Although we may not see it with our eyes or in the photos we capture with our standard cameras or phones, the sun is constantly changing. Structures on the surface or lower atmosphere of the sun can vary from day to day, or even from hour to hour. In this guide, we'll outline what you'll need to safely photograph our ever-changing sun and what structures you can hope to image.

Safety: Take precautions

It is important not to look directly at the sun. Doing so for even short durations can permanently damage your eyes. If you want to look up at the sun for reference, use a pair of certified solar eclipse glasses. Check out some of the best solar viewing gear, but note that some products allow you to photograph the sun safely through a camera or a telescope, but are not rated for direct observation with your eyes. See our guide on how to observe the sun safely.

Cameras, lenses and settings

No matter how you adjust the settings, even on the best cameras for astrophotography, the sun will remain too bright for you to successfully image any detail if you don't use the right equipment. Therefore, to photograph the sun, you must significantly reduce its effective brightness.

You can do this with a neutral-density filter, which attaches to the end of your camera lens. Neutral-density filters are used in all kinds of photography, but many will not have the power to block out enough sunlight to image the sun. Therefore, you should look for a neutral-density filter designed especially for solar photography.

With this filter attached to your camera, you will be able to successfully photograph the sun in optical light. Different filters may also change the apparent color of the sun in your image, with gray/white and orange/yellow being common filter options.

It's important to note that although a purpose-made filter can reduce the sun's brightness enough to image the star, it is not enough to protect your eyes from sunlight. Therefore, while using a neutral-density filter for solar photography, do not look into the optical viewfinder on your camera (if you have one). Instead, use the digital display. Similarly, do not use the filter to look directly at the sun.

The size of the sun in your image will depend on the focal length of your camera lens. At a minimum, you'll need a 200-millimeter telephoto lens. However, as shown in the images below, this will leave a lot of empty space in your camera frame. The longer the focal length, the larger the sun will appear in your image, and thus the higher the resolution of the sun will be. The images below show how the sun looks in a selection of focal lengths on the Nikon D850, a full-frame DSLR camera.

Once your lens and filter are sorted, you can play around with your camera settings.

1. Set your camera to aperture-priority mode. Typically, an aperture between f/5.6 and f/8 will give the best performance for most lenses, but you can play around with it to see what works best for your setup.

2. Adjust your exposure time. The exposure time you set may depend on several factors. If you do not have a tripod or you are using a tripod in strong wind, you will want to shorten your exposure time. This will reduce the total wobble throughout the exposure and lead to a sharper image. If you have a strong tripod and wind is not an issue, you can afford to increase the exposure time, which will decrease the noise levels.

3. Set your ISO. You do not want an ISO sensitivity high enough to saturate the image, but you need it high enough to avoid adding noise. A longer exposure time will allow for a shorter ISO, without introducing too much noise. Play around with these settings to find a combination that works for you. As with nighttime astronomy, another good tip is to not take the photograph immediately by clicking the capture button (if you're using a tripod), as your interaction with the camera will cause the system to wobble. Instead, set a timer for 10 seconds or longer, or use a remote control to take the shot.

Photographing the sun with telescopes

If you are feeling more ambitious, you can photograph the sun with one of the best telescopes. We won't dive much into the camera setup here, as it will be similar to that used in nighttime astronomy. You can either mount your usual camera to the telescope directly or use a purpose-made eyepiece camera. Either way, the important pieces of equipment typically sit at the other end of the telescope that's pointing at the sun.

Different filters allow us to see different layers of the sun, so let's quickly recap these layers of our local star. The surface of the sun is called the photosphere. This is the layer of the sun that emits the sunlight visible to the human eye. Above the photosphere, which has a temperature of around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius), is a layer called the chromosphere. The chromosphere is cooler and less dense than the photosphere, with a temperature around 7,200 F (4,000 C). Above the chromosphere, temperatures rapidly increase through a thin transition region, before reaching the solar corona. The corona is the tenuous outer atmosphere of the sun, with temperatures of around 1.8 million F (1 million C), which becomes visible to us during a total solar eclipse.

Just like on your camera, you can attach a purpose-made solar filter to the end of your telescope. Alternatively, you can use a dedicated solar telescope, which utilizes a system of internal filters. Filters block the majority of sunlight, allowing only a small amount of light into your telescope. Different filters allow in light from different layers of the sun, thus changing the features of interest available to your photography. The three primary filter types are white light, H-alpha and Ca K.

A white-light filter removes over 99.9% of the intensity of incoming sunlight, but it does not filter by wavelength. With a white-light filter, you will receive sunlight from the sun's surface. If you have a larger telescope aperture or you plan to point at the sun for a long time, an ultraviolet and infrared (UV/IR) filter is also recommended. This will not affect your photo, but it will remove excess light to prevent it from heating up your telescope system.

Unlike white-light filters, which image the photosphere, H-alpha and Ca K filters image a higher layer of the sun, the chromosphere. These filters work by filtering light by wavelength, instead of just intensity, to allow in light from a narrow part of the solar spectrum.

H-alpha is light emitted by hydrogen plasma at a specific energy level that is dominant in the chromosphere. This light is at a wavelength of 656.28 nanometers, which sits in the red part of the visible spectrum. When you use an H-alpha filter, the sun therefore appears red. H-alpha filters can be broadband (about 1 Å) or narrowband (0.5 Å). These will alter the view of the chromosphere slightly. Some filters are also tunable, which allows you to adjust the wavelength range of the filter. Ca K filters filter a wavelength of light emitted by calcium plasma at 393.4 nm, which appears blue to the human eye.

When you're using an external filter on your telescope, do not remove the eyepiece from the viewfinder scope. Whether you're using a dedicated solar telescope or an external filter on a nighttime telescope, different filters will show different features on the sun. The images below show the sun photographed through the H-alpha and Ca K filters discussed above. White-light images are shown earlier in this article.

Features on the sun

Now that you have your full setup, let's take a look at the structures you can hope to see on the sun.

Sunspots

The easiest feature on the sun to photograph are sunspots. Sunspots are cooler parts of the photosphere created by strong regions of concentrated magnetic field. The intense magnetic field above sunspots is what creates solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

A sunspot looks like a dark structure with a darker inner section (the umbra) and slightly lighter (yet still darker than the surrounding photosphere) penumbra around it. Sunspots can exist for weeks or months, but they can change significantly over a few hours as new magnetic fields emerge, or cancel out, within the region. Sunspots are visible in the photosphere through white-light filters and solar telescopes. They are still visible in chromospheric filters (H-alpha and Ca K), but the contrast is not as stark.

Filaments

At higher altitudes, a different type of magnetic structure is visible. Filaments are twisted magnetic structures full of chromospheric material. They are rooted in the lower solar atmosphere, but they stretch into higher altitudes in the corona. Because they are composed of material from the chromosphere, filaments are not visible with standard white-light filters. Instead, they require either H-alpha or Ca II filters to be seen. At these wavelengths, filaments appear dark against the bright solar disk.

Prominences

Whereas filaments are viewed against the sun's surface, prominences are the same structure but seen over the edge of the sun. Against the background of space, prominences appear bright. They can be photographed with the same filters as filaments, and they can also be seen with the naked eye during the totality phase of a total solar eclipse. A tunable narrow H-Alpha filter will really make prominences and filaments pop against their background. You can also play around with the exposure time to change the contrast of the prominences against the dark background.

Solar eclipses

Although the advice outlined in this article can be used to photograph the sun anytime, it is also valid during the partial phases of a solar eclipse, when the sun is partially blocked by the moon. The moon's edge provides a new feature to photograph, with the intricate irregularities of craters along the moon's silhouette visible. For further advice on photographing the partial or total phases of a solar eclipse, check out our guide on how to photograph a solar eclipse.

If you want to read more about the science of observing the sun and the history of our relationship with it, check out my book "The Sun: Beginner's guide to our local star (Collins, 2023).

A giant parachute built for Europe's beleaguered ExoMars mission has aced a drop test with a mock lander during a test campaign in the Arctic.

The double parachute system consists of a 50-foot-wide (15-meter) first-stage chute and a secondary 118-foot-wide (35m) chute, which is, according to ESA, the largest ever designed to land an object on Mars.

If all goes well, it will lower the 683-pound (310-kilogram) Rosalind Franklin rover to the surface of the red planet in 2028, so that it can commence its delayed search for traces of Martian life.

The parachute system had had a complicated journey with many test failures but was deemed ready for the planned launch in 2022 before the mission was suspended after Russia invaded Ukraine. Since Europe withdrew from its collaboration with Russia, who had provided the landing platform and a few other bits of technology for the mission, the parachute has been stored waiting for a new landing platform to be built in Europe.

"We are running this campaign to confirm our readiness for Mars, and to verify that the parachutes are still performing as expected after the long storage," Luca Ferracina, ESA's ExoMars Entry Descent and Landing Module system engineer, said in a statement.

That's good news for the mission, which has been in limbo since the Trump administration's draft NASA budget was released in May. NASA committed to provide a few hundred million dollars to help ESA get ExoMars off the ground in 2028, but the Trump budget culled that funding as part of its widespread science mission cuts. But the U.S. Senate's Appropriations Committee rejected those cuts in its report published on Friday, July 18, suggesting that Trump's budget may not find support among legislators.

ESA is surely following the discussions closely as NASA's withdrawal would likely cause further delays to the heavily delayed mission.

Earlier this year, ESA signed a $194 million contract with the European aerospace giant Airbus to build the new landing platform. During the parachute tests, its mock-up descended to the ground at Sweden's Esrange Space Center in Kiruna from the altitude of 18.6 miles (30 kilometers) after having been dropped from a high-altitude balloon. The capsule, according to ESA, experienced about 20 seconds of free fall before the first of the parachutes unfurled.

Although the atmosphere of Mars has only about 1% of the density of Earth's atmosphere, the engineers fine tuned the test to recreate the forces the landing assembly will experience on Mars.

"The combination of velocity and low atmospheric density in this test is exactly the same as what the parachutes will experience on Mars," Ferracina said.

During the Mars landing, the capsule will hit the red planet's tenuous atmosphere at a mind-boggling speed of 13,050 mph (21,000 km/h) but will slow down to about 1,000 miles per hour from natural drag before the first parachute opens. During the tests, the mock-up capsule reached about that speed after its short freefall through the thin stratospheric air.

"We are happy to confirm that we have a parachute design that can work on Mars — an ambitious system with the largest parachute ever to be flown outside Earth," Ferracina said.

Prior to 3I/ATLAS, the previous two "interstellar invaders" were 1I/'Oumuamua, spotted in 2017, and 2I/Borisov, detected in 2019. Both have now left the solar system, though other interstellar bodies are predicted to dwell undetected in our cosmic backyard.

As Space.com reported on July 11, recent research suggested that 3I/ATLAS could be even more exciting than initially perceived, as its trajectory through the solar system indicates it comes from a region of the Milky Way older than our 4.6 billion-year-old solar system. With an estimated age of 7 billion years, that would make 3I/ATLAS the oldest comet we've ever seen.

Astrophysics undergrad student astrafoxen alerted his followers to the Hubble images of 3I/ATLAS via this Bluesky feed.

"Hubble Space Telescope images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS are out! These were taken 5 hours ago. Plenty of cosmic rays peppering the images, but the comet's coma looks very nice and puffy. Best of luck to the researchers trying to write up papers for this... " the post reads.

Hubble Space Telescope images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS are out! These were taken 5 hours ago. Plenty of cosmic rays peppering the images, but the comet's coma looks very nice and puffy. Best of luck to the researchers trying to write up papers for this... archive.stsci.edu/proposal_sea... 🔭

— @astrafoxen.bsky.social (@astrafoxen.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-07-22T09:45:35.680Z

One such paper is already available, albeit as a preprint. Describing optical and near-infrared spectroscopy performed on 3I/ATLAS, the research reveals that: "3I/ATLAS is an active interstellar comet containing abundant water ice, with a dust composition more similar to D-type asteroids than to ultrared trans-Neptunian objects."

D-type asteroids are space rocks packed with organic molecule-rich silicates and carbon with water ice in their interiors.

The arrival of 3I/ATLAS into the solar system has initiated an exciting period for astronomers. Since the solar system interloper was spotted on July 1, 2025, by the ATLAS survey telescope, an array of other instruments have attempted to get in on the act by spotting the comet.

One project that will be trying to get a good look at 3I/ATLAS is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which observes the universe near and far with the largest digital camera ever built. That is fitting, as the comet from beyond the solar system was actually first spotted as scientists were preparing to make observations with Rubin.

The new observatory, which released its first images of the cosmos on June 23, 2025, is expected to discover between 5 and 50 interstellar objects as they zip through the solar system during the observatory's decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

In the meantime, 3I/ATLAS can enjoy the undivided attention of astronomers aiming to study interstellar bodies with a view to painting an intimate picture of planetary systems beyond our own.

The Hubble images of 3I/ATLAS are available to download from this database.

For decades, scientists pictured Europa's frozen surface as a still, silent shell. But the new observations reveal that it's actually a dynamic world that's far from frozen in time.

"We think that the surface is fairly porous and warm enough in some areas to allow the ice to recrystallize rapidly," Richard Cartwright, a spectroscopist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory and lead author of the new study, said in a statement.

Perhaps even more exciting is what this surface activity reveals about Europa's subsurface ocean. The presence of geologic activity and ongoing cycling between the subsurface and surface make "chaos terrains" — highly disrupted regions where blocks of ice seem to have broken off, drifted and refrozen — especially valuable as potential windows into Europa's interior.

The study focused on two regions in Europa's southern hemisphere: Tara Regio and Powys Regio. Tara Regio, in particular, stands out as one of the moon's most intriguing areas. Observations from JWST detected crystalline ice both at the surface and deeper below — challenging previous assumptions about how ice is distributed on Europa.

Related: Explore Jupiter's icy ocean moon Europa in NASA virtual tour (photos)

By measuring the spectral properties of these "chaos" regions using remotely sensed data, scientists could gain valuable insight about Europa's chemistry as well as its potential for habitability, they explained in the paper, which was published May 28 in The Planetary Science Journal.

"Our data showed strong indications that what we are seeing must be sourced from the interior, perhaps from a subsurface ocean nearly 20 miles (30 kilometers) beneath Europa's thick icy shell," Ujjwal Raut, program manager at the Southwest Research Institute and co-author of the study, said in the statement.

Hidden chemistry

Raut and his team conducted laboratory experiments to study how water freezes on Europa, where the surface is constantly bombarded by charged particles from space. Unlike on Earth, where ice naturally forms a hexagonal crystal structure, the intense radiation on Europa disrupts the ice's structure, causing it to become what's known as amorphous ice — a disordered, noncrystalline form.

The experiments played a crucial role in demonstrating how the ice changes over time. By studying how the ice transforms between different states, scientists can learn more about the moon's surface dynamics. When combined with fresh data from JWST, these findings add to a growing body of evidence showing that a vast, hidden liquid ocean lies beneath Europa's icy shell.

"In this same region […] we see a lot of other unusual things, including the best evidence for sodium chloride, like table salt, probably originating from its interior ocean," Cartwright said. "We also see some of the strongest evidence for CO₂ and hydrogen peroxide on Europa. The chemistry in this location is really strange and exciting."

These regions, marked by fractured surface features, may point to geologic activity pushing material up from beneath Europa's icy shell.

JWST's NIRSpec instrument is especially well suited for studying Europa's surface because it can detect key chemical signatures across a wide range of infrared wavelengths. This includes features associated with crystalline water ice and a specific form of carbon dioxide called ¹³CO₂, which are important for understanding the moon's geologic and chemical processes.

NIRSpec can measure these features all at once while also creating detailed maps that show how these materials are distributed across Europa's surface. Its high sensitivity and ability to collect both spectral and spatial data make it an ideal tool for uncovering clues about what lies beneath Europa's icy crust.

The team detected higher levels of carbon dioxide in these areas than in surrounding regions. They concluded that it likely originates from the subsurface ocean rather than from external sources like meteorites, which would have resulted in a more even distribution.

Moreover, carbon dioxide is unstable under Europa's intense radiation environment, suggesting that these deposits are relatively recent and tied to ongoing geological processes. "The evidence for a liquid ocean underneath Europa's icy shell is mounting, which makes this so exciting as we continue to learn more," Raut said.

Another intriguing finding was the presence of carbon-13, an isotope of carbon. "Where is this ¹³CO₂ coming from? It's hard to explain, but every road leads back to an internal origin, which is in line with other hypotheses about the origin of ¹²CO₂ detected in Tara Regio," Cartwright said.

This study arrives as NASA's Europa Clipper mission is currently en route to the Jovian moon, with an expected arrival in April 2030. The spacecraft will perform dozens of flybys, with each one bringing it closer to Europa's surface to gather critical data about the ocean hidden beneath the moon's icy crust.

The proposed mission, called CosmoCube, aims to "listen" for these ancient signals from the far side of the moon. It will target the "cosmic dark ages" — a critical-but-mysterious era roughly 50 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, when the first stars, galaxies and black holes in the universe formed.

"It's incredible how far these radio waves have travelled, now arriving with news of the universe's history," David Bacon, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. who's involved with the mission, said in a statement. "The next step is to go to the quieter side of the moon to hear that news."

Observing this distant epoch is notoriously difficult, astronomers say. At that time, the universe was filled with a dense fog of neutral hydrogen gas that blocked visible light from traveling freely through space, rendering the early cosmos opaque.

However, hydrogen, which is the most abundant element in the universe, emits a characteristic radio signal at a frequency of 1,420 megahertz, corresponding to a wavelength of about 8.3 inches (21 centimeters). As the first luminous objects ignited, they subtly transformed the hydrogen around them, altering the strength and profile of this signal. Capturing these variations could offer a pristine view into how the first luminous objects formed, according to the statement.

While this signal has been studied extensively in the nearby universe, detecting its much fainter counterpart from the universe's earliest days is far more challenging. Capturing these ancient signals requires near-total radio silence, which is virtually impossible to achieve on Earth, where electronic devices and atmospheric interference create a constant background hum.

"It's like trying to hear that whisper while a loud concert is playing next door," Eloy de Lera Acedo, an associate professor of radio cosmology at the University of Cambridge who's involved with the CosmoCube mission, said in the statement. "This makes it really hard to pick up those faint signals from billions of years ago."

The CosmoCube mission would take advantage of the moon's far side, which acts as a natural shield from Earth's radio emissions, according to the statement. From this unique vantage point, the probe aims to deploy a sensitive radiometer designed to detect low-frequency radio signals.

The mission data could also help to resolve the Hubble tension, the long-standing puzzle in cosmology involving conflicting measurements of the universe's expansion rate based on observations of the early universe versus the local universe.

Lab prototypes of the instruments are already undergoing environmental testing. The team plans to launch CosmoCube within the next four to five years, with the goal of reaching lunar orbit by the end of the decade, the team said in the statement.

New evidence found in shavings from a meteorite known as Northwest Africa 12264 — a 50-gram (1.8 ounces) piece of space rock that is believed to have formed in the outer solar system — suggests that rocky planets like Earth and distant icy bodies may have formed at the same time. This challenges the long-standing belief that planets closer to the sun formed before those in the outer solar system, the ones that lie beyond the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Planets form within the rotating disks of gas and dust that surround young stars, where particles collide and stick together through a process known as accretion. As developing rocky planets heat up, they begin to differentiate, forming separate internal layers known as the core, mantle and crust.

