Just thought I'd commemorate the fact that today marks 25 years since I took my Geology 104 lab exam at Cal State Long Beach. Today was a turning point in how I would view my remaining years in college after I spent one last class with Yenny (who I called 'Denise' in my Blog for how many years after that); giving her a Christmas card and us exchanging e-mail addresses that would lead to 2001 being one of the most painful years of my life.
Anyways, click on this Blog Entry to read what I originally posted about this day a quarter century ago. Have a nice Saturday!
NASA, ESA, STScI, D. Jewitt (UCLA), M.-T. Hui (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory). Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope Revisits Interstellar Comet (News Release - December 4)
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reobserved interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on November 30, with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument. At the time, the comet was about 178 million miles (286 million kilometers) from Earth.
Hubble tracked the comet as it moved across the sky. As a result, background stars appear as streaks of light.
Hubble previously observed 3I/ATLAS in July, shortly after its discovery, and a number of NASA missions have since studied the comet as well. Observations are expected to continue for several more months as 3I/ATLAS heads out of the Solar System.
NASA Completes Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Construction (News Release)
NASA’s next big eye on the cosmos is now fully assembled. On November 25, technicians joined the inner and outer portions of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in the largest clean room at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“Completing the Roman observatory brings us to a defining moment for the agency,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya. “Transformative science depends on disciplined engineering, and this team has delivered—piece by piece, test by test—an observatory that will expand our understanding of the Universe. As Roman moves into its final stage of testing following integration, we are focused on executing with precision and preparing for a successful launch on behalf of the global scientific community.”
After final testing, Roman will move to the launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations in summer 2026. Roman is slated to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will send the observatory to its final destination a million miles from Earth.
“With Roman’s construction complete, we are poised at the brink of unfathomable scientific discovery,” said Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA Goddard. “In the mission’s first five years, it’s expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies. We stand to learn a tremendous amount of new information about the Universe very rapidly after Roman launches.”
Observing from space will make Roman very sensitive to infrared light — light with a longer wavelength than our eyes can see — from far across the cosmos. Pairing its crisp infrared vision with a sweeping view of space will allow astronomers to explore myriad cosmic topics, from dark matter and dark energy to distant worlds and solitary black holes, and conduct research that would take hundreds of years using other telescopes.
“Within our lifetimes, a great mystery has arisen about the cosmos: why the expansion of the Universe seems to be accelerating. There is something fundamental about space and time we don’t yet understand, and Roman was built to discover what it is,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “With Roman now standing as a complete observatory, which keeps the mission on track for a potentially early launch, we are a major step closer to understanding the Universe as never before. I couldn’t be prouder of the teams that have gotten us to this point.”
Double vision
Roman is equipped with two instruments: the Wide Field Instrument and Coronagraph Instrument technology demonstration.
The coronagraph will demonstrate new technologies for directly imaging planets around other stars. It will block the glare from distant stars and make it easier for scientists to see the faint light from planets in orbit around them. The Coronagraph aims to photograph worlds and dusty disks around nearby stars in visible light to help us see giant worlds that are older, colder, and in closer orbits than the hot, young super-Jupiters direct imaging has mainly revealed so far.
“The question of ‘Are we alone?’ is a big one, and it’s an equally big task to build tools that can help us answer it,” said Feng Zhao, the Roman Coronagraph Instrument manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The Roman Coronagraph is going to bring us one step closer to that goal. It’s incredible that we have the opportunity to test this hardware in space on such a powerful observatory as Roman.”
The coronagraph team will conduct a series of pre-planned observations for three months spread across the mission’s first year-and-a-half of operations, after which the mission may conduct additional observations based on scientific community input.
The Wide Field Instrument is a 288-megapixel camera that will unveil the cosmos all the way from our Solar System to near the edge of the observable Universe. Using this instrument, each Roman image will capture a patch of the sky bigger than the apparent size of a full moon. The mission will gather data hundreds of times faster than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, adding up to 20,000 terabytes (20 petabytes) over the course of its five-year primary mission.
“The sheer volume of the data Roman will return is mind-boggling and key to a host of exciting investigations,” said Dominic Benford, Roman’s program scientist at NASA Headquarters.
Survey trifecta
Using the Wide Field Instrument, Roman will conduct three core surveys which will account for 75% of the primary mission. The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey will combine the powers of imaging and spectroscopy to unveil more than a billion galaxies strewn across a wide swath of space and time. Astronomers will trace the evolution of the Universe to probe dark matter — invisible matter detectable only by how its gravity affects things we can see — and trace the formation of galaxies and galaxy clusters over time.
