Space

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/science/space/astronomer-desi-dark-energy.html https://archive.is/H23dH

For those of us who have closely followed the story of Wilmore and Williams over the last nine months—and Ars Technica has had its share of exclusive stories about this long and strange saga—the final weeks before the landing have seen it take a disturbing turn.

In February, President Trump and the chief executive of SpaceX, Elon Musk, began to say that the two astronauts were "stranded" in space because the Biden administration did not want to bring them home. "They got left in space," Trump said.

"They were left up there for political reasons," Musk concluded.

Just what those political reasons were never specified. But the basic message was clear: Biden, bad; Trump, good.

The reality is that NASA set a plan for the return of Wilmore and Williams last August. The spacecraft that brought them back to Earth on Tuesday safely docked to the space station in September. They could have come home at any time since. NASA—not the Biden administration, which all of my reporting indicates was not involved in any decision-making—decided the best and safest option was to keep Wilmore and Williams in orbit until early this year. Musk knew this plan. He had to sign off on it. Senior NASA officials earlier this month confirmed, publicly and on the record, that the decision was made by the space agency in the best interests of the International Space Station Program. Not for political reasons.

And still, the lies came.

Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, giving it an insurmountable lead in the running tally of moons in the solar system.

Until recently, the "moon king" title was held by Jupiter, but Saturn now has a total of 274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets combined. The team behind the discoveries had previously identified 62 Saturnian moons using the Canada France Hawaii telescope and, having seen faint hints that there were more out there, made further observations in 2023.

"Sure enough, we found 128 new moons," said the lead researcher, Dr Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Academia Sincia in Taiwan. "Based on our projections, I don't think Jupiter will ever catch up."

Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SwRI, ASI, INAF, JIRAM

Why are there so many cyclones around the north pole of Jupiter? The topic is still being researched. NASA's robotic Juno mission orbiting Jupiter took data in 2018 that was used to construct this stunning view of the curious cyclones at Jupiter's north pole. Measuring the thermal emission from Jovian cloud tops, the infrared observations are not restricted to the hemisphere illuminated by sunlight. They reveal eight cyclonic features that surround a cyclone about 4,000 kilometers in diameter, just offset from the giant planet's geographic north pole. Similar data show a cyclone at the Jovian south pole with five circumpolar cyclones. The south pole cyclones are slightly larger than their northern cousins. Oddly, data from the once Saturn-orbiting Cassini mission has shown that Saturn's north and south poles each have only a single cyclonic storm system.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250309.html

Frozen Lake Saint Clair in the North American Great Lakes system and the briny Salinas Las Barrancas in Argentina have little in common—save for their heart-like shapes. From the perspective of Earth’s orbit, the opposites combine to send a lacustrine Valentine’s Day message.

[Image description: At the centre is a thin vertical cloud known as Lynds 483 (L483) that is roughly shaped like an hourglass with irregular edges. The lower lobe is slightly cut off. The top lobe is seen in full, petering out at the top.]

https://esawebb.org/images/weic2503a/

This image of the Horsehead Nebula from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope focuses on a portion of the horse’s “mane” that is about 0.8 light-years in width. It was taken with Webb’s NIRCam (Near-infrared Camera). The ethereal clouds that appear blue at the bottom of the image are filled with a variety of materials including hydrogen, methane, and water ice. Red-colored wisps extending above the main nebula represent both atomic and molecular hydrogen. In this area, known as a photodissociation region, ultraviolet light from nearby young, massive stars creates a mostly neutral, warm area of gas and dust between the fully ionized gas above and the nebula below. As with many Webb images, distant galaxies are sprinkled in the background.

This image is composed of light at wavelengths of 1.4 and 2.5 microns (represented in blue), 3.0 and 3.23 microns (cyan), 3.35 microns (green), 4.3 microns (yellow), and 4.7 and 4.05 microns (red).