Scientists have thought that our solar system's inner rocky planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars —formed first (around 4.566 billion years ago), while gas giants and icy bodies in the outer solar system came together slightly later (4.563 billion years ago), due to the colder temperatures at a greater distance from the sun. Rocky planets farther out were also thought to form more slowly because their higher water and ice content would have delayed internal heating and core development.

Analyzing the composition of the meteorite (which was purchased from a dealer in Morocco in 2018) revealed a ratio of chromium and oxygen that indicates it came from the outer part of the solar system. Using precise isotopic dating methods, the researchers found that the rock formed 4.564 billion years ago — just two to three million years after the solar system’s earliest solid materials.

Until now, such early formation was thought to be limited to bodies from the inner solar system, according to a statement announcing the new study.

Evidence that rocky planets beyond Jupiter formed as rapidly, and at the same time, as the inner planets could transform our understanding of how planets take shape — not only in our solar system, but in planetary systems throughout the universe, the researchers said.

Their findings were published on July 4 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

ESA has chosen five rocket companies to pass through to the next round of its competition to encourage and support the development of new launch vehicles.

The agency announced on July 7 that it had selected German companies Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA), Maiaspace from France, Spain's PLD Space and Orbital Express Launch, or Orbex, which is based in the United Kingdom, to proceed to the next stage of its European Launcher Challenge.

The European Launcher Challenge (ELC) is a new scheme to promote new small and medium-sized launch vehicles and boost competitiveness in Europe, which for decades has relied on large Ariane rockets.

The challenge was announced in November 2023, followed by a request for information and a formal call for proposals in March 2025, leading to ESA announcing the preselected challengers. The ELC has two components. The first is for launch services to be performed for ESA from 2026 to 2030, while the second is for development and demonstration of larger, upgraded launchers.

Each chosen company will be eligible for up to 169 million euros ($198 million US) in support to cover one or both of these components. The ESA member states will finalize funding decisions in November at the agency's crucial ministerial council, which will set funding for projects for the next three years.

Both Isar Aerospace and RFA have made it to the pad already. Isar's Spectrum rocket had a first, short-lived flight in March from Norway, with the launcher exploding seconds in flight. RFA's RFA One rocket exploded on the pad in the Shetland Islands back in August 2024 during a static fire test.

PLD Space conducted a suborbital flight of its Miura 1 rocket in 2023, as a stepping stone toward launching the orbital Miura 5. Orbex, meanwhile, is working on its Prime microlauncher, while Maiaspace is developing its reusable Maia rocket.

These are not the only European companies engaged in developing new rockets, with Skyrora (U.K.), Latitude (France) and HyImpulse (Germany) at various stages of developing their rocket concepts.

The difference will be just 1.34 milliseconds less than the standard 24 hours — not something you'll notice — but it's part of a puzzling trend in Earth's rotational behavior that has been unfolding in recent years. If it continues, a second may need to be subtracted from atomic clocks around 2029 — a so-called negative leap second, which has never been done before.

The speed of Earth's rotation isn't fixed. Long ago, a day was much shorter than the 24 hours — or 86,400 seconds — we're now accustomed to. According to a 2023 study, a day on Earth was approximately 19 hours for a significant part of Earth's early history, due to a balance between solar atmospheric tides and lunar ocean tides. However, over deep time, a day on Earth has become consistently longer. The primary culprit has been tidal friction from the moon, which has caused it to gradually move farther away from Earth. As it moves away, the moon saps Earth's rotational energy, causing Earth's rotation to slow and days to lengthen.

So why the sudden reverse?

From when records began (with the invention of the atomic clock) in 1973 until 2020, the shortest day ever recorded was 1.05 milliseconds less than 24 hours, according to Timeanddate.com. But since 2020, Earth has repeatedly broken its own speed records. The shortest day ever measured occurred on July 5, 2024, when Earth's rotation was completed 1.66 milliseconds faster than usual.

Looking ahead to 2025, scientists predicted that July 9, July 22, and Aug. 5 could be the shortest days of the year. However, new data suggests that July 10 took the lead as the shortest day so far in 2025, clocking in at 1.36 milliseconds less than 24 hours. On July 22, Earth is expected to complete its spin 1.34 milliseconds early, making it a close runner-up. If current predictions hold, Aug. 5 will be about 1.25 milliseconds shorter than usual, leaving July 22 as the second-shortest day of the year.

There are signs the acceleration may be easing. The rate of decrease in day length appears to be slowing, but the underlying cause of the recent rotational changes remains elusive.

One 2024 study suggested that the melting polar ice and rising sea levels may be influencing Earth's spin. However, rather than driving the acceleration, this redistribution of mass might be moderating it. A more likely culprit is deep below our feet — the slowing of Earth's liquid core, which could be redistributing angular momentum in a way that makes the mantle and crust spin slightly faster.

"The cause of this acceleration is not explained," Leonid Zotov, a leading authority on Earth rotation at Moscow State University, told Timeanddate.com. "Most scientists believe it is something inside the Earth. Ocean and atmospheric models don't explain this huge acceleration."

Zotov predicts Earth’s rotation may soon decelerate once again. If he’s right, this sudden speeding-up could prove to be just a temporary anomaly in the planet’s long-term trend toward slower rotation and longer days.

The nation wants to build a moon base by 2045, The Korea Times reported on Thursday (July 17), citing a long-term exploration road map that the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) laid out that same day during a hearing at the National Research Foundation of Korea in Daejeon.

That road map "outlines five core missions, including low Earth orbit and microgravity exploration, lunar exploration, and solar and space science missions," The Korea Times wrote.

KASA, which was established just last year, aims to develop homegrown lunar landing and roving technology, as well as the ability to extract and exploit moon resources such as water ice.

Some of this work is already underway. For example, the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources recently deployed prototype lunar rovers in an abandoned coal mine, testing tech that could be used for space mining down the road.

And South Korea already has some experience at and around the moon. In August 2022, the nation launched its first moon probe — called the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter or Danuri — atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Danuri reached lunar orbit four months later and is still going strong, studying the moon with its suite of instruments.

South Korea had already been aiming for the lunar surface; officials have said they want to put a robotic lander on the moon by 2032. But the newly revealed road map ups the ante. The nation plans to develop a new, presumably more capable moon lander by 2040, "with the goal of building a lunar economic base by 2045," The Korea Times wrote.

South Korea isn't the only nation with moon-base ambitions. The United States also plans to build one or more lunar outposts in the next decade or so, via NASA's Artemis program. China is working toward the goal as well, in partnership with Russia and other nations. And India has said it wants to build a moon base by 2047.

The moon isn't KASA's only distant destination, by the way; the agency also wants to pull off South Korea's first-ever Mars landing by 2045.

As interest in human missions to Mars grows, scientists are focusing on how to sustain life in space without constant resupply from Earth. A team of researchers led by Robin Wordsworth of Harvard University demonstrated that green algae can not only survive but thrive inside bioplastic chambers designed to mimic the extreme environment of the Red Planet.

"If you have a habitat that is composed of bioplastic, and it grows algae within it, that algae could produce more bioplastic," Wordsworth said in a statement. "So you start to have a closed-loop system that can sustain itself and even grow through time."

In laboratory tests, Wordsworth and his team cultivated a common type of green algae called Dunaliella tertiolecta inside a 3D-printed chamber made from polylactic acid, which is a biodegradable plastic derived from natural sources. The chamber was engineered to replicate the thin, carbon dioxide–rich atmosphere of Mars, which has a surface pressure less than 1% that of Earth.

Despite these extreme conditions, the algae were able to perform photosynthesis, according to the statement.

"We have demonstrated that habitable conditions can be maintained in extraterrestrial environments using only biologically produced materials," the researchers wrote in a paper published earlier this month in the journal Science Advances. "The results reported here represent an important step forward, but many additional steps are needed to enable robust ecosystems to be sustained long-term beyond Earth."

Wordsworth and his team attribute the experiment’s success to the bioplastic chamber, which shielded the algae from harmful ultraviolet radiation while still allowing sufficient light to penetrate. Though liquid water cannot normally exist at such low pressures, the team created a pressure gradient within the chamber that stabilized liquid water, enabling biological activity.

The results suggest that bioplastics could be a viable material for constructing habitats on Mars and other celestial bodies, scientists say. Unlike conventional industrial materials, which are expensive to transport and difficult to recycle off-Earth, bioplastics can potentially be produced and reused on-site using biological processes, according to the statement.

The latest proof of concept experiment builds on earlier work by Wordsworth’s team, which showed that silica aerogels could replicate Earth’s greenhouse effect to support life in cold, low-pressure environments. By combining algae chambers for bioplastic production with aerogels for heat and pressure regulation, the researchers say they are making real progress toward self-sustaining space habitats.

Next, the team plans to test their bioplastic systems in vacuum conditions relevant to moon and deep-space missions.

"The concept of biomaterial habitats is fundamentally interesting and can support humans living in space," Wordsworth said in the statement.

"As this type of technology develops, it's going to have spinoff benefits for sustainability technology here on Earth as well."

The object, designated 2020 VN40, is part of a family of distant solar system objects called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). 2020 VN40 is the first object discovered that orbits the sun once for every ten orbits Neptune makes. Considering that one Neptunian year lasts 164.8 Earth years, that means 2020 VN40 has one heck of a long year, lasting around 1,648 years or 19,776 months on Earth!

The team behind this research thinks that 2020 VN40's ponderous orbital dance with Neptune may have come about when it was temporarily snared by the gravity of the ice giant planet. Thus, this discovery could help researchers better understand the dynamics of bodies at the edge of the solar system.

"This is a big step in understanding the outer solar system," team leader Rosemary Pike from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian said in a statement. "It shows that even very distant regions influenced by Neptune can contain objects, and it gives us new clues about how the solar system evolved."

The orbital rhythm of 2020 VN40 was discovered in data from the Large inclination Distant Objects (LiDO) survey. LiDO uses the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope with backup from the Gemini Observatory and the Walter Baade Telescope to search the outer solar system for weird objects.

In particular, LiDO specializes in hunting TNOs with orbits that take them far above and below the orbital plane of Earth around the sun. These are regions of the solar system that have thus far only been sparsely explored by astronomers.

"It has been fascinating to learn how many small bodies in the solar system exist on these very large, very tilted orbits," LiDO team member and University of Regina researcher Samantha Lawler said.

The highly tilted path of 2020 VN40 finds it at an average distance from the sun equivalent to 140 times the distance between Earth and our star.

However, the most interesting element of the orbit of 2020 VN40 is its resonance with the orbit of Neptune. Other bodies rhythmically aligned with Neptune make their closest approaches to the sun, their perihelion, when Neptune is at its greatest distance from our star, or its aphelion.

Defying this trend, 2020 VN40 is at perihelion when Neptune is also close to the sun. That's if one were looking at it from above the solar system, with the tilt of 2020 VN40 meaning that this TNO and Neptune are not actually close together; the TNO is actually far below the solar system.

This also separates 2020 VN40 from other resonant TNOs, which tend to stay within the plane of the solar system when they make close approaches to the sun.

"This new motion is like finding a hidden rhythm in a song we thought we knew," team member and University of California Santa Cruz scientist Ruth Murray-Clay said. "It could change how we think about the way distant objects move."

Revealing the orbital strangeness of 2020 VN40 suggests that solar system objects with highly tilted orbits can adopt novel and unexpected types of movement.

The hunt is now on for more bodies like 2020 VN40, with the newly operating Vera C. Rubin Observatory set to play a key role in this investigation.

"This is just the beginning," team member and Planetary Science Institute researcher Kathryn Volk said. "We're opening a new window into the solar system's past."

The 2020 VN40 results were published on July 7 in The Planetary Science Journal.

Geologists studying driftwood and lake sediments found in Stanton's Cave — in Marble Canyon, which lies in the eastern part of the Grand Canyon — revealed a possible connection between the area and the famous impact site known as Meteor Crater (also called Barringer Crater) in northern Arizona.

Through excavation and multiple rounds of radiocarbon dating, researchers determined the driftwood is about 56,000 years old. Yet today, the mouth of Stanton's Cave sits 150 feet (46 meters) above the Colorado River. A new study suggests the wood was carried there by an ancient paleolake, formed when a massive landslide dammed the river.

"It would have required a 10-times-bigger flood level than any flood that has happened in the past several thousand years," Karl Karlstrom, co-lead author of the study and an Earth and planetary science professor at the University of New Mexico, said in a statement from the university.

The study claims that the strike that created Meteor Crater could be linked to a paleolake — an ancient lake that existed in the past but has since dried up — in the Grand Canyon that formed at the same time. The impact would have generated an earthquake around magnitude 5.4 to 6, which could have sent a shock wave powerful enough to shake loose unstable cliffs in the Grand Canyon 100 miles (161 kilometers) away and trigger a massive landslide. That event, in turn, could have deposited enough debris to dam the river and form a lake.

Other caves high above the river have also been explored for clues about the canyon's geological past. In addition to the driftwood, ancient beaver tracks have been found in areas that would be inaccessible to the water-dwelling animals today, further supporting the idea that a paleolake once existed in the area.

With driftwood and sediment samples found in many caves as high up as 3,084 feet (940 m), the researchers estimate the paleolake would have been about 50 miles (80 km) long and nearly 300 feet (91 m) deep. Over time, the dam that blocked the Colorado River could have been overtopped and deeply eroded, eventually filling up with sediment.

While there is evidence linking the paleolake, the meteorite impact and resulting landslide, the researchers noted that further study is required to eliminate any other possible explanations for the river damming, such as random rockfall or a more local earthquake around the same time.

Their findings were published July 15 in the journal Geology.

This is the conclusion of a team of scientists from China who have found a one-step method of doing all this. Whether it is economically viable, however, is up for debate.

But the Chinese team thinks that it is. "The biggest surprise for us was the tangible success of this integrated approach," said team-member Lu Wang, who is a chemist from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in a statement. "The one-step integration of lunar water extraction and photothermal carbon dioxide catalysis could enhance energy utilization efficiency and decrease the cost and complexity of infrastructure development."

They point out that studies have shown that transporting supplies from Earth to any future moon base would be expensive because the greater the mass of cargo, the harder a rocket has to work to launch into space. Studies have indicated that it would cost $83,000 to transport just one gallon of water from Earth to the moon, and yet each astronaut would be expected to drink 4 gallons of water per day.

Fortunately, the moon has plentiful water, although it is not automatically apparent. Brought to the moon by impacts of comets, asteroids and micrometeoroids, and even by the solar wind, water lurks in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles, trapped within minerals such as ilmenite.

Extracting the water for drinking is relatively easy and there are numerous technologies that describe how this can be done, including heating the regolith by focusing sunlight onto it. However, the Chinese team has been able to take this one step further.

"What's novel here is the use of lunar soil as a catalyst to crack carbon dioxide molecules and combine them with extracted water to produce methane," Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist from the University of Central Florida, told Space.com. Metzger was not involved in the new research, but he is the co-founder of the NASA Kennedy Space Center's 'Swamp Works', a research lab for designing technologies for construction, manufacturing and mining on planetary (and lunar) surfaces.

Methane would be more desirable than liquid hydrogen as a potential rocket fuel because it is easier to keep stable, thereby requiring less machinery and less cost to keep on the moon. Liquid methane, when mixed with oxygen as an oxidizer, is a potent rocket fuel. Many commercial companies such as China's Landspace are already launching methane-powered rockets.

The water-bearing ilmenite is also a useful catalyst for reacting the water with carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and methane, and the Chinese team have developed a one-step process for doing so. First, they heat the regolith to 392 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius) by focusing sunlight to release the water inside. Then, carbon dioxide such as that which could be breathed out by astronauts is added to the mix, causing the ilmenite to catalyze the reaction between the extracted water and the carbon dioxide. Researchers tested this process, known as photothermal catalysis, in the laboratory using a simulant based on samples of lunar regolith returned to Earth by China's Chang'e 5 mission (the lunar samples are far too previous to destroy in such experiments, which is why a simulant is used instead).

While previous technologies have also been able to accomplish this, they required more steps and more machinery, and used a catalyst that would have to be transported up from Earth. This, the research team believe, makes their process more efficient and less expensive than the alternatives.

However, Metzger is not wholly confident that it will work. For one thing, lunar regolith is a proficient thermal insulator, so heating a sample all the way through would not be easy.

"The heat does not spread effectively deeper into the soil, and this greatly reduces the amount of water that can be produced in a given time," Metzger said. One option could be to 'tumble' the regolith, turning it over repeatedly so that the heat is more evenly applied, but this slows the extraction of water and increases the mechanical complexity of the process. In an environment where lunar dust gets into every nook and cranny, and where temperature fluctuations between night and day can be as great as 482 degrees Fahrenheit (250 Celsius), the risk of breakdown only increases as more moving parts enter the equation.

"It may be doable, but more maturation of the technology is needed to show that it is actually competitive," said Metzger.

There's also a problem with the application of carbon dioxide, something recognized by both the Chinese team and Metzger. Specifically, there's a question mark over whether astronauts could produce enough carbon dioxide through their normal exhalation. Metzger calculates that astronauts could only provide a tenth of the carbon dioxide required. Alternatively, carbon dioxide could be shuttled up from Earth, but this would rather defeat the purpose of the proposed technique, which was to develop a lot-cost means of obtaining water, oxygen and methane with resources largely already available on the moon.

However, in the long-run, perhaps shipping some materials up from Earth will be beneficial. Metzger points out a similar experiment that used an exotic granular catalyst – nickel-on-kieselguhr (kieselguhr is a kind of sedimentary rock) – rather than lunar regolith. Metzger suspects that a material specifically designed to be a catalyst, such as nickel-on-kieselguhr, would be more efficient than lunar regolith. Plus, although it would be expensive to transport from Earth, the nickel-on-kieselguhr can be re-used so you would only need to transport it to the moon once. In a cost-benefit analysis, in the long term it might be more efficient to do this instead.

Regardless, the research team has convincingly shown that using lunar regolith as a catalyst to produce fuel and water works. The next step is to show that the technology can be scaled up to sustain a base on the moon more efficiently than other techniques, and that it can operate in lunar conditions where the gravity is weaker, the temperature swings to large extremes, and there is intense radiation from space.

"I think these are highly interesting results and there may be additional applications to use lunar soil as a photocatalyst," said Metzger. "More work will be needed to show whether this concept can be economically competitive. I am skeptical, but all good ideas have their detractors and you can never really know until somebody does the work to prove it."

There is certainly no immediate rush for the technology. With NASA's Artemis III mission, which aims to finally return astronauts to the surface of the moon in 2027 at the earliest, and funding made available for Artemis IV and V at some indeterminate time in the future, we're not yet in a position to build a permanent lunar base.

However, the Artemis missions are the perfect opportunity to trial some of these technologies and will be greatly important for showing whether we really can live on the moon or not.

The research was published on July 16 in the journal Joule.

China has taken a new step in its long-term planning for lunar exploration with the completion of a "simulated moon underground space."