The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will probe our dynamic Universe by observing the same region of the cosmos repeatedly. Stitching these observations together to create movies will allow scientists to study how celestial objects and phenomena change over time periods of days to years. That will help astronomers study dark energy — the mysterious cosmic pressure thought to accelerate the Universe’s expansion — and could even uncover entirely new phenomena that we don’t yet know to look for.
Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will look inward to provide one of the deepest views ever of the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers will watch hundreds of millions of stars in search of microlensing signals — gravitational boosts of a background star’s light caused by the gravity of an intervening object. While astronomers have mainly discovered star-hugging worlds, Roman’s microlensing observations can find planets in the habitable zone of their star and farther out, including worlds like every planet in our Solar System except Mercury.
Microlensing will also reveal rogue planets—worlds that roam the galaxy untethered to a star — and isolated black holes. The same dataset will reveal 100,000 worlds that transit, or pass in front of, their host stars.
The remaining 25% of Roman’s five-year primary mission will be dedicated to other observations that will be determined with input from the broader scientific community. The first such program, called the Galactic Plane Survey, has already been selected.
Because Roman’s observations will enable such a wide range of science, the mission will have a General Investigator Program designed to support astronomers to reveal scientific discoveries using Roman data. As part of NASA’s commitment to Gold Standard Science, NASA will make all of Roman’s data publicly available with no exclusive use period. This ensures that multiple scientists and teams can use data at the same time, which is important since every Roman observation will address a wealth of science cases.
Roman’s namesake — Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer — made it her personal mission to make cosmic vistas readily accessible to all by paving the way for telescopes based in space.
“The mission will acquire enormous quantities of astronomical imagery that will permit scientists to make groundbreaking discoveries for decades to come, honoring Dr. Roman’s legacy in promoting scientific tools for the broader community,” said Jackie Townsend, Roman’s deputy project manager at NASA Goddard. “I like to think Dr. Roman would be extremely proud of her namesake telescope and thrilled to see what mysteries it will uncover in the coming years.”
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
NASA / Goddard / University of Arizona / Dan Gallagher
Sugars, ‘Gum,’ Stardust Found in NASA’s Asteroid Bennu Samples (News Release)
The asteroid Bennu continues to provide new clues to scientists’ biggest questions about the formation of the early Solar System and the origins of life. As part of the ongoing study of pristine samples delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx(Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft, three new papers published Tuesday by the journals Nature Geoscience and Nature Astronomy present remarkable discoveries: sugars essential for biology, a gum-like substance not seen before in astromaterials, and an unexpectedly high abundance of dust produced by supernova explosions.
Sugars essential to life
Scientists led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan found sugars essential for biology on Earth in the Bennu samples, detailing their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience. The five-carbon sugar ribose and, for the first time in an extraterrestrial sample, six-carbon glucose were found. Although these sugars are not evidence of life, their detection, along with previous detections of amino acids, nucleobases, and carboxylic acids in Bennu samples, show that building blocks of biological molecules were widespread throughout the Solar System.
For life on Earth, the sugars deoxyribose and ribose are key building blocks of DNA and RNA, respectively. DNA is the primary carrier of genetic information in cells. RNA performs numerous functions, and life as we know it could not exist without it.
Ribose in RNA is used in the molecule’s sugar-phosphate “backbone” that connects a string of information-carrying nucleobases. “All five nucleobases used to construct both DNA and RNA, along with phosphates, have already been found in the Bennu samples brought to Earth by OSIRIS-REx,” said Furukawa. “The new discovery of ribose means that all of the components to form the molecule RNA are present in Bennu.”
The discovery of ribose in asteroid samples is not a complete surprise. Ribose has previously been found in two meteorites recovered on Earth. What is important about the Bennu samples is that researchers did not find deoxyribose.
If Bennu is any indication, this means that ribose may have been more common than deoxyribose in environments of the early Solar System. Researchers think the presence of ribose and lack of deoxyribose supports the “RNA world” hypothesis, where the first forms of life relied on RNA as the primary molecule to store information and to drive chemical reactions necessary for survival.
“Present day life is based on a complex system organized primarily by three types of functional biopolymers: DNA, RNA, and proteins,” explains Furukawa. “However, early life may have been simpler. RNA is the leading candidate for the first functional biopolymer because it can store genetic information and catalyze many biological reactions.”
The Bennu samples also contained one of the most common forms of “food” (or energy) used by life on Earth, the sugar glucose, which is the first evidence that an important energy source for life as we know it was also present in the early Solar System.
