Tag: Solar System

Sunrise on the moon! Private Blue Ghost lander captures amazing shot after historic lunar touchdown (photo)

NeRD

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander has captured a gorgeous shot of sunrise on the moon as it begins its workday on the lunar surface. Blue Ghost aced its lunar landing attempt on Sunday (March 2), setting down close to Mons Latreille, a solitary lunar peak in the vast basin Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”) in the northeastern region of the moon’s near side. And the spacecraft is already getting to work, starting up its science payloads and capturing amazing images of its surroundings and the distant Earth from the lunar…

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Is it time to revisit what NASA’s Viking lander found on Mars in 1976?

NeRD

Back in 1976, the dual NASA Viking landers came to full stop on the Red Planet. Their life detection experimental findings still reverberate within the scientific community – fueling the on-going discussion on a key question: Is there life on Mars? Fast forward to today, a new paper tackles and reconsiders the results of the Viking Biology experiments. Perchlorate finding The most significant change since those 1970’s experiments were conducted was the discovery of high levels of perchlorate on Mars. Perchlorate, plus abiotic oxidants, explains the Viking results and there…

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Scientists warn of consequences as over 800 NOAA workers are fired: ‘Censoring science does not change the facts’

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Scientists warn that the Trump administration’s abrupt firing of hundreds of weather forecasters and climate experts across NOAA will curtail important climate research and could result in preventable deaths during extreme weather events and related disasters. Over 800 employees across most divisions of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — a premier U.S. federal agency at the forefront of climate research that provides timely weather forecasts to the public for free — were dismissed in mass layoffs that began Thursday afternoon (Feb. 27). The cuts targeted probationary employees, a…

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Private Athena moon lander beams home gorgeous views of Earth from space (photos)

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A newly launched lunar lander just captured some stunning shots of its home planet. Athena, the second moon lander from Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday evening (Feb. 26). Shortly after deploying into the final frontier, Athena snapped a few selfies with Earth in the background, including one that shows the Falcon 9‘s upper stage drifting in the void beneath the lander. (Bright specks visible near the rocket stage may be some of the other payloads that launched with…

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Private Blue Ghost lander sees far side of the moon in breathtaking detail ahead of lunar landing (video)

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Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander is sharing some amazing views from just above the moon. Blue Ghost beamed home gorgeous, up-close shots of the moon‘s far side on Feb. 24, just after lowering its orbit ahead of a Sunday morning (March 2) landing attempt. “That feeling you get when you look out the window and realize you’re almost home!” Texas-based Firefly wrote in a Feb. 26 X post, which shared a 93-second video of the Blue Ghost footage. Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander snapped this shot of the…

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Japan’s Resilience moon lander aces lunar flyby ahead of historic touchdown try (photo)

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The private Resilience lunar lander just got its first up-close look at the moon. Resilience, which was built by Japanese company ispace, aced a flyby of the moon on Friday evening (Feb. 14), coming within a mere 5,220 miles (8,400 kilometers) of Earth’s nearest neighbor. The lander memorialized the milestone with a photo, snapping a nice shot of the battered lunar surface from a distance of 8,972 miles (14,439 km). The close encounter was “a historic first of its type for a Japanese private, commercial lunar lander,” according to ispace.…

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‘City-killer’ asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit the moon instead of us, scientists say

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An asteroid that’s big enough to wipe out a city has a 1-in-43 chance of hitting our planet in the year 2032. But according to new calculations, there’s an even smaller chance that it might crash into the moon instead. On Feb. 7, NASA scientists increased the likelihood of asteroid 2024 YR4 colliding with Earth on Dec. 22, 2032, nearly doubling the odds from 1.2% to 2.3%. The potentially hazardous asteroid measures an estimated 180 feet (55 meters) across — about as wide as Walt Disney World’s Cinderella Castle is…

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Continent-size blobs in Earth’s mantle are a billion years old, ancient crystals reveal

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Continent-size islands deep inside Earth’s mantle could be more than a billion years old, a new study finds. Known as large low-seismic-velocity provinces (LLSVPs), these blobs are both hotter and older than nearby areas of the mantle. The findings, published Jan. 22 in the journal Nature, shed light on Earth’s deep interior and could help explain how the mantle moves over time. Scientists have known about these LLSVPs for a few decades. The two giant blobs — one beneath the Pacific Ocean and one beneath Africa — lie at the…

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What the asteroid with a 1-in-48 chance of hitting Earth in 2032 looks like (images)

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It might not look like much in this image, but this is the asteroid that has made a major news impact in 2025. That’s because this space rock, designated asteroid 2024 YR4, has a 1-in-48 chance of impacting Earth in 2032. For obvious reasons, astronomers are desperate to learn as much as they can about 2024 YR4, estimated to be as large as 177 feet wide (54 meters wide). That’s around as wide as Cinderella’s Castle in Walt Disney World Florida is tall. The image featured here was captured on…

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Tiny plasma jets on the sun drive the elusive solar wind, Europe’s Solar Orbiter reveals

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Solar scientists have found tiny, short-lived jets of energy on our sun to be the primary drivers of the solar wind, marking a step toward decoding our star’s elusive behavior and, eventually, refining predictions of its storms. The “solar wind” refers to pockets of energetic particles blasted out from the sun. These particles are occasionally directed toward Earth, like last summer when a rare cluster of such storms rained on our planet and sparked breathtaking auroras across the globe — likely the strongest auroras we’ve seen in centuries. The solar…

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