Researchers have established a practice area in a volcanic lava cave in a forest region near Jingbo Lake in Mudanjiang City, located in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang. The move is in response to research suggesting that lava tube systems are present on the moon and Mars and could provide shielding from those worlds' harsh radiation environments.

"The underground volcanic lava pipes by the Jingbo Lake are the most similar environment on Earth to the underground space of the moon. I hope our forward-looking research can serve China's lunar exploration program," Li Jiaqi, a researcher at Peking University, told China Central Television (CCTV).

Experimental robots are already being used to test conducting autonomous exploration and multi-functional operations in the simulated lunar environment.

"Compared with traditional lunar roving vehicles and exploration robots, it has stronger environmental adaptability and flexibility," said Li Xianglong, a doctoral student from the Harbin Institute of Technology. "When exploring the underground space of the moon for the future, it can possess more precise perception, decision-making and operation capabilities."

Students also set up seismometers in the area to serve as a reference for future lunar experiments. China's Chang'e 7 mission to the lunar south pole, set to launch sometime in 2026, will carry a seismograph to study the moon's interior and detect moonquakes, caused by tidal forces from Earth, and temperature changes affecting the lunar surface. China plans to establish an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in the 2030s.

The 311-gram space rock was discovered in 2023 and is known as the Northwest Africa 16286 meteorite — and based on the decay of the lead isotopes that it contains, its formation has been dated to about 2.35 billion years ago.

"Its age and composition show that volcanic activity continued on the moon throughout this timespan, and our analysis suggests an ongoing heat-generation process within the moon, potentially from radiogenic elements decaying and producing heat over a long period," said lead researcher Joshua Snape of the University of Manchester in a statement.

The meteorite is an important piece in the jigsaw that is the moon's history, filling-in an almost billion-year-long gap in our knowledge. The meteorite is much younger than samples brought back to Earth by NASA's Apollo missions, the Soviet Union's Luna missions and China's Chang'e 6 mission, all of which range between 3.1 billion and 4.3 billion years old, but older than the 1.9-billion-year-old rocks returned by Chang'e 5.

Crucially, meteorite 16286 has a volcanic origin, with geochemical analysis showing that it formed when a lava flow from deep within the moon vented onto the surface and solidified. It contains relatively large crystals of a mineral called olivine, moderate levels of titanium and high levels of potassium. Its lead isotopes also point to a volcanic source deep underground that has an unusually high uranium-to-lead ratio (the lead being a decay product of uranium). This abundance of uranium, and the heat it produced as it underwent radioactive decay, is a potential clue as to what was keeping volcanism going a billion years after the moon's main bouts of volcanism had ceased.

There are only 31 volcanic lunar rocks that have been found on Earth in the form of meteorites, and meteorite 16286 is by far the youngest.

"Moon rocks are rare, so it's interesting when we get something that stands out and looks different to everything else," said Snape.

The meteorite is more evidence that volcanism continued throughout this period on the moon; Chang'e 5 has found such evidence in its samples from the moon's farside of volcanism in the past 123 million years. Together, these discoveries are transforming what we thought we thought we knew about the moon's volcanism and how the moon has remained geologically active, at least in bursts, almost to the present day.

The next step is to pinpoint the meteorite's origin on the moon: likely a crater blasted into the surface by an impact that ejected the meteorite long ago. Once identified, it will be a prime location for a future sample-return mission to learn more about lunar volcanism during this little-known period, from which so few samples exist.

Snape presented the findings at the world's premier geochemistry meeting, the Goldschmidt Conference in Prague held between July 6 and July 11.

The Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i captured the newfound comet passing through our cosmic neighborhood, about 290 million miles (465 million kilometers) from Earth.

3I/ATLAS was initially detected by ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) on July 1. It's just the third known interstellar object — meaning it originated outside of our solar system — according to a statement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) NOIRLab, which operates the International Gemini Observatory.

"The sensitivity and scheduling agility of the International Gemini Observatory has provided critical early characterization of this interstellar wanderer," Martin Still, NSF program director for the International Gemini Observatory, said in the statement. "We look forward to a bounty of new data and insights as this object warms itself on sunlight before continuing its cold, dark journey between the stars."

Interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS are remnants from distant star systems that have been ejected into space. They offer valuable insights into the building blocks of other planetary systems in the universe — including the chemical elements that were present when and where they formed, according to the statement.

3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar object detected visiting our solar system, after 1I'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. While more objects of this nature are believed to regularly pass through our solar system, they are incredibly difficult to capture.

However, at an estimated 12 miles (20 km) in diameter, 3I/ATLAS is much larger than previous interstellar objects, making it a better target for study. The new images from the Gemini North telescope show that the comet has a compact coma — the cloud of gas and dust enveloping its icy core. And other observations have suggested that it may be the oldest comet ever discovered (possibly older than our solar system), hailing from the outer thick disk of the Milky Way.

3I/ATLAS will reach its closest approach to the sun on Oct. 30, passing within 130 million miles (210 million km), or just inside the orbit of Mars. In December, 3I/ATLAS will pass within about 170 million miles (270 million km) of Earth, though it will pose no danger to our planet.

Given 3I/ATLAS' highly eccentric orbit, this will be its one and only visit to our solar system, as its trajectory does not loop back around the sun. That's why astronomers around the world are using a wide variety of telescopes to observe the comet during its brief visit, before it returns to interstellar space.

The first wildfire to directly impact Grand Canyon National Park was the Dragon Bravo Fire, which began on July 4. Dragon Bravo has already scorched thousands of acres and continues to destroy a number of structures, including the monumental Grand Canyon Lodge, along its path within the park’s North Rim. Five days after the Dragon Bravo Fire began, another thunderstorm resulted in the creation of the White Sage Fire, which rapidly grew and expanded during a period of dry and hot weather accompanied by powerful wind gusts.

In order to fight the fires from all angles, firefighters, weather forecasters and community leaders depend on information gathered in space from satellites. Some satellites are equipped with instruments that can monitor a wildfire's progression and growth, as well as provide high-resolution photos of both the fire itself and the associated smoke plume. There are two satellite constellations from NOAA that particularly tag-team with wildfire updates: the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). Together, the satellites can paint a picture using tools they're equipped with, with JPSS tracking the United States in a non-geosynchronous orbit while 512 miles (824 kilometers) above us and GOES orbiting around the Earth at the same speed in a geosynchronous orbit while 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above.

So, how do satellites gather information that's crucial in the fight to contain a wildfire?

There are different filters and spectral bands that can be used to get that information., and tools on the satellites are able to analyze just those two things. These tools capture high-resolution images of the growth and expansion of a wildfire in almost real-time. They can also show, via time-lapse, the direction that fire and smoke are moving. If we look at the time-lapse of images taken by the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) aboard NOAA's GOES-18 satellite, you can see where the fire originated, its rapid growth and expansion, and how the direction of the wind steered the flames over time (in this view, the winds were blowing from the north/northwest).

Another instrument that regularly provides important information about wildfires lives on NOAA's JPSS satellites, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21. Even after the sun goes to sleep, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) can continue to snap photos of the wildfire. These details keep first responders and community leaders aware of the fire's behavior — and alert them if any growth, new hot spots, or updates critical with fighting the wildfire can be seen. These monitoring tools thus remain of extreme importance, continuously providing information to help us understand a wildfire with a level of accuracy and precision that ground reports alone cannot offer.

You can find more information on both the Dragon Bravo and White Sage fires through the InciWeb site and any closure details from Grand Canyon National Park are located here.

As wind swirls across the landscape on both Mars and Earth, it sweeps up ground particles that reveal the dry columns. The whirlwinds dance across the landscape, leaving a path revealed by excavated particles. On the active surface of Earth, such paths are hard to spot. But on the nearly inactive surface of Mars, they can remain for months, long after the devils' minutes-long lifetimes.

"Dust devils themselves are difficult to capture in images because they are so short-lived," Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University and lead author of the study, told Space.com by email. "The tracks they leave behind last longer, so we are able to observe them more thoroughly."

Dusting off the fingerprints

On warm, windy days in Earth's deserts, vortices of sand and debris can form suddenly and move unpredictably. (This author distinctly recalls being "chased" by one such devil in the Mojave Desert as a child in 1990.) Similar conditions on Mars can also produce dust devils. But the whirls on the Red Planet tend to be both wider and taller than their counterparts on Earth, and scientists aren't sure why.

Questions like these led Dauber and her colleagues to study images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — the highest-resolution photos of the planet snapped from space. HiRISE can capture features as small as 3 feet (1 meter). But its detailed perspective comes at a price: Its images cover only a small percentage of the Martian surface and are taken by request, though most latitudes and longitudes are well sampled.

Dauber's team studied 21,475 HiRISE images taken between January 2014 and April 2018 — roughly a quarter of the snapshots captured by the instrument as of autumn 2024. Tracks appear in only 798 of those, or just under 4%. Dust devil tracks (DDTs) suggest dust devils are more common at high northern and southern latitudes and are especially active in each hemisphere's summer, peaking in the southern hemisphere's summer.

According to the researchers, Mars' significant orbital eccentricity, or deviation from a perfect circle, causes the atmosphere in the southern summer to circulate more energetically, creating conditions ideal for vortex formation. That, combined with less dust accumulation in the North, makes the southern hemisphere summer an almost perfect storm for dust devils. The observations reflect peak DDT preservation more than dust devil formation, the researchers cautioned, but the culmination coincides with the peak observed by NASA's Spirit rover at Gusev crater, along with global observations of the sand spouts.

The researchers also realized that DDTs most commonly form and are preserved in regions of mixed sand, rocks and bedrock, with little bright dust, the most common surface type identified on Mars. Bright dust scooped up from the surface leaves behind trails that are dark from the underlying landscape.

"The material on the ground is critical to the formation of the DDTs," Dauber said.

Dusty missions

The first Martian dust devil tracks appeared in images sent back from NASA's Mariner 9 mission in 1972 (although they weren't discovered until the images were analyzed in 2014). But it wasn't until 1998, when higher-resolution images were captured by Mars Global Surveyor, that the tracks could be seriously analyzed.

Dust has hindered past ground missions. Mars rovers take their energy from the sun via solar panels. Over time, dust builds up on the panels, limiting their efficacy. The blockage has shuttered missions like NASA's Opportunity rover, which explored the surface for 14.5 years. NASA's InSight lander also succumbed to a dust-related death after four years.

The high winds that birth dust devils can also revitalize robots, however. Opportunity's twin, Spirit, got a second lease on life after a Martian whirlwind cleaned its solar arrays back in 2005.

Understanding where dust devils are most active can help in the selection of landing sites for future missions. High-latitude bands where DDTs and their progenitors occur more frequently could help to scour solar panels and thus enable a more enduring exploration.

"It depends on the mission — every mission is unique," Daubar said. There are many requirements for landing sites and exploration, including regions that will allow for a safe touchdown, alongside complex scientific goals.

"It could be that there are only a few places where the specific science goals can be achieved, and then perhaps this could be a deciding factor between those sites," she said.

A new study of dust devils on Mars was published in May 2025 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The strange orbit of the object, designated 2023 KQ_{14 a}nd nicknamed "Ammonite," classifies it as a "sednoid." Sednoids are bodies beyond the orbit of the ice giant Neptune, known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), characterized by a highly eccentric (non-circular) orbit and a distant closest approach to the sun or "perihelion."

The closest distance that 2023 KQ₁₄ ever comes to our star is equivalent to 71 times the distance between Earth and the sun. The sednoid is estimated to be between 136 and 236 miles (220 and 380 kilometers) wide. That makes it 45 times wider than the height of Mount Everest.

This is just the fourth known sednoid, and its orbit is currently different from that of its siblings, though it seems to have been stable for 4.5 billion years. However, the team behind the discovery, made using Subaru Telescope as part of the Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy (FOSSIL) survey, thinks that all four sednoids were on similar orbits around 4.2 billion years ago. That implies something dramatic happened out at the edge of the solar system around 400 million years after its birth.

Not only does the fact that 2023 KQ₁₄ now follows a unique orbit suggest that the outer solar system is more complex and varied than previously thought, but it also places limits on a hypothetical "Planet Nine" theorized to lurk at the edge of the solar system.

"The fact that 2023 KQ₁₄'s current orbit does not align with those of the other three sednoids lowers the likelihood of the Planet Nine hypothesis," team leader Yukun Huang of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan said in a statement. "It is possible that a planet once existed in the solar system but was later ejected, causing the unusual orbits we see today."

Hello 2023 KQ14. Goodbye Planet Nine?

2023 KQ₁₄ was first spotted in the wide field of view of the Subaru Telescope, located on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, in observations collected during March, May, and August 2023.

The sednoid was confirmed using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope during follow-up observations performed in July 2024.

This data was combined with archival data from other observatories, allowing astronomers to reconstruct the orbit of 2023 KQ₁₄ over the past 19 years.

But this is a celestial body that likely formed as the planets of the solar system were taking shape around the infant sun around 4.6 billion years ago. Thus, astronomers were keen to retell the story of its orbit for much longer than two decades.

To do this, Huang and their FOSSIL team colleagues turned to the computer cluster operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan to perform complex numerical simulations. This revealed the orbital stability of 2023 KQ₁₄ for 4.5 billion years and the implications of that steady orbit.

"2023 KQ₁₄ was found in a region far away where Neptune's gravity has little influence," team member and planetary scientist Fumi Yoshida said. "The presence of objects with elongated orbits and large perihelion distances in this area implies that something extraordinary occurred during the ancient era when 2023 KQ₁₄ formed.

"Understanding the orbital evolution and physical properties of these unique, distant objects is crucial for comprehending the full history of the solar system."

Yoshida added that, at present, the Subaru Telescope is one of the only telescopes on Earth capable of making a discovery like that of 2023 KQ₁₄.

"I would be happy if the FOSSIL team could make many more discoveries like this one and help draw a complete picture of the history of the solar system," Yoshida concluded.

The team's research was published on Monday (July 14), in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The jagged, 54-pound (25-kilogram) chunk of the Red Planet is formally called NWA 16788. It was found in Northwest Africa, which is where the "NWA" title comes from — but, surprisingly, the bidding war to attain this cosmic relic wasn't as enthusiastic as many expected. Before live bidding began, advance bids set the starting price of NWA 16799 at $2 million — during live bidding, however, things were slow. Still, the object sold for higher than the original estimate that maxed out at $4 million.

As Cassandra Hatton, the vice chairman of science and natural history at Sotheby's, told Space.com, NWA 16788 doesn't only set itself apart from other Mars meteorites we've found on the planet in size, but also in aesthetics. "It also looks just like the surface of the Red Planet," she said. "Most other Martian meteorites that we find are really small, thin slices, and when you first look at them, you would never guess that they're Martian." For context, this particular Mars meteorite is about 70% larger than the next largest Mars meteorite that's been located on planet Earth; and Hatton says many of those smaller Red Planet samples sold for between $20,000 and $80,000.

As for the identity of the proud new owner of the largest piece of the Red Planet we have on Earth? Well, we may never know. It's fully up to the buyer to reveal themselves, and Hatton says many choose to remain anonymous.

"There's all sorts of reasons — maybe safety," she said. "Maybe they're worried somebody will try to steal it from them; maybe they want to be an anonymous donor to a museum. People have all sorts of motivations for keeping it quiet, and then some people like to announce it immediately."

This Mars rock wasn't the only rare object to be sold for a hefty sum during Wednesday's auction. The other star of the show was a mounted juvenile Ceratosaurus skeleton from approximately 154-149 million years ago, which sold for $26 million, and a plethora of incredible items were distributed during the event. For instance, a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex foot sold for $1.4 million; a Megalodon Shark tooth from Virginia sold for $18,000; a Neanderthal tool set sold for $45,000; and a stunning, clear blue Aquamarine specimen sold for $75,000. (All prices mentioned do not include the extra fees).

"At the end of the day, it's the bidders who tell us what things are worth, not me, not anyone else. The estimates are just there to give people an indication," Hatton told Space.com. "Last summer, I sold the Stegosaurus 'Apex.' For the Stegosaurus, the estimate was [$4 million to $6 million], and it sold for $44.6 million."

"I've had single objects sell for $6 million," Hatton said. "I did the whole Buzz Aldrin collection, and I think that did $8 million. I did the whole Richard Feynman collection of his Nobel Prize in papers that did $4 million."

The entire concept of auctions, particularly for scientific objects that could benefit the public as well as scientific community, can be quite fraught. Why not freely donate to scientific laboratories, children's museums or other public spaces? Hatton, however, believes that attaching monetary value to such items can incentivize collectors to take care of those items — perhaps better than museums that struggle with funding can.

She also says many collectors tend to donate their purchases to museums, or at least allow them to be displayed, while also providing a sum of money to the selected institution to help staff take care of the objects. Some of that money, she says, may even be set aside to create funding for postdoctoral researchers who can study the objects.

In order to confirm that NWA 16788 is indeed a Mars meteorite, a small piece of it was also broken off to send to a lab. This piece may be helpful for scientists looking to analyze the object. "A sample has been taken and analyzed and published in the meteoritical bulletin, so they could go and get that," Hatton said.

Astronomers have witnessed the birth of a planetary system that could one day resemble the solar system. The discovery offers scientists a proxy to study how our home planetary system formed around the sun around 4.6 billion years ago.

The team was able to pinpoint the moment specks of material that will one day forge planets began to form around the infant star HOPS-315, located around 1,300 light-years away.

The breakthrough was made possible with data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array (ALMA), an array of 66 radio telescopes located in the desert of northern Chile, and observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

"For the first time, we have identified the earliest moment when planet formation is initiated around a star other than our sun," team leader and Leiden University researcher Melissa McClure said.

The team's results were published on Wednesday (July 16) in the journal Nature.

Protostars and protoplanetary disks

Stars are born when cool and overdense patches of interstellar gas and dust collapse under their own gravity. This results in a "protostar" surrounded by an envelope of the same material from which it formed.

This material is eventually flattened out into a swirling disk with the protostar at its heart. That structure is known as a "protoplanetary disk," as it is from this and within it that new planets will form.

Astronomers have seen many infant stars surrounded by protoplanetary disks, embedded within which are young and massive Jupiter-sized worlds. However, to see the origin of these fresh extrasolar planets or "exoplanets," astronomers needed to catch protoplanetary disks at an earlier stage.

"We've always known that the first solid parts of planets, or 'planetesimals,' must form further back in time, at earlier stages," McClure said.

A clue as to what scientists should be looking for in these disks at early stages can be found on Earth, sealed within meteorites that have fallen to our planet.

Sowing the seeds of the solar system

Meteorites are fragments of asteroids that formed 4.6 billion years ago at the same time that the planets of our solar system were taking shape.

That means that trapped within these space rocks is a fossil record of our planetary system, including the materials that were present at its origin.

Within meteorites is a wealth of crystalline minerals that contain silicon monoxide, which condenses at high temperatures, such as those found in the protoplanetary disk around the sun during the formative period of the solar system.

This crystalline material was the first solid matter in the solar system, and was bound together by gravity to create mile-wide planetesimals, the seeds of the terrestrial planets like Earth and the cores of solar system gas giants like Jupiter.

This team was able to spot traces of hot minerals condensing in the protoplanetary disk swirling around HOPS-315. In particular, they detected silicon monoxide both as a gas around this infant star and in crystalline materials. This suggests that the condensation of minerals has just begun around HOPS-315.