NASA, ESA, CSA, Karl Misselt (University of Arizona), Alain Abergel (IAS, CNRS)

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Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the hunting dogs, Canes Venatici. A popular target for earth-based astronomers, the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across, with spiral arms sweeping through the outskirts of its broad disk. But this Hubble Space Telescope field of view spans about 7,000 light-years or so across M94's central region. The sharp close-up examines the galaxy's compact, bright nucleus and prominent inner dust lanes, surrounded by a remarkable bluish ring of young, massive stars. The massive stars in the ring appear to be less than about 10 million years old, indicating the galaxy experienced a corresponding well-defined era of rapid star formation. As a result, while the small, bright nucleus is typical of the Seyfert class of active galaxies, M94 is also known as a starburst galaxy. Because M94 is relatively nearby, astronomers can explore in detail reasons for the galaxy's burst of star formation.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250306.html

The idea of flying satellites in "very" low-Earth orbit is not new. Dating back to the dawn of the space age in the late 1950s, the first US spy satellites, as part of the Corona program, orbited the planet as low as 120 to 160 km (75 to 100 miles) above the Earth.

This low vantage point allowed the Kodak cameras on board the Corona satellites to capture the highest-resolution images of Earth during the height of the Cold War. However, flying so close to the planet brought a number of challenges, most notably that of atmospheric drag.

For much of the space age, therefore, satellites have flown much higher orbits. Most satellites today fly at an altitude of between 400 and 800 km (250 and 500 miles), which is high enough to avoid the vast majority of atmospheric drag while still being close enough to offer good communications and a clear view of the planet.

In recent years, a handful of new space companies have announced plans to develop small- and medium-size satellites designed to survive in very low-Earth orbit (VLEO) and capable of taking advantage of the closer-in vantage point. The first of these companies to actually reach the launch pad is a Denver-based startup named Albedo.

There's a new lander on the Moon. Yesterday Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost executed the first-ever successful commercial lunar landing. During its planned 60-day mission, Blue Ghost will deploy several NASA-commissioned scientific instruments, including PlanetVac which captures lunar dust after creating a small whirlwind of gas. Blue Ghost will also host the telescope LEXI that captures X-ray images of the Earth's magnetosphere. LEXI data should enable a better understanding of how Earth's magnetic field protects the Earth from the Sun's wind and flares. Pictured, the shadow of the Blue Ghost lander is visible on the cratered lunar surface, while the glowing orb of the planet Earth hovers just over the horizon. Goals for future robotic Blue Ghost landers include supporting lunar astronauts in NASA's Artemis program, with Artemis III currently scheduled to land humans back on the Moon in 2027.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250303.html

It was funny seeing a Cedar Park dateline. Pretty sure I've never seen that in a national pub. But cool stuff regardless!

Discovered by Charles Messier in 1764, the globular cluster M14 is home to over 150,000 stars and has an apparent magnitude of 8.3. It is located 29,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus, and is best observed with a telescope during July.

In the summer of 1938, M14 played host to a nova – an extraordinarily rare event in a cluster of its kind. A nova is a sudden stellar eruption where, in just a few days, a star’s brightness increases by a factor of 10,000. Then over the following months the outburst fades away and the star returns to its normal brightness.

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Explanation: Why are there so many bright blue stars? Stars are usually born in clusters, and the brightest and most massive of these stars typically glow blue. Less-bright, non-blue stars like our Sun surely also exist in this M41 star cluster but are harder to see. A few bright orange-appearing red giant stars are visible. The red-light filaments are emitted by diffuse hydrogen gas, a color that was specifically filtered and enhanced in this image. In a hundred million years or so, the bright blue stars will have exploded in supernovas and disappeared, while the slightly different trajectories of the fainter stars will cause this picturesque open cluster to disperse. Similarly, billions of years ago, our own Sun was likely born into a star cluster like M41, but it has long since drifted apart from its sister stars. The featured image was captured over four hours with Chilescope T2 in Chile.

Source: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250225.html

Expedition 68 Flight Engineers (middle left to right) Frank Rubio and Josh Cassada, both from NASA, assist astronauts (far left and right) Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Nicole Mann from NASA out of their Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs), or spacesuits. The spacewalkers had just finished a seven-hour and 21-minute spacewalk installing a modification kit on the International Space Station's starboard truss structure preparing the orbital lab for its next roll-out solar array. Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina is in the background participating in post-spacewalk photography activities.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-iss068e041399/

The rising Earth is about five degrees above the lunar horizon in this telephoto view taken from the Apollo 8 spacecraft near 110 degrees east longitude. Astronaut Bill Anders took the photo on the morning of Dec. 24, 1968. The South Pole is in the white area near the left end of the terminator. North and South America are under the clouds.

Image Credit: NASA

https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/as08-14-2383orig/