’d worked with Jim on a Roger Corman movie that Makeup Effects Lab was doing, 'Battle Beyond the Stars.' [...] During 'Terminator,' Jim had drawings of Sigourney and the Power Loader he'd brought into the shop. I'd see them out of the corner of my eye and knew exactly what it was supposed to be. It was clearly an alien of that world with Sigourney Weaver.

"I was intrigued by it all because four years before, when 'Alien' had come out, it was so amazing cinematically. The lifecycle of the creature, and the organic nature of it. I had no idea that seven years later we'd be in England doing a sequel."

Mahan and posse began working on the Queen's preliminary designs in Southern California at Stan Winston's shop, where they conducted the infamous 'garbage bag test' out in the back parking lot, so named due to the flailing puppet being wrapped in black plastic trash bags.

"It was a proof of concept of how that was going to work," he explains. "Moving to Windsor, England, and setting up shop at Pinewood Studios was extraordinarily exciting. We then started making the full-size process of making the Queen and all the other effects, and we met the English crew, and Lindsay was one of them."

MacGowan fondly remembers his experience on the ambitious project and being recruited to join Stan Winston and the rest of the guys.

"They were legends at that point for us. We were also young and goofy, and it's amazing they actually let us do what we did when we were that young," MacGowan notes. "I was at college at the time, and I’d skip off college and make my way to Pinewood. It was like here’s the rock ‘n' roll Americans, and then we have our more reserved English team that got influenced by the American team. It was a lot of fun and some of my favorite memories of starting in the business.

"I remember it being incredibly cold at Pinewood at the time. There was no insulation in the warehouse, and we had these giant propane jet heaters, and they kept going out. We’d be nice and warm, then suddenly the flame would be out. It was a great time to get to know Shane, John, Alec, and Tom. I look at them as my American brothers."

Having everything under one roof, being created pre-shooting, was a great asset as it allowed Cameron to constantly oversee the process and monitor the progress being made.

"We were life-casting all the actors, various teams were doing the xenomorph warriors and the eggs and the facehuggers," Mahan adds. "It was a pretty big build list, and we had four or five months to get everything done. John Richardson was a great special effects man from the Bond films, and we all thought that was cool to work with guys that had done James Bond movies.

"That was my first time in England, so the setting was very new and exciting. Of course, we blew off a lot of steam occasionally, but we were very serious about just getting it all done. We knew we had a lot to live up to because of the first film. Very few people, if any, had come back from working on that first film. You don’t know how it's going to turn out. We all thought the 'Aliens' script was great. Jim had a lot of turmoil there and didn’t have a good time on his own for various reasons, but we weren't really privy to that."

Before hopping across the pond to the UK, Mahan and his ace crew did molds and castings using a quarter-scale maquette of the Alien Queen sculpted at Stan Winston's shop for their design master.

"Back then, everything had to be done by measurements, by plotting out, and by eye. Today, it's so simple to have a computer generate and mill out a perfectly formed section. You had to use a really focused artistic eye to get exactly where we were supposed to be.

"We also had to make action suits, and there were a lot of them. I think there were 13 or 14, and then there were like eight eight-foot-tall puppets that were more spindly and long that were going to be used on wires and get hit and blow up and get shot. Then there was one articulated half-animatronic that would play in various scenes. You have to imagine an era that was pre-CGI. There was no reliance on rod removal or performer puppeteer removal. You had to hide everything and everybody in the frame. So in the dropship fight, it’s an enormous amount of people making the Queen operate, and you don’t see them.

"That all comes down to Jim Cameron and his magnificent eye for framing this action scene without seeing the crane or any of the support devices. Directors today, most of them don't even have any idea how to do that. And that was the magic of Jim Cameron and still is. He had the designing thought of shot composition and action that played off the best attributes of that hydraulic/actor-driven Queen. Because there were two guys inside and nine of us on her tail, her head, the cable, her hands, the feet. We were everywhere."

MacGowan took his role very seriously to get the fit and finishing perfect for this elegant egg-laying beast that would end up being the seething, android-ripping superstar of the popular 1986 sequel. -

"It was really just to honor what Giger had done in the past, but also to give Jim what he was looking for in his vision for the Queen," he recalls. "The Queen is really Jim's design and entire look. Our focus was making sure that we got what Jim wanted, but still make sure that fans of the original movie, which was all of us, could really appreciate."

As a mentor to his dedicated young crew of VFX creators, Winston schooled them in the subtle art of injecting personality and emotion into their creature performances.

"It's something they always reinforced, but if you’re a student of horror and science fiction films, you know all the great creatures and monsters have got some sympathetic or some interesting personality," adds Mahan. "Even the xenomorph in the first film, the personality is that it does not care. It's just going to kill you. But that’s still a personality trait.

"We were always taught by Stan that these are not effects; these are characters that we’re making; these are actors in the film. It just happens to be a creature from space, or a robot from the future, or a dinosaur. Whatever it is, it has to be believed, and we’ve always carried that philosophy through."

As to the mystery of exactly where the original Alien Queen screen-used puppet ended up, Mahan has a few clues, but sadly admits that most of it has unfortunately been lost to time.

"Jim has one in his museum, and I think collector Bob Burns did have a head," Mahan shares. "The rest of it might be that it's fallen into disrepair. I know when we left, a lot of it was put into containers at Pinewood, and it sat and rotted for years. We always wanted to get that back, but I’ve not seen a real Queen in a while.

While the classic design hasn't changed much over the years, Mahan notes that the materials used to make creatures like the Alien Queen have.

"The head was fiberglass and had other foam rubber parts. The materials back then were not very sophisticated," explains Mahan. "The materials we have today, like what we did on 'Alien: Romulus', are like from outer space. They're translucent silicones, and they stretch well, and there’s lightweight plastic 3D-grown parts."

"Back then, the only thing we had was clear urethane that I got the cowl of her head to kind of move around. The original idea was that the skin on her face was supposed to be translucent. It ended up being foam rubber painted to look translucent. A lot of those materials have just fallen apart. On screen, it's pretty impressive.

"When we did 'Alien: Romulus,' Lindsay and I had not done an 'Alien' film since 'Aliens.' When that opportunity came up to revisit that world, the sensory memories came flooding back. It's one of those movies where I think I remember every day that I was on set for that film.”

"Aliens" is available to stream on Disney+ in the UK, and to rent and buy on various platforms in the US.