"This process has never been seen before in a protoplanetary disk — or anywhere outside our solar system," team member and University of Michigan researcher Edwin Bergin said.

The minerals were first spotted by the JWST, with ALMA pinpointing their location to a small area of the protoplanetary disk. This region has a similar orbital distance to HOPS-315 as the distance between the solar system's main asteroid belt and the sun.

"We're really seeing these minerals at the same location in this extrasolar system as where we see them in asteroids in the solar system," team member and Leiden University researcher Logan Francis said.

That means HOPS-315 is an excellent proxy to study our own cosmic history.

Team member Merel van 't Hoff of Purdue University compared this discovery to "a picture of the baby solar system."

"We're seeing a system that looks like what our solar system looked like when it was just beginning to form," van 't Hoff concluded. "This system is one of the best that we know to actually probe some of the processes that happened in our solar system."

"Our work is a new piece of evidence that suggests that Mars was once a much more complex and active planet than it is now, which is such an exciting thing to be involved in," study leader Adam Losekoot of the U.K.'s Open University said in a statement.

We've known Mars was once a wet planet ever since the Mariner 9 orbiter mission from the '70s photographed a surface covered in dried-up river channels. These channels were dated back to over 3.5 billion years ago. However, channels cut into the ground are not the only evidence for running water on Mars.

When that water ran-off, or evaporated, it left sedimentary deposits. Sometimes we see these in craters that were once lakes filled with water: NASA's Curiosity rover is exploring Gale Crater, which has a central three-mile-tall (five-kilometer-tall) peak covered in sediment.

Other times, these sediments were laid down on river beds. Over the eons, the sediments would have hardened, while the river channels and the land around them would have weathered and eroded away. That left the sediments, which are more resistant to erosion, sticking out as tall ridges. Geologists today call them fluvial sinuous ridges, or, more plainly, inverted channels.

Now, Losekoot, who is a Ph.D. student, has led the discovery of a vast network of these channels in Noachis Terra based on images and data taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera and the Context Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the defunct Mars Global Surveyor mission.

Previously, Noachis Terra had not been given due attention because it lacked the more classical river channels that form more obvious evidence of water. However, by mapping the network of inverted channels, Losekoot realized there was lots of evidence there had once been plentiful water in the region.

"Studying Mars, particularly an under-explored region like Noachis Terra, is really exciting because it's an environment which has been largely unchanged for billions of years," said Losekoot. "It's a time capsule that records fundamental geological processes in a way that just isn't possible here on Earth."

Some of the inverted channels appear as isolated segments that have survived the elements for billions of years. Others are more intact, forming systems that run for hundreds of miles and stand tens of yards tall.

Such a widespread network of inverted channels does not suggest these channels were caused by flash floods, argues Losekoot. Rather, they seem to have formed in stable climatic conditions over a geologically significant period of time during the Noachian–Hesperian transition, which was the shift from one geological era into the next around 3.7 billion years ago.

What's particularly intriguing is the most likely source of water to have formed these inverted channels is precipitation — be it rain, hail or snow. Indeed, given the size of the inverted channel network in Noachis Terra, this region of Mars may have experienced lots of rainy days in a warm and wet climate.

It's more evidence that Mars was once more like Earth than the cold and barren desert it is today.

Losekoot presented his findings at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting held at the University of Durham in the U.K., which ran between July 7 and July 11.

On July 15, a colossal filament erupted from the sun's northeastern limb, dramatically reshaping part of our star's surface, albeit briefly, and unleashing a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space.

The outburst was so powerful that it carved a glowing trench of hot plasma more than 250,000 miles (about 400,000 kilometers) long, roughly the distance from Earth to the moon.

The explosive event was captured in stunning detail by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), showing the filament unraveling as solar material arcs and cascades through the sun's atmosphere. As the filament collapsed, it left behind what some call a "canyon of fire," with towering walls estimated to rise at least 12,400 miles (20,000 km) high, according to Spaceweather.com

These glowing rifts form when the sun's magnetic field lines violently snap and realign after an eruption, leaving behind a searing hot trench of plasma that traces the reshaping magnetic field, according to NASA.

This fiery chasm isn't just a visual spectacle. Filaments are cooler, dense ribbons of solar plasma that can hang suspended above the sun's surface by magnetic fields, according to NOAA. When these become unstable, they can erupt dramatically, sometimes launching coronal mass ejections (CMEs) into space — powerful blasts of solar plasma and magnetic fields that can trigger geomagnetic storms here on Earth.

Coronagraph imagery from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and GOES-19 satellite suggests that while the filament eruption did release a CME, there is no Earth-directed component.

"The CME is heading away from Earth," aurora chaser Vincent Ledvina wrote in a post on X. "Here is the CME in LASCO C2 (left) and CCOR-1 (right) which has a later frame of the CME further spread out. The front is traveling pretty slowly and away from Earth."

You can keep up to date with the latest northern lights forecasts, alerts and geomagnetic storm warnings with our aurora forecast live blog.

This Mars rock is up for auction at Sotheby's in New York City this week, which is why it's currently on display in the Upper East Side. As of now, it's expected to sell for between $2 million and $4 million, but it could very well sell for far more.

"At the end of the day, it's the bidders who tell us what things are worth, not me, not anyone else. The estimates are just there to give people an indication," Cassandra Hatton, the vice chairman of science and natural history at Sotheby's, told Space.com. "Last summer, I sold the Stegosaurus 'Apex.' For the Stegosaurus, the estimate was [$4 million to $6 million], and it sold for $44.6 million."

Hatton said she first heard about the Mars rock (formally called NWA 16788) about a year ago from the rock's seller, who learned about the specimen from a meteorite hunter in Africa. ("NWA" is short for "Northwest Africa," the region where the rock was found.) "When they first acquired it, they called me right away," she said. "I said, 'All right, we have got to get it tested; we need to have it published in the meteoritical bulletin."

As such, the seller went through several formal steps to document and test the rock as well as have it published upon. That testing process was rather rigorous for a few reasons. First of all, unlike lunar meteorite candidates, possible Mars meteorites have no pristine samples to be compared with. During the Apollo years, astronauts physically brought hundreds of pounds of moon rocks back to Earth, and those samples still serve as the isotopic reference point for determining whether a rock is indeed a lunar meteorite or just a peculiar piece of our planet.

Astronauts haven't visited the Red Planet yet, so of course we don't have any Mars rock reference points — and though there is still talk of a possible Mars Sample Return program to bring home samples that NASA's Perseverance rover has been collecting from the Martian surface over the last few years, the timeline on that is as unclear as can be. It may even be cancelled, if the Trump administration's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal is passed as-is by Congress.

Alas, the testing team had to come up with a workaround, and they did so by considering a few clues we have about what a Martian meteorite should look like.

How do you verify a Mars rock?

Imagine something huge impacting another world — in this case, an asteroid striking Mars long ago. As a consequence of that impact, there'd have been a bunch of stuff that shot upward during the crash — chunks of the Martian surface, particles of dust, and who knows what else. If any of that debris managed to shoot far enough to exit the Martian atmosphere, it'd have been possible for those travelers to reach Earth, travel through our atmosphere and land somewhere on our world.

Because of this journey, Martian atmospheric data is important to consider when verifying whether something is a Mars rock — and thanks to the twin Viking landers that NASA sent to Mars in the '70s, scientists indeed have that atmospheric data.

"You'll find little gas pockets in a lot of Martian meteorites," Hatton said. "We've cut those pockets open and compared the gas in those pockets to the gas that we analyzed from the Martian atmosphere — and if they match up, then we know that rock came from Mars."

The next step has to do with the general composition of a meteorite. Typically, Hatton explains, meteorites contain what's known as "Maskelynite" glass, which forms as the result of the big crash that forced the meteorite off the surface of a world.

"That's layer one," she explained. "Is there Maskelynite glass in this rock? If it is, it's a meteorite, because we only find that in meteorites."

"Then it's very easy," she said. "What's the [chemical makeup] of this rock? Compare it to a [Mars] rock that we have that we found in the desert — if they match, then boom. That's Martian."

The market price of Mars

Usually, pricing rare items that come into Sotheby's isn't too much of an ordeal. For instance, if you're trying to figure out the value of an antique necklace, you can look at the value of the stones and metals in the piece, think about the fame of the designer and look into how much other items from the same era cost.

Similar thought processes help auction houses estimate the value of objects like photographs, autographs, technology and art. "If I have a Picasso, I just compare it to the other Picassos," Hatton said. "Is it bigger, blue or older? Is it depicting Marie-Thérèse [Walter, a French model and muse of the artist]?"

The same can't be said for rare scientific items.

"I really have to think about the context, the background, the history, the rarity, the significance, and then I put an estimate on it," Hatton said.

In the case of the Mars rock soon to be up for auction, she said the cost estimate of $2 million to $4 million came from the fact that it's the biggest Red Planet meteorite we have. For context, other, smaller Martian meteorites have sold for between $20,000 and $80,000, Hatton said, but she emphasized that bigger isn't exactly always better in the auction world. Sometimes, the bigger you get, the more likely it is for the bidding price to go down.

"How many people could fit a 100-foot long sauropod in their house? Nobody, not even every museum could fit a sauropod that's 100 feet long," she said, as an example. "So, then your market gets much smaller. That's also something to consider: Who could maintain this? Who could have it in their home?"

But that reasoning doesn't really apply in this case, because NWA 16788 — though huge for a Mars meteorite — can still fit into an average-sized backpack. So, Hatton calls the maximum $4 million figure on the Mars rock at hand a conservative estimate.

But beyond all the statistics, there's also an unusual aesthetic value to consider with NWA 16788.

"It also looks just like the surface of the Red Planet," she said. "Most other Martian meteorites that we find are really small, thin slices, and when you first look at them, you would never guess that they're Martian."

"This one has really amazing fusion crust on the outside," she added. "If you look closely at it, you could almost use it as a film set for a movie about Mars — put little teeny people on there, because you could see the grooves and the ripples and the mountains on it."

But, well, does this belong in a museum?

When asked why she believes a specimen so brilliant it can be called the "largest Mars rock on Earth" should be auctioned off to a collector rather than donated to a public museum or scientific institution — it's no secret that many would argue for the latter — Hatton looked back at the history of museums as a whole.

"If we didn't have personal private collectors, we would not have museums," she said. "Many of my clients give the things to museums or loan them to museums."

She also explained that having to pay for something may make one more likely to care for their property: "If it's precious to you monetarily, you take care of it. Having this value tied to the object helps ensure that it is taken care of."

"There are some museums that don't have the funding and the staff to properly care for objects," she added. "So, a lot of times, the private collectors are saving these objects. They're making sure that they're taken care of."

Hatton also pointed out that many major collectors loan their items to museums, and as part of that loan, offer extra money to have staff take care of the items or fund postdoctoral researchers to study them.

"Part of what I am hoping, and I think I am achieving with a lot of these sales, is raising the profile of all of these different types of space, sci-tech and natural history objects, and helping people understand how important they are."

And though Hatton doesn't allow herself to place her own personal value estimate on the Mars rock — or anything she's auctioning off, for that matter — she highlighted that auctions aren't always purely about the items themselves.

"I've had people cry after they've bought things at an auction. I've cried when I've had people contact me and say, 'will you sell this?' because there [are] your white whales — your grails that you hope maybe one day you'll get to see. I always root for people to get what they want, because it's not just about the object. They're kind of chasing a dream."

While the theories of this well-heeled amateur astronomer might seem fanciful when viewed from 2025, given what was known at the time, a large percentage of the public found Lowell's theories about an inhabited Mars not just credible, but likely. Lowell went so far as to theorize that the planet was straddled by canals, designed and executed by hyper-intelligent beings, that would carry water from the poles to the equator of the apparently arid planet.

While other astronomers had their doubts, popular notions of Mars as a colder and drier near-twin of Earth persisted for almost a half century longer, well into the 1960s. In 1953, Wernher von Braun, who would go on to design NASA's giant Saturn V moon rocket, wrote a seminal work called "The Mars Project,” the first comprehensive look at how to send people to the Red Planet. The centerpiece was a number of huge, winged gliders that would land astronauts on Mars by navigating what was then thought to be an atmosphere perhaps half the density of Earth's.

More generally, contemporary maps of Mars were still based on observations from telescopes like Lowell's 24-inch refractor up to Mount Palomar's 200-inch giant reflector. But even that latter monster showed only a shimmering red blob of a planet with shifting, indistinct imagery.

In short, in the mid-20th century, our understanding of Mars was still as much intuition and imagination as fact. That all changed 60 years ago on July 14, 1965, when a small spacecraft sped by the planet at a distance of just 6,118 miles (9,846 kilometers). After the 22 low-resolution TV images made it back to Earth, the Martian empire dreamed of by Lowell and fiction authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs were smashed into red dust.

Some of NASA's earliest planetary missions, Mariners 3 and 4 were planned and executed by a group of pioneering scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and its associated NASA field center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). NASA was a brand-new agency when the planning for the first Mars flyby was begun a few years earlier, but the core science team had been working together at Caltech for years, and included one of the newest additions to the geology faculty — Bruce Murray, who would later become the fifth director of JPL. Other Caltech professors on the Mariner Mars team were Robert Sharp and Gerry Neugebauer, professors of geology, and Robert Leighton and Victor Neher, both professors of physics.

Despite the impressive intellect brought to bear, the project was, by today's standards, a plunge into the unknown. The combined Caltech and JPL team had little spaceflight experience to guide them. There had been just one successful flight beyond lunar orbit — Mariner 2's dash past Venus in 1962 — to build upon. There was no Deep Space Network to track and command the spacecraft, and navigating to Venus was less challenging than the voyage to Mars, which was almost twice as long — some 325 million miles (523 million km). And while the Mariner design was ultimately quite successful, at the time, flying machines in the harsh environment of space was in its infancy. Most failed to achieve their goals.

Incredibly, the probe was originally designed, like the Venus-bound Mariner 2 that had recently returned copious "squiggly-line” data from that planet, without a camera. Leighton took exception to this, realizing that a lot of valuable data would be gleaned from visual imagery. He had a long history in optical astronomy and was not about to pass up this opportunity to get a close look at Mars. He also understood a more human side of the mission: Images of the planet could forge a powerful connection between planetary science and the public.

Mariner 4 had a twin, Mariner 3, which launched on Nov. 5, 1964. The Atlas rocket that boosted it clear of the atmosphere functioned perfectly (not always the case, given its high failure rate in that era), but the fairing in which Mariner 3 rode became snagged, and the spacecraft, unable to collect sunlight on its solar panels, died within hours, drifting into a heliocentric orbit.

After a hurried fix, Mariner 4 launched three weeks later on Nov. 28 with a redesigned fairing. The probe deployed as planned and began the long journey to Mars. But there was more drama in store: The primitive guidance system, oriented by a photocell device that was intended to acquire and track the bright star Canopus, became confused — both by other stars of similar brightness and also by a cloud of dust and paint flecks ejected when the spacecraft deployed. Ultimately, the tracker was able to find Canopus and the journey continued without incident. This star-tracking technology, along with an instrument-laden scan platform and various other design features, was central to planetary missions for decades.

Just over seven months later, Mars was in the crosshairs. On July 14, 1965, Mariner's science instruments were activated. These included a magnetometer to measure magnetic fields, a Geiger counter to measure radiation, a cosmic-ray telescope, a cosmic dust detector, and the television camera.

This last device had caused no end of consternation. At the time, TV cameras used fragile glass tubes and, with their associated electronics, were slightly smaller than dishwashers. Space-capable TV imagers were not available, and few people had thought to even try designing one. Leighton's team spent countless hours coming up with a low-resolution, slow-scan Vidicon tube — a glass vacuum tube aimed through a toughened telescope — that could withstand the violence of launch and the harsh temperature variations in space.

Just a few hours after the science package was put to work, the TV camera began acquiring images. About nine hours later, with the spacecraft heading away from Mars, the on-board tape recorder, which had stored the data from the primitive camera, initiated playback and transmitted the raw images to Earth. And what images they were.

The first views arrived at JPL shortly after midnight on July 15. These were initially represented by numeric printouts that had to be interpreted into black-and-white images, but the imaging team was impatient. They cut the numbered paper into strips, pasted them onto a backboard, and played "paint by numbers" with grease markers to create an eerily accurate first look.

Once the computer-processed photographs arrived, though they were soft and indistinct, and spectroscopic and other measurements were still inexact, the combined data turned our notions about the true nature of the Red Planet on their head. Within hours, Mars had descended from Lowell's fever dreams to cold, harsh reality.

Quick calculations told the story — Mars was a frigid, desert world, and those who still held to Lowell's dreams of a possible Martian empire had to concede defeat. The planet was a moon-like desert, a place of intense cratering and wide empty plains. The final blow came shortly after the flyby, when Mariner directed its radio signal through the limb of the Martian atmosphere. The atmospheric density was found to be about 1/100th that of Earth. For the dreamers, Mars died on that day in 1965.

But for the gathered Caltech team savoring the fuzzy pictures from Mariner 4's sprint, this was a victory. After the discovery of Venus' true nature, when a planet thought to be a swampy, humid world was revealed as a hellish place of intense pressure and searing temperatures, Mars seemed almost welcoming. And the inclusion of a TV camera on the mission added a human touch that transcended the numbers, bringing the fourth planet into living rooms worldwide.

When discussing the mission a few years later, Leighton related one touching letter he received from, of all people, a milkman. It read, "I'm not very close to your world, but I really appreciate what you are doing. Keep it going." A soft-spoken Leighton said of the sentiment, "A letter from a milkman… I thought that was kind of nice."

After its voyage past Mars, Mariner 4 maintained intermittent communication with JPL and returned data about the interplanetary environment for two more years. But by the end of 1967, the spacecraft had suffered close to 100 micrometeoroid impacts and was out of fuel. The mission was officially ended on Dec. 21.

Since then, a multitude of spacecraft have rocketed Marsward from a variety of nations. The path to Mars is still challenging, and the U.S. leads in successes. From the Viking Mars orbiters and landers of the 1970s through the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, which are still operating today, the Red Planet has crept from the dreadful waste seen by Mariner 4 to a place once covered in shallow oceans and with a possibly temperate atmosphere. And while we have never found any signs of Percival Lowell's high-society Martians, we may soon live in their stead.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe is no stranger to breaking records.

On Dec. 24, 2024, Parker made history by flying closer to the sun than any spacecraft in history. The probe reached a distance of just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the solar surface, entering the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere, known as the corona. During this flyby, it also reached a top speed of 430,000 miles per hour (690,000 kilometers per hour), breaking its own record as the fastest ever human-made object.

Now, NASA has released remarkable video captured during the historic flyby, offering the closest views of the sun ever recorded. The new images were captured with Parker's Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe, or WISPR, revealing a never-before-seen view of the sun's corona and solar winds shortly after they are released from the corona.

"Parker Solar Probe has once again transported us into the dynamic atmosphere of our closest star," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a statement accompanying the images. "We are witnessing where space weather threats to Earth begin, with our eyes, not just with models. This new data will help us vastly improve our space weather predictions to ensure the safety of our astronauts and the protection of our technology here on Earth and throughout the solar system."

WISPR's images revealed an important boundary in the sun's atmosphere called the heliospheric current sheet, where the sun's magnetic field changes direction from north to south. It also captured, for the first time in high resolution, collisions between multiple coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are major drivers of space weather, and are important in understanding risks to astronauts and technology on Earth such as power grids and communications satellites.

"In these images, we're seeing the CMEs basically piling up on top of one another," said Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR instrument scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which designed, built, and operates the spacecraft in Laurel, Maryland. "We're using this to figure out how the CMEs merge together."

Before the Parker Solar Probe, NASA and its international partners could only study solar wind from afar, which is why the spacecraft has been instrumental in closing key knowledge gaps. It identified the widespread presence of "switchbacks" — zig-zagging magnetic field patterns — around 14.7 million miles from the sun and linked them to the origins of one of the two main types of solar wind.

Closer in, at just 8 million miles, Parker discovered that the boundary of the sun's corona is far more uneven and complex than previously believed.

But more remained to be discovered.

"The big unknown has been: how is the solar wind generated, and how does it manage to escape the sun's immense gravitational pull?" said Nour Rawafi, the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "Understanding this continuous flow of particles, particularly the slow solar wind, is a major challenge, especially given the diversity in the properties of these streams — but with Parker Solar Probe, we're closer than ever to uncovering their origins and how they evolve."

Prior to Parker Solar Probe, distant observations suggested there are actually two varieties of slow solar wind, distinguished by the orientation or variability of their magnetic fields. One type of slow solar wind, called Alfvénic, has small-scale switchbacks. The second type, called non-Alfvénic, doesn't show these variations in its magnetic field.

As it spiraled closer to the sun, Parker Solar Probe confirmed there are indeed two types of solar wind. Its close-up views are also helping scientists differentiate the origins of the two types, which scientists believe are unique. The non-Alfvénic wind may come off features called helmet streamers — large loops connecting active regions where some particles can heat up enough to escape — whereas Alfvénic wind might originate near coronal holes, or dark, cool regions in the corona.

"We don't have a final consensus yet, but we have a whole lot of new intriguing data," said Adam Szabo, Parker Solar Probe mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The Parker Solar Probe is built to endure extreme conditions — from the freezing cold of deep space to the intense heat near the sun. A key factor in its survival is the difference between temperature and heat. While space near the sun can reach temperatures of several million degrees, that doesn't necessarily mean there's a lot of heat. This is because the sun's corona is extremely thin, meaning there are fewer particles. Even though individual particles in the corona are incredibly hot, there aren't many. The probe, therefore, doesn't receive much heat.

"While Parker Solar Probe will be traveling through a space with temperatures of several million degrees, the surface of [its] heat shield that faces the sun will only get heated to about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,400 degrees Celsius)," write NASA scientists.

These temperatures are, of course, still incredibly hot, which makes its heat shield, the Thermal Protection System (TPS), essential. The shield is made from a carbon composite foam sandwiched between two carbon plates. Carbon is ideal for this purpose because it is both lightweight and able to withstand extremely high temperatures without melting.

"Tested to withstand up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius), the TPS can handle any heat the sun can send its way, keeping almost all instrumentation safe," explained NASA.

Its structure allows it to endure intense heat while minimizing weight, making it crucial for a spacecraft that needs to travel at extreme speeds. The outer surface of the TPS is also coated with a white ceramic paint, which helps reflect as much solar energy as possible and further reduces the amount of heat absorbed.

Scientists led by Xinyue Yang of the University of Houston analyzed decades of readings from spacecraft and computer models to find that Uranus emits 12.5% more internal heat than the amount of heat it receives from the sun. However, that amount is still far less than the internal heat of other outer solar system planets like Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, which emit 100% more heat than they get from the sun.

The researchers behind this new study say Uranus' internal heat could help reveal the origins of the curious, tilted world. "This means it's still slowly losing leftover heat from its early history, a key piece of the puzzle that helps us understand its origins and how it has changed over time," Wang said in a statement.

In 1986, the iconic Voyager 2 probe flew by Uranus while headed out of the solar system and into interstellar space. A good deal of what scientists understand about the seventh planet from the sun comes from that flyby, that found that Uranus does not reveal significant internal heat.

But it turns out that we may have caught Uranus at a weird time, and some of the readings Voyager 2 collected could have been skewed by a surge in solar weather that occurred during its flyby of the planet.

By reviewing a large set of archival data and combining that with computer models, researchers now believe the internal heat emitted by Uranus could imply a completely different internal structure or evolutionary history for the planet we thought we knew. Its believed that Uranus formed around 4.5 billion years ago along with the rest of the solar system, and NASA believes it formed closer to the sun before moving to the outer solar system around 0.5 billion years later. That story, however, is now called into question by these new findings.

"From a scientific perspective, this study helps us better understand Uranus and other giant planets," Wang said in the statement. The researchers also believe this new understanding of Uranus' internal processes could help NASA and other agencies plan for missions to the distant planet.

In 2022, the National Academy of Sciences flagged a mission concept known notionally as Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) as one of the highest-priority planetary science missions for the next decade. But even then, before massive budget uncertainty hit NASA and the science community in the wake of President Donald Trump's overhaul of U.S. government spending, scientists knew such an ambitious and expensive mission would be difficult to put into motion.

"There are many hurdles to come — political, financial, technical — so we're under no illusion," Leigh Fletcher, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in the U.K. who participated in the decadal survey process, told Space.com in 2022 when the report was published. "We have about a decade to go from a paper mission to hardware in a launch fairing. There's no time to lose."

Whether or not new research into Uranus helps boost support for such a mission, scientists are already hailing these new results as groundbreaking on their own. Study co-author Liming Li said the study of Uranus' internal heat not only helps us understand the distant, icy world better, but could also help inform studies of similar processes here on Earth, including our own changing climate.

"By uncovering how Uranus stores and loses heat, we gain valuable insights into the fundamental processes that shape planetary atmospheres, weather systems and climate systems," Li said in the statement. "These findings help broaden our perspective on Earth's atmospheric system and the challenges of climate change."

A study on Uranus' internal heat was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

In increasing number, probes are being dispatched by multiple countries that can plumb the depths of deliverables from space rocks.

Metallic asteroids are made up mostly of iron and nickel, and also contain platinum group metals, or PGMs for short. Similarly, carbonaceous asteroids are known to contain hydrated minerals.

Tantalizing tastes of asteroids have already been robotically sent back to Earth, by missions such as NASA's OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer), which delivered pieces of the space rock Bennu in September 2023.

Then there's NASA's Psyche spacecraft, which is scheduled to arrive in August 2029 at its target asteroid, Psyche — an object perhaps made of a mixture of rock and metal, with metal composing 30% to 60% of its volume.

Pick-action ready business?

Enter the entrepreneurial work of AstroForge, a company based in Huntington Beach, California. AstroForge sees mining asteroids as the next trillion-dollar industry and is fully engaged in trying to make space mining a real, "pick-action ready" business.

Last February, AstroForge successfully got its $3.5 million Odin spacecraft headed outward to reconnoiter 2022 OB5, a small near-Earth asteroid. But the following month, the firm declared Odin lost in space due to ground station and communication issues.

"Welcome to the school of Hard Rocks," said AstroForge CEO and co-founder Matt Gialich, as the company presses forward on a follow-on asteroid mission, Vestri, in 2026.

AstroForge is a deep-space mining company with the goal of extracting valuable metals from asteroids, starting with PGMs.

"By bringing space resources into Earth's supply chain," the company's website explains, "we're aiming to reduce the need for traditional terrestrial mining methods and explore a more sustainable future — one mission at a time."

Moon versus asteroids

Mining asteroids versus mining the moon was recently discussed by Alex Ellery, a research professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His research was detailed at the Space Resources Roundtable, held here last month at the Colorado School of Mines.

"Can humanity enjoy the benefits of both asteroid and lunar mining without compromise," Ellery asks, "or do we have to choose one at the expense of the other?"

Traditionally, asteroid mining has focused on precious materials like noble metals and PGMs, Ellery said, but only one in 2,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) is known to have PGMs in economically mineable concentrations. While water has been detected in asteroids, that water in hydrated minerals is also rare, roughly one in a 1,000 NEOs, he adds.

While asteroids have diverse resources, including some not found on the moon, they alone likely cannot support industrial self-sufficiency due to scarcity, dispersion, and technical complexity, Ellery thinks.

"If a lunar industry is able to collect deposits of asteroid-sourced materials, it would have both bulk and rare resources that would enable a closed industry in cislunar space," Ellery observes.

Lucrative lunar resources

According to a recent paper led by Jayanth Chennamangalam, an independent researcher in Vancouver, Canada, it may be more advantageous, and therefore more lucrative, to mine asteroids that have impacted the moon rather than the ones that are zipping through space.

We know that many asteroids have crashed into the moon over its lifetime, as evidenced by the craters left on its surface, Chennamangalam told Space.com.

"Most asteroids vaporize on impact, but some don't, and leave behind remnants, depending on the impact velocity," said Chennamangalam.

But how much of these asteroid-derived resources — PGMs and water/hydrated minerals — are still present on the moon?

"The key finding of our research is that there are potentially thousands of craters on the moon that contain PGM ore or hydrated minerals," said Chennamangalam.

"So what we have found," the researcher continued, "is that there are potentially a lot more craters on the moon with ore-bearing asteroidal remnants than there are accessible ore-bearing asteroids. Of course, there are several caveats that need to be kept in mind, and these are discussed in the paper."

That paper, by Chennamangalam and three colleagues, was published in May in the journal Planetary and Space Science.

International body proposed

Meanwhile, the prospect that asteroid orbits may be deliberately changed for research and mining, or in the future, by habitation, has gained the attention of a student team from Imperial College London, the University of Santiago de Compostela and Cairo University.

"Mining is especially likely, given sizable investments into long-term plans made by commercial actors," the student team reports in their proposal, which advocates for the creation of an international body, the Panel on Asteroid Orbit Alteration (PAOA).

That proposal was discussed at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, during a public ceremony on June 30 — Asteroid Day.

Emerging risks

The PAOA idea won the Schweickart Prize, a program of the B612 Foundation. The Schweickart Prize is an annual award designed to foster a new generation of leaders in planetary defense and to encourage ideas to help protect Earth from potential asteroid impacts.

The prize is named after Russell "Rusty" Schweickart, an Apollo 9 astronaut and the co-founder of the Association of Space Explorers and B612.

The PAOA would address emerging risks of unintended asteroid orbit changes from future human space activities.

The proposal "highlights the increasing likelihood of human space activities — including asteroid mining, scientific research missions, and even spacecraft malfunctions — inadvertently altering the orbits of near-Earth objects," notes the B612 Foundation.

"This international body would be tasked with establishing comprehensive scientific, technical and policy guidelines to manage such risks, ensuring a coordinated and effective planetary defense response as the space industry continues its rapid expansion," explains the B612 Foundation statement.

A new sunspot emerging over the eastern limb of the sun is putting on an explosive show and it's heading our way.

Sunspot region 4136 was recently captured crackling with dozens of magnetic explosions known as Ellerman bombs. French astrophotographer Philippe Tosi photographed the activity on July 10 from Nîmes, France, using an H-alpha filter to capture the fine-scale action in exquisite detail. The image shows Ellerman bombs popping like fireworks near a sunspot that has already hurled out multiple M-class solar flares — mid-level eruptions on the solar flare scale — as it appeared over the eastern limb of the sun, according to spaceweather.com.

"This is not the first time I have observed Ellerman's bombs," Tosi told Space.com in an email translated from French using Google translate. "The conditions were difficult because it is currently very hot in the south of France — around 38°C [100 degrees Fahrenheit]."

Ellerman bombs were first described in the early 20th Century by physicist Ferdinand Ellerman. These events occur in the lower solar atmosphere and are driven by magnetic reconnection, a process on the sun in which oppositely charged magnetic fields meet and explosively reconfigure.

Each Ellerman bomb releases around 10²⁶ ergs of energy — roughly equivalent to 100,000 World War II-era atomic bombs, according to spaceweather.com. While that's only about one-millionth the energy of a large solar flare, these mini-explosions are seen as indicators of magnetic complexity in a sunspot. When opposite magnetic polarities collide and reconnect, they release energy in quick, bright flashes.

That complexity could mean bigger fireworks ahead. With the sunspot now rotating to face Earth, it could pose a threat for stronger space weather events in the coming days. M-class flares, like those already seen, can cause brief radio blackouts and minor satellite disruptions when aimed directly at our planet.

Scientists and skywatchers alike will be keeping a close eye on this sunspot region as it rotates into an Earth-facing position in the coming days.

The asteroid, which at one point had a 1 in 43 chance of striking our planet, now has a 1 in 25 (4%) chance of hitting the moon in 2032.

New research suggests that if such an impact were to occur, ejecta blasted from the moon could damage satellites orbiting Earth. The resultant debris could also create a stunning meteor shower over Earth.

"A 2024 YR4 impact on the moon would pose no risk to anything on the surface of the Earth: our atmosphere will shield us," research author and University of Western Ontario astronomer Paul Wiegert told Space.com. "But the impact could pose some danger to equipment or astronauts (if any) on the moon, and certainly to satellites and other Earth-orbiting platforms, which are above our atmosphere."

What's the damage?

If 2024 YR4 were to strike the moon in 2032, it would be the largest lunar impact in approximately 5,000 years. Wiegert explained that the impact would release energy equivalent to the detonation of 6 million tons of TNT. That's comparable to the detonation of a large nuclear weapon.

For comparison, "Little Boy," the nuclear weapon that devastated Hiroshima, released an explosive yield equivalent to approximately 15,000 tons of TNT. Understandably, such a large blast on the lunar surface would create a lot of debris.

"The impact would excavate a crater about 0.62 miles (1 kilometer across)," Wiegert said. "Most of this material would fall back to the moon, but a small fraction, around 0.02% to 0.2%, could be ejected at high enough speeds to escape the moon."

Though that is just a small fraction of the total debris, it still equates to between 10 million and 100 million kilograms of lunar rock entering space.

"The YR4 impact, if it occurs and if it occurs in a favorable location, could produce a flux of meteoroids 10 to 1,000 times higher than the normal background for a few days," Wiegert said. "The debris would be travelling a bit slower than typical meteors, at around 22,400 miles per hour (10 km/s) rather than 44,700 to 67,100 mph (20 to 30 km/s), but this is still faster than most bullets."

In fact, that ejecta speed is about 11 times faster than a bullet fired by a rifle and 30 times as fast as a bullet from a handgun. That means these pieces of debris would have more than enough energy to damage satellites or other space-based technology.

To reach Earth-orbiting satellites, the debris would have to travel about 236,000 miles (380,000 km), meaning we would have hours to days of warning about the impending danger.

Fortunately, though this could disturb things here on the surface that rely on satellites, like communication, navigation, and weather monitoring, the direct risk is very low.

"The debris will burn up in Earth's atmosphere. We don't expect there to be many pieces large enough to survive passing through Earth's atmosphere," Wiegert said. "A rock would have to be 3.3 feet (1 meter) or more in diameter to survive entry, but we expect most of the debris to be inches or smaller."

Wiegert added that the impact of this debris to our immediete space enviroment could be long-lasting, lingering around Earth for years.

"We were surprised at how well material can be delivered to the Earth by this kind of impact, though it really depends on the asteroid impacting in a certain region of the moon, as impacts in other regions produce very little," he added.

So does the possible threat presented by 2024 YT4's potential impact on the moon warrant a new scale, similar to the Torino Scale (the method used to categorize the potential impact hazard of near-Earth objects like asteroids and comets)?

"No, the indirect consequences are too varied to compress into a single scale," Torino scale creator and planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Richard P. Binzel told Space.com. "The Torino Scale is all about whether a passing asteroid merits attention in the first place, and of course, most asteroids don't."

Binzel added that probability is always the key element with asteroids and any risk they pose.

"What one can control, by obtaining more telescopic measurements, is determining with certainty whether you have a hit or miss. After all, at the end of the day, an object either hits or misses. The answer is deterministic," he continued. "As much as I would love to be a spectator watching those lunar fireworks, that is not the way to bet or something to get too concerned about.

"The only imperative that makes sense right now is to get the data and bring certainty to the question of hit or miss."

Whether 2024 YR4 impacts the moon or not, where this impact would occur on the lunar surface, and the risk that it poses to space-tech could be determined when the asteroid returns to Earth and becomes visible again in 2028.

"Now we wait. There is, as of right now, about a 4% chance of asteroid YR4 hitting the moon, and we probably won't get this number updated until the asteroid returns to visibility in 2028," Wiegert said. "At that point, we should know pretty quickly whether or not it will in fact hit the moon.

"The whole event would be exciting to watch in binoculars or a small telescope."

The team's research has been submitted for publication in the American Astronomical Society journals, and a preprint version is available on the repository website arXiv.

The object was already exciting to astronomers as only the third space object seen entering the solar system from beyond its limits, the other two being 1I/'Oumuamua seen in 2017 and 2I/Borisov detected in 2019.

However, new research has shown this potentially "water ice-rich" visitor could be even more extraordinary than initially believed. 3I/ATLAS could be around 3 billion years older than our 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and thus any comet ever before observed.

University of Oxford astronomer Matthew Hopkins is part of a team of scientists that think 3I/ATLAS, discovered on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope, is around 7 billion years old.

"All non-interstellar comets, such as Halley's comet, formed at the same time as our solar system, so they are up to 4.5 billion years old," Hopkins said in a statement. "But interstellar visitors have the potential to be far older, and of those known about so far, our statistical method suggests that 3I/ATLAS is very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen."

The secret to 3I/ATLAS' old age

The key to the advanced age of 3I/ATLAS is the fact that it comes from a completely different region of the Milky Way than previous interstellar visitors.

Based upon the steep trajectory that 3I/ATLAS appears to be taking through our galaxy, Hopkins and colleagues theorize that it originated in the Milky Way's "thick disk" of stars.

The thick disk is a band of our galaxy's most ancient stars that sandwiches the thin disk, which formed more recently and contains our relatively young star, the sun, and the solar system.

"This is an object from a part of the galaxy we've never seen up close before," University of Oxford astrophysicist Chris Lintott said. "We think there's a two-thirds chance this comet is older than the solar system, and that it's been drifting through interstellar space ever since."

If 3I/ATLAS originates from the Milky Way's thick stellar disk, and thus formed around an ancient star, this also has implications for its chemical composition. Hopkins and crew suggest the interstellar interloper may be rich in water ice.

As 3I/ATLAS gets closer to the sun, it will get warmer. Frozen ices will turn to gas, a process called sublimation, and erupt from the surface of the comet.

This outgassing will give 3I/ATLAS a cometary aura, or "coma," and a bright tail, the familiar and distinctive characteristics of comets.

Observations have already indicated that 3I/ATLAS is bursting to life with cometary activity. These observations also seem to indicate that 3I/ATLAS is bigger than previous interstellar invaders 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

"We're in an exciting time, 3I/ATLAS is already showing signs of activity. The gases that may be seen in the future as 3I/ATLAS is heated by the sun will test our model," team member Michele Bannister, of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, said. "Some of the biggest telescopes in the world are already observing this new interstellar object – one of them may be able to find out!"

One of the telescopes that will be trying to get a look at 3I/ATLAS will be the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

In fact, this interstellar visitor was first spotted as scientists were preparing to make observations with Rubin, which they predict will uncover between 5 and 50 interstellar objects passing through the solar system as it conducts the 10-year-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

"The discovery of 3I/ATLAS suggests that prospects for Rubin may now be more optimistic; we may find about 50 objects, of which some would be similar in size to 3I/ATLAS.

"This week's news, especially just after the Rubin First Look images, makes the upcoming start of observations all the more exciting."

The model the team used to investigate the origins of 3I/ATLAS was developed by Hopkins as part of his doctoral thesis, one he defended just one week before the interstellar object was discovered.

Rather than heading on vacation, Hopkins found himself applying the model, dubbed the Ōtautahi–Oxford Model, in real-time for the first time. The test subject: 3I/ATLAS.

"Rather than the quiet Wednesday I had planned, I woke up to messages like '3I!' It's a fantastic opportunity to test our model on something brand new and possibly ancient," Hopkins concluded.

Hopkins discussed the 3I/ATLAS findings on Friday (June 11) at the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) 2025 at Durham University in the UK.

Darryl Z. Seligman is a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow/Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University.

Recently, scientists around the world announced the discovery of 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object to pass through the solar system. This discovery will have significant scientific impacts, advancing our understanding of how solar systems form and evolve throughout the history of the galaxy. 3I/ATLAS has also come at an especially auspicious time, given the recent advent of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and ongoing difficult discussions on funding for the space sciences. The scientific and cultural impact of 3I/ATLAS over the coming months and years will serve as an exemplar of what astronomy can learn and why it matters.

Until recently, humanity had only discovered two interstellar objects — 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov. Infamously, 'Oumuamua exhibited a mysterious nongravitational acceleration without a dust coma, which is still not well-understood. Unfortunately, 'Oumuamua was only detected after it had passed close to the sun, and it quickly became undetectable. As a result, there is little data on this object. Meanwhile, 2I/Borisov was a very traditional comet, albeit an extrasolar one. Although we understand more about Borisov, a sample of one understood and one weird object is not enough to provide any meaningful conclusions. The detection of 3I/ATLAS is a great improvement in this context — the detection of a 3rd object is a 50% increase in the sample size, and given the strangeness of 'Oumuamua, it effectively doubles the sample of understandable objects.

Even though 3I/ATLAS was only discovered recently, observations are already beginning to clarify the population of interstellar objects. Since 3I/ATLAS appears to be a comet, like 2I/Borisov, we can determine that comet-like interstellar objects are far more common than exotic ones like 'Oumuamua. In addition, 3I has an excess velocity of nearly 60 km/s (134,000 mph) relative to the sun. Since the influence of the galaxy tends to speed up objects over time, this velocity implies that ATLAS is far older than either 'Oumuamua or Borisov — around 3-11 billion years old. This fact alone tells us that interstellar objects were being produced relatively early in the lifetime of the galaxy, presumably along with exoplanetary systems. We can even begin to determine the distribution of these objects and infer the population of the still-unseen planets that must have ejected them into interstellar space.

And that is not all. Even though 3I/ATLAS was discovered less than a week ago, it will be observable for months to come. Astronomy's great instruments, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, are expected to reveal its size, composition, spin, and how it reacts to being heated for the first time. As the months pass and more data come in, we will peel back the mysteries of 3I and gain new insights into the workings of distant planetary systems.

It is a happy coincidence and a pointed lesson that 3I/ATLAS was discovered less than a week after the Vera C. Rubin Observatory came online, although Rubin did not discover this object. In Rubin's first 10 hours of observation, it found more than 2,000 previously unknown asteroids, and is expected to discover many more interstellar objects like 3I. As our catalog of interstellar objects grows, we will gain ever-increasing insight into these products of exoplanetary systems. As Rubin discovers these objects, the lessons learned from our observations of 3I will let us more effectively leverage our scientific capabilities to learn about these visitors.

At a critical moment, given the current Congressional discussions on science funding, 3I/ATLAS also reminds us of the broader impact of astronomical research. An example like 3I is particularly important to astronomy — as a science, we are supported almost entirely by government and philanthropic funding. The fact that this science is not funded by commercial enterprise indicates that our field does not provide a financial return on investment, but instead responds to the public's curiosity about the deep questions of the universe: Where did we come from? Are we alone? What else is out there? The curiosity of the public, as expressed by the will of the U.S. Congress and made manifest in the federal budget, is the reason that astronomy exists.

At a time when federal science funding is under threat, we are fortunate for the striking example of 3I/ATLAS. The public interest in this object and the sense of wonder that it brings can help renew public and political commitment to space science. In 3I/ATLAS, we see both the promise of astronomy and the importance of continuing its funding.

That may not sound like much, but it was the shortest day since modern records began.

It's not a one-off either. Scientists expect two more short days this summer, on July 22 and Aug. 5, all thanks, in part, to the moon.

What makes Earth spin faster?

Earth doesn't rotate at a perfectly constant speed. While we define a day as 24 hours, in reality, the length of a day can vary slightly from one day to the next due to both internal and external forces acting on the planet.

Over long timescales, Earth's rotation is actually gradually slowing down, largely because of tidal friction from the moon. The moon's gravity pulls on Earth's oceans, creating tidal bulges that act like a brake. This adds about 2 milliseconds to the length of a day every century.

But over shorter timescales, days to months, Earth's spin can actually speed up and that's what happened on July 9, and will also happen on July 22 and Aug. 5.

The moon's role

On July 9, the moon was at its maximum declination, meaning it was positioned farthest from Earth's equator. This creates an off-center gravitational pull that slightly changes Earth's axial wobble, leading to a small but measurable increase in rotational speed.

That unusual lunar alignment is the primary cause of the shortened day. Two more high-declination alignments — on July 22 and Aug. 5 — are expected to create similar effects according to the BBC Sky at Night Magazine.

How do we know?

Scientists have been using atomic clocks to monitor Earth's rotation with millisecond precision since the 1960s, with globally coordinated timekeeping started in 1972.

Atomic clocks can detect fluctuations of just a few milliseconds in the length of a day. By comparing Earth-based time known as Universal Time 1 with International Atomic Time (TAI) scientists can track exactly how much the planet's rotation varies.

According to the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), July 9, 2025, was the shortest day ever recorded using these modern methods.

Could we lose a second?

Yes, and it would be a historic first.

When Earth's rotation slows down over time, scientists add a "leap second" to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to keep civil time aligned with Earth's actual spin. This usually happens every few years. The last time it occurred was in 2016.

Leap seconds work like this: if Earth falls more than 0.9 seconds out of sync with TAI, the IERS steps in to add a second to the clock, typically on June 30 or Dec. 31.

But now, with Earth spinning faster, we're facing the opposite problem. If this trend continues, we could soon be ahead of atomic time, which would require removing a second instead.

This would be called a negative leap second, and it's never been done before.

Some scientists predict that if Earth's rotation continues to speed up by just a few more milliseconds each year, a negative leap second might be needed around 2029, according to BBC Sky at Night Magazine, though the exact timing depends on future measurements.

DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, slammed into the 558-foot-wide (170-meter-wide) asteroid Dimorphos on Sept. 26, 2022. The force of the impact shortened Dimorphos' orbit around its larger asteroid companion, Didymos, by about 32 minutes. The point of the mission was to show that we could deflect hazardous asteroids if they're ever found to be on a collision course with Earth.

However, it now seems that there are more subtleties involved in deflecting asteroids than simple brute force.

Prior to impact, an Italian-built cubesat called LICIACube, which had piggybacked on DART, detached and took images of the immediate aftermath of the impact. As well as general clouds of dust, LICIACube saw two clusters of boulders, ranging in size from 1.3 to 23.6 feet (40 centimeters to 7.2 meters), speeding away from the point of impact. Later observations by the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed the presence of these boulders.

"We saw that the boulders weren't scattered randomly in space," Tony Farnham, an astronomer at the University of Maryland and lead author of the new research, said in a statement. "Instead, they were clustered in two pretty distinct groups, with an absence of material elsewhere, which means that something unknown is at work here."

Furthermore, these two clusters of boulders imparted more than three times the momentum imparted by the DART spacecraft.

"We succeeded in deflecting an asteroid, moving it from its orbit," said Farnham. "Our research shows that while the direct impact of the DART spacecraft caused this change, the boulders ejected gave an additional kick that was almost as big. That additional factor changes the physics we need to consider when planning these types of missions."

Twenty years ago, when NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft was deliberately sent to collide with comet 9P/Tempel, it hit a relatively smooth surface, which was reflected in a smooth and continuous ejecta sheet rather than disparate groups of large pieces of debris.

Dimorphos, in contrast to 9P/Tempel, has a rougher surface that's littered with large boulders.

Due to this, Jessica Sunshine, who is a professor of astronomy and geology at the University of Maryland and who has worked on both the Deep Impact and DART missions, thinks she knows what happened when DART hit Dimorphos.

"DART's solar panels likely hit two big boulders, called Atabaque and Bodhran, on the asteroid [in the moment before the main body of the spacecraft hit]," said Sunshine. "Evidence suggests that the southern cluster [of escaping rocks] is probably made up of fragments from Atabaque, a 3.3-meter-radius [10.8 meters] boulder."

This southern cluster contains 70% of the ejected boulders and was moving at high velocities of up to 32 miles per second (52 kilometers per second) at shallow angles to the surface. The ejection of the southern cluster alone could have been enough to tilt Dimorphos' orbital plane around Didymos by up to a degree.

By comparing Deep Impact with DART, it seems evident that objects with different properties to one another can react differently to being impacted. These differences will come into play should we have to deflect a dangerous asteroid or comet for real, because an error brought about by not understanding the effect of a surface on the way debris is ejected could spell disaster.

"If an asteroid was tumbling toward us, and we knew we had to move it a specific amount to prevent it from hitting Earth, then all these subtleties become very, very important," said Sunshine. "You can think of it as a cosmic pool game. We might miss the pocket if we don't consider all the variables."

To learn more, and to confirm these changes predicted by the ejection of the boulders, the European Space Agency's Hera mission will follow up on DART when it arrives at the Didymos–Dimorphos system in 2026. However, it will have to look out for boulders and other debris produced by the DART impact that could provide their own impact hazard to the spacecraft.

The new results were published on July 7 in the Planetary Science Journal.

Correction 7/10: 32 miles per second is equivalent to 52 kilometers per second, not 52 meters per second. This article has been updated to reflect that.

What is it?

At 3,200 square miles (8,300 square kilometers), Lake Titicaca is the largest freshwater lake in South America. Thought to be around three million years old, the lake is one of just a handful of ancient lakes remaining around the globe. Over 25 different rivers dump into the lake, feeding into its large size. Ancient structures and artifacts show that humans have lived around Lake Titicaca since before colonial times and continue to live there today.

Where is it?

Lake Titicaca lies between ranges of the Andes Mountains in a basin that's part of the Altiplano (high plateau) of the northern Andes in Peru. At 2.36 miles (3.81 km) above sea level, the lake is the highest in the world.

Why is it amazing?

This photo, taken by an astronaut aboard the ISS in October 2024, shows a stunning example of sunglint reflecting from the surface of the waters of Lake Titicaca.

Sunglint is an optical phenomenon that happens when sunlight reflects off a body of water directly into the camera, creating silvery bright patches, especially over smooth surfaces. Sunglint can help reveal subtle details in the water that may be invisible under ordinary lighting, including any oils or films created by algae, wind patterns and boat wakes.

Here, several V-shaped patterns show boat wakes, while two subtle arcs in the top left show internal waves. These features can help scientists better study hard-to-access areas of Lake Titicaca, learning more about the unique ecosystems it provides.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about studying Earth from space and monitoring bodies of water like Lake Titicaca.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has captured the clearest images yet of the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS as it moves inward through the solar system.

ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) snapped new images of the comet just two days after it was discovered, recording a timelapse as the object moved across the sky. The resulting stacked image is the deepest view yet of the interstellar intruder.

"These data were obtained with the FORS2 instrument on the VLT on the night of 3 July 2025," ESO officials wrote in a July 8 statement. The VLT timelapse shows the comet moving over the course of 13 minutes.

Comet 3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1 by the Deep Random Survey remote telescope in Chile, part of the NASA-funded ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) telescope, when the comet was about 410 million miles (670 million kilometers) away from the sun. Originally designated C/2025 N1 (ATLAS), it was quickly confirmed to be an interstellar visitor due to its hyperbolic and highly eccentric orbit.

3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar object detected visiting our solar system, after 1I’Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. (The 3I in the newfound object's name stands for "third interstellar.")

ESO says that better quality images of the comet will become available as it makes its way into the inner solar system. The enigmatic object is expected to make its closest approach to Earth in late October 2025, but it won’t be visible to telescopes or astronomers at this point, as 3I/ATLAS will be hiding behind the sun.

"It will become observable again in December 2025, as it makes its way back to interstellar space," ESO stated.

ESO added that VLT and telescopes around the globe will continue to make observations of the fleeting celestial visitor, hoping to uncover clues about its structure, composition and origin.

NASA's troubled efforts to get prized Martian samples to Earth could get a lifeline, if a new proposal for a more cost-effective mission architecture gets the go-ahead.

The Perseverance rover landed on Mars in 2021 and set about collecting intriguing and diverse samples in preparation for a follow up Mars Sample Return Mission (MSR) campaign, which would pick the samples up and deliver them to Earth for analysis. However, independent reviews indicated costs ballooning to up to $11 billion, and MSR faces cancellation in Trump administration budget proposals for 2026.

In a new effort to revive the program, aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, which has built 11 of NASA's 22 Mars spacecraft over the years, is proposing a cut-price, streamlined mission that would use a smaller lander, a smaller Mars ascent vehicle and a smaller Earth entry system.

The lander would build on heritage from NASA's InSight lander, which successfully touched down on the Red Planet in November 2018.

"Our most recent commercial industry-led offer to NASA is to execute Mars Sample Return (MSR) as a firm-fixed price solution for under $3 billion," a June 26 statement from Lockheed Martin read.

"Given current MSR estimates of $7 billion, our goal is to utilize existing designs and streamline operations of the primary spacecraft and systems — while managing risk and reducing oversight — offering a significantly lower total mission cost," the statement continued.

In addition to its Mars expertise, the company noted that it designed and built the spacecraft and return capsules for all three of NASA's robotic sample return missions, including the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, which delivered samples from the space rock Bennu to Earth in 2023.

"With a commercial industry approach that focuses on managing key requirements, reducing complexity by leveraging heritage, flight-proven elements and limiting new designs to only those needed to close the architecture, we can bring back the samples that will unlock the mysteries of Mars, and lay the groundwork for the astronauts who will set foot on the Red Planet," Lockheed Martin wrote.

But Lockheed's plan is not the only alternative vision for MSR. Private space company Rocket Lab put forward its own cut-price proposal for the mission last year, in response to a NASA call for ideas to get the precious samples home in a faster and cheaper manner.

China too is working on a robotic campaign to collect and return Mars samples. With the launch of its Tianwen 3 mission set for late 2028, the country will get the first shot at acquiring the historic first Red Planet samples, with the material potentially holding the evidence of life beyond Earth.

For now, the U.S. approach to Mars appears to be shifting from a robotic approach and toward putting astronauts on the Red Planet, according to Trump administration budget proposals, likely using SpaceX's in-development Starship megarocket. Landing humans on Mars is much more challenging and complex but, if realized, would also see invaluable Martian rock, dust and atmosphere samples delivered to Earth.

"Not only can you teach an old spacecraft new tricks, you can open up entirely new regions of the subsurface to explore by doing so," Gareth Morgan of the Planetary Science Institute and co-investigator on MRO's Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument, said in a statement.

MRO is something of a veteran now, having been in orbit around Mars since 2006. It carries five instruments still in operation (a sixth, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, CRISM, was shut down in 2023). The spacecraft typically points these instruments at targets on the surface by tipping itself over by up to 28 degrees. If MRO performs one of these rolls so a particular instrument can get a good view of something, it usually means the other four are inconvenienced, hence why the roll maneuvers are planned weeks in advance so as not to interrupt other observations.

Things usually work out — however, the SHARAD instrument has always been at a disadvantage.

SHARAD fires pulses of radar at Mars that are able to detect water-ice buried as deep as 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) below the surface. Yet, SHARAD is positioned on the rear of the spacecraft, playing second fiddle to the likes of the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), which has the best views in the house from the front of the spacecraft. From the rear, SHARAD's radar beams typically catch part of the spacecraft's structure, resulting in interference that reduces clarity and how deep underground it can probe.

"The SHARAD instrument was designed for the near-subsurface and there are select regions of Mars that are just out of reach for us," said Morgan. "There is a lot to be gained by taking a closer look at those regions."

So, starting in 2023, MRO's engineers began experimenting with the spacecraft by performing what they describe as "very large rolls" of 120 degrees, spinning the spacecraft backwards so it is almost upside down relative to Mars. During the large roll, SHARAD gets an unencumbered view of Mars' surface, which permits the radar signal to be 10 times stronger.

There is a caveat to these very large rolls, though. During a standard roll of up to 28 degrees, MRO's high-gain antenna can remain pointed at Earth and its solar arrays can keep tracking the sun to maintain power. During a 120-degree roll, the high-gain antenna isn't pointed at Earth and the solar arrays lose sight of the sun.

This means that a 120-degree roll requires even more planning before it is performed.

"The very large rolls require a special analysis to make sure we'll have enough power in our batteries to safely do the roll," Reid Thomas, who is MRO's Project Manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the statement.

As a result, the MRO team is limiting the spacecraft to just one or two very large rolls each year, but they hope to be able to streamline the process and perform these maneuvers more often in future. It could really be worth it: Finding large pockets of water-ice close to the Martian surface would be vital for future astronauts who could use it for drinking water as well as for producing oxygen and rocket fuel. Plus, the very existence of the water at different latitudes can tell us more about the history of water and the past climate of Mars.

There's also another benefit to the rolls. There is one instrument on MRO that was not designed to require rolls to point, and that is the Mars Climate Sounder, which measures small changes in temperature over the course of the Martian seasons. The Climate Sounder has to be able to point both down at the surface and at the horizon where it can peer through the thin layers of Mars' atmosphere; to aid it in these observations, the Climate Sounder was affixed to its own gimbal. However, by 2024, this gimbal had grown unreliable due to age, and so the Climate Sounder now relies on the standard 28-degree rolls to make its observations. The very large 120-degree rolls give the Climate Sounder more flexibility.

Where it used to be the case that the rolls limited MRO's science output because they only gave a good view to one instrument at a time, the rolls are now helping the aging Mars probe to maintain its science output. It's not quite cartwheels, but it shows that MRO still has a lot of life left in it yet.

An assessment of the success of the large rolls is described in The Planetary Science Journal.

What is it?

Named after the paleoanthropologist who co-discovered the Lucy skeleton, NASA's Lucy space probe is key to helping scientists understand the early history of our solar system. Launched on Oct. 16, 2021, Lucy is the first space mission designed specifically to study Trojan asteroids, which are ancient remnants from the early solar system that share orbits with the sun and Jupiter.

One of these asteroids is the Donaldjohanson. Discovered in 1995, this small rocky asteroid (not considered a Trojan asteroid) was located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Where is it?

This photograph was taken in the main asteroid belt of our solar system, where the spacecraft came close to the asteroid at 596 miles (960 kilometers) from Earth.

Why is it amazing?

On April 20 2025, NASA's Lucy had a close encounter with the asteroid Donaldjohanson, taking this close up image. While Donaldjohanson isn't considered a Trojan asteroid, the flyby provided a "dress rehearsal" for the Lucy mission before heading toward Jupiter to study the Trojan asteroids farther away from Earth.

Once there, Lucy will conduct four flybys, observing at least six asteroids. According to NASA, the first close encounter will be with asteroid Eurybates in August 2027.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about NASA's Lucy mission and the process of asteroid formation as the space probe continues to travel our solar system.

Named 3I/ATLAS, where 3I stands for "third interstellar", and designated C/2025 N1 (ATLAS), the object was first spotted on July 1, 2025, by the Deep Random Survey remote telescope in Chile, part of the ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) project.

It's a significant find. But what exactly is it?

Initially referred to by the temporary designation A11pl3Z, 3I/ATLAS drew immediate attention from astronomers because of its peculiar motion. Rapid follow-up observations and reanalysis of previous data led to the preliminary conclusion that the object was not bound by the sun's gravity. That makes it an interstellar object — only the third ever seen after 1I'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. "If confirmed, it will be the third known interstellar object from outside our solar system that we have discovered, providing more evidence that such interstellar wanderers are relatively common in our galaxy," Mark Norris, Senior Lecturer in Astronomy at the University of Central Lancashire, told Space.com at the time of 3I/ATLAS’s discovery.

Even more exciting? 3I/ATLAS is the largest and brightest interstellar object yet, which means it could help scientists unlock clues about the formation of other star systems.

How do we know it's interstellar? Could it strike Earth? Can we send a spacecraft to intercept it? Here are all of your questions answered and everything else you need to know about this rare discovery, including why it may be the first of many more interstellar objects to be detected.

How do we know 3I/ATLAS is from another star system?

What makes astronomers certain about the interstellar nature of 3I/ATLAS is its trajectory. The object follows a highly hyperbolic orbit, which means it's not gravitationally bound to the sun. Its orbital path also has an eccentricity of 6.2. For context, any object with an eccentricity above 1 is on a path that does not loop back around the sun, implying it comes from — and will return to — interstellar space. In comparison, the first known interstellar visitor, 1I/'Oumuamua, had an eccentricity of about 1.2, and 2I/Borisov came in at 3.6. 3I/ATLAS massively outpaces both.

"Some long-period comets could have a brush with Jupiter that modifies its orbit to 1.05, i.e., hyperbolic on the way out, but just barely," Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, told Space.com. "This one is firmly hyperbolic on the way in, so interstellar."

How is 3I/ATLAS different from 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov?

Aside from being significantly more hyperbolic, the most striking difference is size.

"3I/ATLAS is much larger than the other two — it's about 15 kilometers (km) [9 miles] in diameter, with huge uncertainty, compared to 100m for 1I/'Oumuamua and less than 1km for 2I/Borisov," said Hainaut. 3I/ATLAS may even be as wide as 12 miles (20 km). However, that conclusion could change with more observations.

What is 3I/ATLAS?

What 3I/ATLAS and 2I/Borisov have in common is that they are both comets. Shortly after its discovery, signs of a comet-like coma and tail became evident, giving it an additional designation of C/2025 N1 (ATLAS), the naming convention for comets.

Since 1I/ʻOumuamua was observed only as it was leaving the solar system, it was difficult for astronomers to get enough data on it to confirm its exact nature — hence the crazy theories about it being an alien spaceship — though it's almost certainly an asteroid or a comet.

Could 3I/ATLAS strike Earth?

Right now, 3I/ATLAS is within Jupiter's orbit, about 323 million miles (520 million km) from Earth and 420 million miles (670 million km) from the sun.

3I/ATLAS will reach approximately 167 million miles (270 million km) from Earth on Dec. 19, and at no point will it pose a threat. It will get to within 18 million miles (30 million km) of Mars on Oct.2 and to within 130 million miles (210 million km) of the sun — its closest point (perihelion) — on Oct. 29. At perihelion, it will be traveling at around 42 miles (68 km) per second/second or about 152,000 miles (245,000 km) per hour.

Is 3I/ATLAS visible in the night sky?

Only with the right equipment — and patience.

Right now, 3I/ATLAS is in the constellation Sagittarius in the arc of the Milky Way, low on the southern horizon as seen from mid-northern latitudes in July. Traveling south, it's around magnitude 18.5, making it about 2.5 million times fainter than Polaris, according to Gianluca Masi at the Virtual Telescope Project, who imaged 3I/ATLAS on July 3. A 150-200mm/6-8-inch aperture telescope with a CCD camera is required to image 3I/ATLAS, while an optical telescope would need an aperture of around 400 mm/16-inch.

"It will not be visible to the naked eye, and I think it will be a challenge for an amateur, but some have impressive equipment these days," Professor Martin Barstow at the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Leicester, told Space.com.

However, that could change because as it gets closer, it's expected to brighten. "By the time it makes its closest approach, it will be a relatively easy target for amateur astronomers to observe," said Norris. By then, it could reach magnitude 11. For most, 3I/ATLAS will be a fascinating science story but not a skywatching opportunity.

When will professional telescopes observe 3I/ATLAS?

Most large observatories are in the Southern Hemisphere, where 3I/ATLAS will be best placed, so expect numerous images to be shared over the coming days and weeks.

As it gets close to its bright perihelion, it will be lost in the sun's glare as seen from Earth, so professional astronomers will study it — just as soon as the bright moon has departed the sky, likely in the weeks following the last quarter moon on July 18.

More observations are necessary because what we know about 3I/ATLAS is based purely on preliminary data. "It was discovered a few days ago and has been observed only with small telescopes," said Hainaut. "We are scrambling to get the big guys on it as soon as possible."

Why is 3I/ATLAS so interesting to astronomers?

Although much remains unknown, it is already clear that this object is orders of magnitude larger than ʻOumuamua and Borisov, making it a better target for study.

It could be a valuable opportunity for planetary scientists, as interstellar objects offer a tangible connection to other star systems and carry chemical signatures that can provide insights into how planetary systems form, or even offer evidence of life elsewhere in the galaxy.

"They undoubtedly carry chemical signatures from outside the solar system, so gaining observations tells us a lot about the possibility of material traveling between planetary systems," Barstow said. "If we could get a sample from one, one day, it would be an incredible breakthrough."

Can we send a spacecraft to intercept or fly by 3I/ATLAS?

Probably not, it's just too fast.

"We would need a spacecraft ready to do this in space, fully checked out and with a rendezvous capability," Barstow said.

The need to have a spacecraft in orbit ready to react to an incoming interstellar object, such as 3I/ATLAS, has been considered before. The European Space Agency is currently readying its Comet Interceptor project for launch in 2029 to deal with intriguing comets that suddenly appear. "However, even this mission might not be able to cope with the high speed of an interstellar traveler," Barstow said.

Although a sample of 3I/ATLAS is not going to be possible, it would provide a huge shortcut for planetary scientists. "Even with our fastest rockets, it would take tens of thousands of years for us to reach nearby stars," said Norris. "Thanks to these visitors from outside our solar system, we may not have to travel that far to sample star systems beyond our own [but] we'll need the technology to catch up and reach them before they pass through our solar system."

Why are astronomers suddenly finding interstellar objects?

It's no coincidence.

"Clearly, our telescopes don't affect the outer solar system, so the fact we get more simply reflects that we are getting better at finding them," Hainaut said.

And we're just getting started. The new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which just released its first images, could discover many more interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS during its decade-long Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) project. There could be plenty to find; a 2020 paper estimated that around seven interstellar objects could pass within one Earth-sun distance of the sun each year. We just haven't been able to see them until now.

"It will be a dramatic improvement," Hainaut said of the LSST. "Get ready for 4I, 5I ... 42I!"

3I/ATLAS may be the brightest and biggest interstellar visitor yet, but it almost certainly won't be the last.

The Rothko-like image was taken by a high-resolution camera on ESA’s Mars Express orbiter and captures Arcadia Planitia, an area of Mars critical to research about the planet’s past and its potential to house humans in the future.

Arcadia Planitia

Northwest of the tallest volcanoes in the solar system, Arcadia Planitia is a region of intrigue. It's laden with solidified lava flows that are, at most, 3 billion years old. The area is also thought to host water ice close to the planet's surface, making it an area of interest when planning future missions to Mars, according to a statement from ESA.

Arcadia Planitia is home to visiting "dust devils," short-lived columns of wind akin to small tornadoes. Dust devils form when the Martian surface warms the air just above it, leading the air to rise and pulling dust with it. The new image shows four dust devils as they snake their way across the plains of the region. Easy to overlook, you can spot them as whitish puffs of dust near the center of the image, straddling the boundary between the darker brown and lighter red parts of the plain.

A large impact crater sits in the bottom right corner of the photo and measures 9 miles (15 kilometers) across, according to ESA. The formation of layered material around the crater is evidence that the ground encompassed notable amounts of water ice during impact, and lack of clear erosion of the crater dates it to relatively recently on the geological timeline.

Is the picture out of focus?

If you noticed that the image is blurry, you're discerning an effect of the wind on Mars. Gusts of air pick up and carry tiny particles of debris from the planet's surface, which creates a minor visual haze.

The wind that causes the haze is also responsible for the reddish area at the top of the photo. The red region is covered in ridges called "yardangs," which are formed when wind erodes vulnerable rock and leaves the most resistant rock still standing.

Below the red section is purplish-brown terrain, which has a high concentration of silicates and a low concentration of iron, the statement notes. The difference in colors also stems from properties of the sand, like density and size, which affect how the grains accumulate and travel across Mars.

This article was originally published in Live Science, read the original article here.

The changes are the latest attacks by the U.S. government on science and the funding of scientific research in an effort to slash the budget to enable tax cuts elsewhere. Already, these attacks have seen the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Science Foundation evicted from their offices, references to climate science removed from websites, funding of data for hurricane forecasts cancelled, and dozens of NASA missions under threat and their project teams asked to produce close-down plans as the space agency's budget is slashed.

Now, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), based at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who have been using data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) that is flown on a series of satellites that form the United States Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, have been told they will soon no longer have access to that data. SSMIS is a microwave radiometer that can scan Earth for ice coverage on land and sea. The Department of Defense uses this data for planning deployments of its own ships, but it has always made the processed data available to scientists, too — until now.

In an announcement on June 24, the Department of Defense declared that the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center operated by the U.S. Navy would cease the real-time processing and stop supplying scientists with the sea-ice data, although NPR reports that, following an outcry at the suddenness of this decision, it has been put back to the end of July.

Politics aside, purely from a scientific point of view, this is madness. The sea-ice index, which charts how much ice is covering the ocean in the Arctic and Antarctic, is strongly dependent upon global warming, with increasing average temperatures both in the ocean and in the atmosphere leading to more sea-ice melting. Sea ice acts as a buffer to slow or even prevent the melting of large glaciers; remove that buffer and catastrophic melting of glaciers moves one big step closer, threatening dangerous sea level rises. Without the ability to track the sea ice, scientists are blinded to one of the most significant measures of climate change and become unable to tell how close we are getting to the brink.

But there's even a commercial side to knowing how much sea ice is present on our oceans. The fewer icebergs there are, the closer cargo ships can sail around the north pole, allowing them to take shorter, faster routes.

Of course, the United States is not the only country to operate climate instruments on satellites. For instance, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has a satellite called Shizuku, more formally known as the Global Change Observation Mission-Water (GCOM-W). On board Shizuku is an instrument called the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2, or AMSRS-2, which does pretty much the same job as SSMIS.

Researchers at NSIDC had already been looking to transfer over to AMSRS-2 data, perhaps having got wind that the Department of Defense's decision was coming down the pipeline. But the switch will take time for the calibration of the instrument and data with NSIDC's systems, leading to a gap in scientists' data — a blind spot in our monitoring of the climate that we can ill afford.

Picture this: a small audience is quietly ushered into a darkened room. They gasp in awe, as a brilliant night sky shines above. They wonder – as many after them will do – what trickery has made the roof above their heads disappear?

But this is a performance; the stars above an ingenious projection. For the first time a public audience has experienced the spectacle of the opto-mechanical planetarium. The location is the newly opened Deutsches Museum in Munich, built to celebrate science and technology. The date is May 7 1925.

Visualizing the heavens

Throughout time, cultures around the world have used the stars to help make sense of the world, to understand where we come from and determine our place in the cosmos.

People have tried to recreate the movements of the stars and planets since antiquity. In the 1700s, the orrery, a clockwork model of the Solar System, was developed. The word “planetarium” was invented to describe orreries that featured the planets.

One room-sized orrery example was built by the self-taught Frisian astronomer Eise Eisinga. It’s still operational today in Franeker, Netherlands.

No human has ever been to the edge of the Solar System to see this view. Orreries, and other mechanical models of the universe like celestial globes, present views from impossible, external perspectives.

The first planetariums

The desire for a realistic view of the stars and planets, created from a perspective we actually see, gathered pace in the early 20th century as light pollution from growing cities diminished the view of the night sky.

People like Oskar von Miller, first director of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, wanted to return this vision of the stars and planets to everyone. (Ironically, von Miller’s earlier career was as an electrical engineer, rolling out the city lighting that contributed to light pollution.)

One early attempt to create this view of the night sky was the Atwood Sphere, installed in Chicago in 1913.

Approximately five metres across, it was made of sheet metal perforated with a star map. When viewed from the inside, the light shining through 692 pinholes replicated the Chicago night sky. The whole structure could even be rotated to simulate the motion of the stars.

A realistic display of the stars is one thing. Representing the planets, whose positions in the sky change from night to night, is a different one. Von Miller and others at the Deutsches Museum knew that fixed holes could not represent the complexity of a moving planet.

What if the planets were displayed by projection? If so, couldn’t the stars be projected, as well? With this realization, a new kind of planetarium was born, borrowing the name from earlier orreries but working in a completely different way.

The task of building such a device was given to the German optical company Carl Zeiss AG. After many setbacks, their first planetarium projector was completed in 1923, with the first performance at the Deutsches Museum a century ago today.

Planetariums were a hit with the public. Within decades, they had spread around the world – the first planetarium in the United States opened in Chicago in 1930, while the first one in Asia opened in Osaka, Japan in 1937. The popularity of planetariums particularly accelerated in the US during the space race of the 1960s.

Australia’s oldest operating planetarium is the Melbourne Planetarium, managed by Museums Victoria since 1965. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Auckland’s Stardome Observatory has been in operation since 1997. The current longest-running planetarium in the southern hemisphere is in Montevideo, Uruguay, operational since 1955.

Changing pace of technology

The opto-mechanical planetarium projector remains a technological wonder of the modern world. Individual plates, perforated with pinholes, are illuminated by a bright central light. Separate lenses focus each projection from one of these star maps to fill the entire dome with about 5,000 stars.

The Sun, Moon and planets have separate projectors driven by gears and rods that mechanically calculate the object’s position in the sky for any time or place.

The opto-mechanical planetarium projector remains a technological wonder of the modern world. Individual plates, perforated with pinholes, are illuminated by a bright central light. Separate lenses focus each projection from one of these star maps to fill the entire dome with about 5,000 stars.

The Sun, Moon and planets have separate projectors driven by gears and rods that mechanically calculate the object’s position in the sky for any time or place.

By the 1990s, a digital revolution had begun. With the advent of computers, the positions of the planets could now be calculated digitally. The Melbourne Planetarium became the first digital planetarium in the southern hemisphere when it installed the Digistar II in 1999.

This system, developed by computer graphics company Evans and Sutherland, replaced the multiple lenses of earlier projectors with a fisheye lens. A single beam of light swept across the whole dome so rapidly that it seemed to create a single image – albeit in a bizarre green color, rendering a starfield of fuzzy green blobs.

The trade-off for a less crisp starfield was a 3D database with more than 9,000 stars. For the first time, planetarium audiences could fly through space, far beyond the edge of the Solar System.

Planetarium technology continues to develop. Today, most planetariums operate through video projection. Known as fulldome, the output from multiple projectors is blended together to create a seamless video, transforming the planetarium into a sophisticated 360-degree theatre.

A gateway to the stars

Astronomy has also changed over the last century. Just as Zeiss was completing its first projector, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that other galaxies exist beyond our Milky Way galaxy.

The stars shown on the dome in Munich in 1925 turned out to be just a tiny part of the universe that we know today.

Planetariums’ digital systems now incorporate data from telescopes and space agencies around the world. Audiences can fly off Earth, orbit the planets and moons of the Solar System, and explore the billions of known galaxies.

Yet some things have not changed. From orreries and lantern slides to opto-mechanical and digital planetariums, the communication of astronomy has always been about more than just the latest results of science.

The power of the planetarium over the last 100 years has been its ability to evoke wonder and awe. It taps into our enduring fascination with the vast mystery of the night sky.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Clays need liquid water to form. These layers are hundreds of feet thick and are thought to have formed roughly 3.7 billion years ago, under warmer and wetter conditions than currently prevail on Mars.

"These areas have a lot of water but not a lot of topographic uplift, so they're very stable," study co-author Rhianna Moore, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas' Jackson School of Geosciences, said in a statement.

"If you have stable terrain, you're not messing up your potentially habitable environments," Moore added. "Favorable conditions might be able to be sustained for longer periods of time."

On our home planet, such deposits form under specific landscape and climatic conditions.

"On Earth, the places where we tend to see the thickest clay mineral sequences are in humid environments, and those with minimal physical erosion that can strip away newly created weathering products," said co-author Tim Goudge, an assistant professor at the Jackson School's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

However, it remains unclear how Mars' local and global topography, along with its past climate activity, influenced surface weathering and the formation of clay layers.

Using data and images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — the second-longest-operating spacecraft around Mars, after the agency's 2001 Mars Odyssey — Moore, Goudge, and their colleagues studied 150 clay deposits, looking at their shapes and locations, and how close they are to other features like ancient lakes or rivers.

They found that the clays are mostly located in low areas near ancient lakes, but not close to valleys where water once flowed strongly. This mix of gentle chemical changes and less intense physical erosion helped the clays stay preserved over time.

"[Clay mineral-bearing stratigraphies] tend to occur in areas where chemical weathering was favoured over physical erosion, farther from valley network activity and nearer standing bodies of water," the team wrote in the new study, which was published in the journal Nature Astronomy on June 16.

The findings suggest that intense chemical weathering on Mars may have disrupted the usual balance between weathering and climate.

On Earth, where tectonic activity constantly exposes fresh rock to the atmosphere, carbonate minerals like limestone form when rock reacts with water and carbon dioxide (CO2). This process helps remove CO2 from the air, storing it in solid form and helping regulate the climate over long periods.

On Mars, tectonic activity is non-existent, leading to a lack of carbonate minerals and minimal removal of CO2 from the planet's thin atmosphere. As a result, CO2 released by Martian volcanoes long ago likely stayed in the atmosphere longer, making the planet warmer and wetter in the past — conditions the team believes may have encouraged the clay's formation.

The researchers also speculate that the clay could have absorbed water and trapped chemical byproducts like cations, preventing them from spreading and reacting with the surrounding rock to form carbonates that remain trapped and unable to leech into the surrounding environment.

"[The clay is] probably one of many factors that's contributing to this weird lack of predicted carbonates on Mars," said Moore.

Kicking up dust and rocks, the Blue Ghost Mission-1's March 2 moon landing marked the start of executing NASA-backed Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) instruments.

The moon lander wrapped up more than 14 Earth days of surface operations (346 hours of daylight) and worked just over five hours into the super-chilly lunar night — checkmark accomplishments after performing the first fully successful commercial moon landing.

Deep dive

One of those investigations involved a distinctive deep dive into studying the interior of the moon.

Blue Ghost deployed four tethered Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) electrodes at 90-degree angles to each other onto the lunar surface, shot far from the lander's top deck. It also unleashed a tall, mast-mounted magnetometer that extended some 8 feet (2.4 meters) above the lunar surface to reduce interference from the lander and to work in tandem with the "shoot from the deck" electrodes.

LMS was designed to measure the moon's electric and magnetic fields. Developed by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), the instrument aimed to gather data that would reveal insights into the moon's mantle, revealing how it has cooled and chemically evolved since its formation.

The LMS payload was funded for delivery to the lunar surface through NASA's CLPS initiative.

SwRI designed the instrument, built its electronics box and led the science investigation. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland provided the LMS magnetometer to measure the magnetic fields, and Heliospace Corporation provided the magnetometer mast and four electrodes used to measure the electrical fields.

Wham, there it goes

"The data is shaping up," said SwRI's Robert Grimm, the LMS principal investigator. "The electrodes all worked," he told Space.com, adding that they arched some 80 feet (25 m) away from Blue Ghost to their respective landing spots.

While the core LMS technique is used every day on Earth, Grimm said it was the first extraterrestrial application of magnetotellurics. "And ours are laying on the surface of the moon."

On Earth, the method is used for finding oil, water, geothermal and mineral resources, as well as to understand geologic processes such as the growth of continents.

Grimm remembers awaiting the electrode deployments while sitting in a SwRI operations center.

"Then suddenly, wham, there it goes. It was a pretty exciting moment. There were a lot of high fives," said Grimm. All the deployments happened with the LMS team immediately starting to take test data.

"We got some really great swaths of high-rate data that are going to be the real heart of our experiment…the best data nuggets for us to analyze," said Grimm. LMS operated for 13 days, he said, with what was learned forthcoming in a few months.

Payload birthright

The road to the moon was a long one.

Indeed, the LMS payload's development goes back years, Grimm said, stemming from SwRI internal funding for prototype landing instruments for two icy ocean moons — Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus.

For the LMS proposal to NASA, Grimm said the team could point to heritage hardware that had been subjected to vibration and thermal-vacuum testing. "You are not going to be picked if you don't have hardware," Grimm said, "and writing proposals is like breathing for us."

Moreover, the team's moon instrument pitch put forward the idea of landing at Mare Crisium, Grimm recalled, "because it's outside where all the Apollo landings were. We wanted to look at a part of the moon that we thought would offer a different interior composition."

Once selected, and through a consensus process with NASA, Firefly Aerospace, and the other payload selectees, Blue Ghost was targeted for Mare Crisium.

Team building

Throughout the process of scoping out Blue Ghost's mission, deliberations were ongoing and focused on power needs, how long experiments would run, data requirements, baseline minimums and maximums, and other specifics.

"There was a team-building process. Maybe it happened naturally over that time. We got to know them, they got to know us," Grimm said, pointing out that the CLPS contract with Firefly Aerospace was geared to delivering science gathered on the lunar surface.

The Blue Ghost lunar lander was lofted moonward on Jan. 15, 2025 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

As an in-person viewer of the early morning liftoff from 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) away, "it was exciting and louder than I thought it would be. It made car alarms go off. But it didn't rattle the change in my pocket," said Grimm. "A person from SpaceX reminded us we're going to the moon from the Apollo launch pad!"

Themes and expressions

On moon landing day, "it was very smooth. Everything tracked all the way down," Grimm said.

Following the nearly two weeks of LMS operating on the moon, as sunset fell on the Blue Ghost machinery, the experiment was turned off. "It was a poignant moment," Grimm recalled. "We cracked a beer, made a toast, and that was it."

A number of moon research signals became evident to Grimm. For one, themes and expressions used around the Commercial Lunar Payload Services concept like "more shots on goal" and "FedEx to the moon" are bothersome, he said.

It's still hard

Given the CLPS lunar landings to date, and the less-than-hoped-for moon science produced, there's a high failure rate at work.

Also, the FedEx notion of simply bolting on your experiment and waiting for the data to roll in doesn't really hold.

"We thought that we were going to turn it on and that was going to be it. Instead, it was a rollercoaster the whole way," Grimm said.

"I'm hopeful that the CLPS is making progress. There's a half-dozen missions already cued up next," Grimm explained.

It's still spaceflight, Grimm stressed. "It's still hard. In some sense harder than it used to be because it has got to be done for so cheap. So it's hard."

And many moon mysteries remain, even how it was formed in the first place.

"The giant impact theory is and has been the leading theory. It explains more than anything else," said Grimm. However, he added, "anything in science is subject to revision if you get more and better data. We don't have all the answers as yet."

A rare but faint interstellar visitor from beyond our solar system is racing toward the sun — and you can watch it live online today!

Astronomers have identified this cosmic interloper as 3I/ATLAS, making it only the third confirmed object from outside the solar system after 'Oumuamua (2017) and comet 2I/Borisov (2019). The interstellar comet, originally designated C/2025 N1 (ATLAS), was observed on July 1 by the NASA-funded ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile. It has since been designated 3I/ATLAS by the Minor Planet Center (MPC), with "3I" marking it as the third known interstellar object.

"There are tentative reports of cometary activity," The MPC report states. "With a marginal coma and a short 3" tail".

You can watch comet 3I/ATLAS live online tonight (July 3), thanks to the Virtual Telescope Project, which will livestream views beginning at 6:00 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT). The feed will showcase imagery from telescopes in Manciano, Italy, weather permitting. Tune in via Virtual Telescope's WebTV, YouTube channel or here on Space.com.

Currently, 3I/ATLAS is about 4.5 astronomical units (AU) — or 670 million kilometers (416 million miles) — from the sun according to NASA, and around magnitude 18.8, far too faint for backyard telescopes.

But it's expected to brighten slightly as it approaches perihelion (closest point to the sun) on Oct. 30, when it will pass just 1.4 AU (130 million miles or 210 million km) from the sun inside the orbit of Mars.

The Virtual Telescope Project captured a photo of the interstellar visitor on July 2, using one of its robotic telescopes to track the object's motion across the sky. In the 120-second exposure, the comet appears as a sharp point of light, while the background stars show short trails due to their relative movement.

The object is speeding through the solar system at 68 kilometers per second (152,000 mph) relative to the sun, and it poses no threat to Earth, according to NASA.

After dipping behind the sun in late fall, 3I/ATLAS is expected to reappear in early December, giving astronomers another chance to study this rare visitor from beyond our cosmic neighborhood.

Ninety-degree temperatures will also be attained over California (save for along the Pacific Coast), as well as Nevada, central and eastern portions of Oregon and Washington State and most of Idaho. Temperatures at or above 100 degrees are expected for southwest Texas, southern and western Arizona, southern Nevada and southeast California. Some desert locations might see ambient air temperatures approach 110 degrees.

With such hot temperatures as these, it might be a surprise for you to hear that on Thursday, July 3 at 3:55 p.m. EDT (1955 GMT), our Earth will reach that point in its orbit where it is farthest from the sun in space.

Since Kepler's laws of motion dictate that celestial bodies orbit more slowly when farther from the sun, we are now moving at our slowest pace in orbit, slightly less than 18 miles per second (29 kilometers per second) compared to just over 19 at perihelion.

Called aphelion, the sun at that moment will be 94,502,939 miles (152,087,738 km) from our Earth (measured from center to center), or 3,096,946 miles (4,984,051 km) farther as compared to when the Earth was closest to it (called perihelion) last Jan. 4. Put another way, we are 16.62 light seconds farther from our local star than at perihelion in January. The difference in distance is equivalent to 3.277 percent, which makes the sun appear 6.55 percent dimmer now than in January; A change of only one part in 30.

The tilt, not the distance makes the difference

Indeed, it's probably no surprise that if you ask people in which month of the year they believe that the Earth is closest to the sun, most probably would say we're closest during June, July or August. But our warm weather doesn't relate to our distance from the sun. It's because of the 23.5-degree tilt of the Earth's axis that the sun is above the horizon for different lengths of time at different seasons. The tilt determines whether the sun's rays strike us at a low angle or more directly.

At New York's latitude, the more nearly direct rays at the summer solstice of June 20 bring about three times as much heat as the more slanting rays at the winter solstice on Dec. 21. Heat received by any region is dependent on the length of daylight and the angle of the sun above the horizon. Hence the noticeable differences in temperatures that are registered over different parts of the world.

A climatological fallacy

When I attended Junior High School, my earth science teacher told all of us that because we were farthest from the sun in July and closest in December, that such a difference would tend to warm the winters and cool the summers  — at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

That certainly seemed to make sense, and yet the truth of the matter is that the preponderance of large land masses in the Northern Hemisphere works the other way and actually tends to make our northern winters colder and the summers hotter!

Interestingly, the times when the Earth lies at its closest and farthest points from the sun roughly coincide with two significant holidays here in the United States: We're closest to the sun around New Year's Day and farthest from the sun around Independence Day.

For those living in Canada, aphelion nearly coincides with their national holiday — Canada Day — on July 1.

But actually, depending on the year, the date of perihelion can vary from Jan. 1 to 5 and the date of aphelion can also vary from July 2 to July 6.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope and other publications.

At least, that's what a team of researchers led by Emma Watts of the Swansea University in the U.K. recently discovered. More specifically, the scientists' new study found that the Afar region of Ethiopia is underlain by a plume of hot mantle that rises and falls in a repeated pattern, almost like "a beating heart." These pulses, the team says, are closely tied to overlying tectonic plates and play a key role in the slow rifting of the African continent.

"We found that the mantle beneath Afar is not uniform or stationary — it pulses, and these pulses carry distinct chemical signatures," Watts said in a statement. "That's important for how we think about the interaction between Earth's interior and its surface."

The Afar region, which covers the northeastern region of Ethiopia, is one of the few places on Earth where three tectonic rift systems meet — the Red Sea Rift, the Gulf of Aden Rift and the Main Ethiopian Rift. As the tectonic plates in this so-called "triple junction" are pulled apart over millions of years, the crust stretches, thins, and eventually breaks, signaling an early step in the formation of a new ocean basin. Geologists have long suspected that a plume of hot mantle lies beneath this region and helps drive the rifting process — but, until now, little was known about how that plume behaves.

To study what lies beneath, researchers collected over 100 volcanic rock samples from across Afar and the Main Ethiopian Rift. They combined this fieldwork with existing geophysical data and advanced statistical modeling to better understand the structure and composition of the crust and underlying mantle.

Their analysis revealed a single, asymmetric plume beneath the region, marked by repeating chemical patterns or "geological barcodes," according to the new study." The chemical striping suggests the plume is pulsing," study co-author Tom Gernon of the University of Southampton said in the statement. "In places where the plates are thinner or pulling apart faster, like the Red Sea Rift, those pulses move more efficiently — like blood through a narrow artery."

"We found that the evolution of deep mantle upwellings is intimately tied to the motion of the plates above," study co-author Derek Keir of the University of Southampton added in the same statement.

"This has profound implications for how we interpret surface volcanism, earthquake activity, and the process of continental breakup."

The team's study was published on June 25 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

"Electrified dust will adhere to conducting surfaces such as wheels, solar panels and antennas. This may diminish the availability of solar energy, harm communications and complicate the motion of rovers and robots," Yoav Yair, a professor at Reichman University in Israel who studies planetary lightning and was not part of the new study, told Space.com.

The study, led by Varun Sheel, head of the Planetary Science Division at the Physical Research Laboratory in India, uses computer models to show how charges could be distributed inside a Martian dust devil. But before getting to how charge buildup works within Red Planet dust devils, it is key to understand how dust devils form on Mars to begin with.

As the sun heats the Martian surface, air near the surface gets heated. Hot air is lighter than cool air, and so it tends to rise. Pockets of hot air therefore rise through cold air, rapidly forming an upward current. The sudden uprush causes air to speed horizontally inward to the center of a newly forming vortex. If the conditions are right, the vortex completes formation and starts spinning. As the air continues to rise, the vortex gets stretched vertically — sort of like a noodle — making the vortex spin even more quickly. As the vortex picks up speed, the wind swirls and kicks up dust. This creates a dust devil.

In short, dust devils are like little gusts of dust high on adrenaline.

Dust devils are frequent on the dry and dusty Martian surface. Mars has lower gravity and a thinner atmosphere compared to Earth. This allows the wind there to kick up dust higher than wind on Earth can. As a result, Martian dust devils can be thrice as large as their terrestrial analogues. NASA's Viking was the first spacecraft to report dust devils on Mars. Later, Mars rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance captured dust devils zooming across the desolate Martian landscape. In general, such whirlwinds can pose a threat to landers and rovers — however, some rovers have actually benefited from dust devils. In 2005, a benevolent dust devil blew dust off the Spirit rover's solar panels, increasing its power levels. Dust devils on Mars, indeed, are a fascinating and curious phenomenon.

And deepening the intrigue, the new study suggests lightning could be zapping inside these dust devils on Mars.

The most common form of lightning on Earth is the one seen during a thunderstorm. As water and ice churn violently inside a thundercloud, they generate electrical charges due to friction. Once that happens, the atmosphere around the clouds doesn't let these charges flow through easily. This means the charges have nowhere to go and keep building up. At some point, the charges can't hold anymore — and they snap. The charges crack through the atmosphere in the form of an electrically conductive conduit, which we see as lightning.

Interestingly, the new study's team explains, a similar kind of churning happens inside dust devils on both Earth and Mars. In the case of dust devils rather than clouds, however, it's the dust particles that are getting churned instead of ice and water droplets. Again, friction builds up charges, and when the charges can't hold any more, the charges release in the form of lightning.

To be clear, the formation of a strong electric field precedes lightning and no direct observations of electric fields within dust devils on Mars have been found thus far. Instead, the study uses computer models to estimate the possible electric field strength and distribution within a Martian dust devil. This is, in fact, the first study to consider the size distribution of dust particles.

Sheel and his team found that when the atmosphere of Mars is laden with dust, the atmosphere becomes less conductive, prohibiting the flow of charges. This could cause a massive charge buildup in a dust-filled vortex, triggering lightning, he explains.

"The possibility that one day we can discover lightning [in these dust devils] is the most exciting aspect of the results," Sheel told Space.com.

In terms of distribution, the study found that larger, positively-charged particles would settle at the bottom of the dust devil while lighter, negatively-charged ones would rise upward. The team also found that larger dust particles would increase the possibility of lightning.

"[The paper] adds an original level of complexity by discussing size distributions," Yair said. "This is an important addition to the existing literature, with practical implications."

However, regarding the possibility of dust devils generating lightning, Yair says, "I am surprised that the authors discuss the probability of lightning inside the dust devil while neglecting the fact that highly charged dust may discharge at much lower electric fields … negating the possibility of lightning."

"In the end, predictions about lightning are very difficult because we don't fully understand how particles charge each other, not even really on Earth. … Ultimately, I think the question will be settled only [by] direct observations on Mars," Steven Desch, a professor of astrophysics at Arizona State University, who was also not involved in the study, told Space.com.

Some progress may have happened on that front, too.

A recent study — shared by a group led by Baptiste Chide of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, France at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna in May — may have recorded the thunder from an electrical discharge. "Electrical discharges such as lightning are among the most energetic and remarkable phenomena in planetary atmospheres," write the authors in their paper. They studied sounds recorded by the SuperCam microphone onboard the NASA Perseverance rover on Mars. The recordings showed signs of coming from an electric discharge in a dust devil. This is the first such direct detection on Mars, setting the stage for newer discoveries by upcoming Mars missions such as the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin rover.

The study was published in the journal Physics of Plasmas in March.

The mineral in question is named "djerfisherite" (pronounced juh-fisher-ite) after the American mineralogist Daniel Jerome Fisher, is an iron-nickel sulfide containing potassium. It is typically found on asteroids and in meteorites called "enstatite chondrites." These are quite rare and formed in the inner solar system some 4.6 billion years ago, in temperatures exceeding 662 degrees Fahrenheit (350 degrees Celsius).

So, imagine the surprise of researchers, led by planetary scientist Masaaki Miyahara of Hiroshima University in Japan, when they found djerfisherite in a grain sampled from Ryugu — a carbon-rich CI chondrite that instead formed in cooler conditions in the outer solar system.

"Its occurrence is like finding a tropical seed in Arctic ice — indicating either an unexpected local environment or long-distance transport in the early solar system," said Miyahara in a statement.

As a CI chondrite, Ryugu was thought to have experienced a very different history when compared to enstatite chondrites. Ryugu is believed to have once been part of a larger protoplanet, but was blasted off due to an impact at some point in the solar system's history. Born in the outer solar system, that parent body would have been relatively abundant in water- and carbon dioxide-ice. Enough heat should have also been generated within the body through the radioactive decay of radioisotopes locked up in its rocks — that would've melted the ice. Taking place about 3 million years after the parent body formed, that resulting liquid would have chemically altered Ryugu's composition. But importantly, temperatures from such radioisotopic heating are not expected to have exceeded 122 degrees F (50 degrees Celsius).

And yet, somehow, there is a grain of djerfisherite in Ryugu samples.

One possibility is the djerfisherite is not native to Ryugu, and is rather connected to the impact of an enstatite chondrite. The alternative is that the djerfisherite formed in situ on Ryugu — but this could only have occurred in potassium-bearing fluids and iron–nickel sulfides at temperatures greater than 662 degrees Fahrenheit.

Isotopic data could offer a decent idea as to the origin of the djerfisherite, but that data is currently lacking, so there's no way to say for sure. However, based on their analysis, Miyahara's team leans towards the likelihood that the djerfisherite somehow indeed formed in situ on Ryugu. How the conditions arose to make this possible remains, however? That's a mystery for now.

"The discovery of djerfisherite in a Ryugu grain suggests that materials with very different formation histories may have mixed early in the solar system's evolution, or that Ryugu experienced localized, chemically heterogeneous conditions not previously recognized," said Miyahara. "This finding challenges the notion that Ryugu is compositionally uniform and opens new questions about the complexity of primitive asteroids."

Scientists will now be rushing to re-analyze their samples from Ryugu to try and learn whether this discovery of djerfisherite is a one-off, or whether there is more evidence that supports its in-situ formation.

In doing so, scientists won't just solve a mystery. They will also come to better understand where and how different minerals formed in the protoplanetary disk around the young sun 4.6 billion years ago, how those minerals subsequently mixed and coalesced to form asteroids and planets, and how subsequent chemical reactions on those bodies produced more minerals. In doing so, they can chart the chemical evolution of the solar system.

The discovery of djerfisherite was reported on May 28 in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.