Mysterious, ancient ‘gum’
A second paper, in the journal Nature Astronomy led by Scott Sandford at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and Zack Gainsforth of the University of California, Berkeley, reveals a gum-like material in the Bennu samples never seen before in space rocks – something that could have helped set the stage on Earth for the ingredients of life to emerge. The surprising substance was likely formed in the early days of the Solar System, as Bennu’s young parent asteroid warmed.
Once soft and flexible, but since hardened, this ancient “space gum” consists of polymer-like materials extremely rich in nitrogen and oxygen. Such complex molecules could have provided some of the chemical precursors that helped trigger life on Earth, and finding them in the pristine samples from Bennu is important for scientists studying how life began and whether it exists beyond our planet.
Bennu’s ancestral asteroid formed from materials in the solar nebula – the rotating cloud of gas and dust that gave rise to the Solar System – and contained a variety of minerals and ices. As the asteroid began to warm, due to natural radiation, a compound called carbamate formed through a process involving ammonia and carbon dioxide. Carbamate is water soluble, but it survived long enough to polymerize, reacting with itself and other molecules to form larger and more complex chains impervious to water.
The carbamate process suggests that it formed before the parent body warmed enough to become a watery environment.
“With this strange substance, we’re looking at, quite possibly, one of the earliest alterations of materials that occurred in this rock,” said Sandford. “On this primitive asteroid that formed in the early days of the Solar System, we’re looking at events near the beginning of the beginning.”
Using an infrared microscope, Sandford’s team selected unusual, carbon-rich grains containing abundant nitrogen and oxygen. They then began what Sandford calls “blacksmithing at the molecular level,” using the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) in Berkeley, California. Applying ultra-thin layers of platinum, they reinforced a particle, welded on a tungsten needle to lift the tiny grain, and shaved the fragment down using a focused beam of charged particles.
When the particle was a thousand times thinner than a human hair, they analyzed its composition via electron microscopy at the Molecular Foundry and X-ray spectroscopy at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source. The ALS’s high-spatial resolution and sensitive X-ray beams enabled unprecedented chemical analysis.
“We knew we had something remarkable the instant the images started to appear on the monitor,” said Gainsforth. “It was like nothing we had ever seen, and for months we were consumed by data and theories as we attempted to understand just what it was and how it could have come into existence.”
The team conducted a slew of experiments to examine the material’s characteristics. As the details emerged, the evidence suggested that the strange substance had been deposited in layers on grains of ice and minerals present in the asteroid.
It was also flexible – a pliable material, similar to used gum or even a soft plastic. Indeed, during their work with the samples, researchers noticed that the strange material was bendy and dimpled when pressure was applied. The stuff was translucent, and exposure to radiation made it brittle, like a lawn chair left too many seasons in the Sun.
“Looking at its chemical makeup, we see the same kinds of chemical groups that occur in polyurethane on Earth,” said Sandford, “making this material from Bennu something akin to a ‘space plastic.’”
The ancient asteroid stuff isn’t simply polyurethane, though, which is an orderly polymer. This one has more “random, hodgepodge connections and a composition of elements that differs from particle to particle,” said Sandford. But the comparison underscores the surprising nature of the organic material discovered in NASA’s asteroid samples, and the research team aims to study more of it.
By pursuing clues about what went on long ago, deep inside an asteroid, scientists can better understand the young Solar System – revealing the precursors to and ingredients of life that it already contained, and how far those raw materials may have been scattered, thanks to asteroids much like Bennu.
Abundant supernova dust
Another paper in the journal Nature Astronomy, led by Ann Nguyen of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, analyzed presolar grains – dust from stars predating our Solar System – found in two different rock types in the Bennu samples to learn more about where its parent body formed and how it was altered by geologic processes. It is believed that presolar dust was generally well-mixed as our Solar System formed. The samples had six-times the amount of supernova dust than any other studied astromaterial, suggesting the asteroid’s parent body formed in a region of the protoplanetary disk enriched in the dust of dying stars.
The study also reveals that, while Bennu’s parent asteroid experienced extensive alteration by fluids, there are still pockets of less-altered materials within the samples that offer insights into its origin.
“These fragments retain a higher abundance of organic matter and presolar silicate grains, which are known to be easily destroyed by aqueous alteration in asteroids,” said Nguyen. “Their preservation in the Bennu samples was a surprise and illustrates that some material escaped alteration in the parent body. Our study reveals the diversity of presolar materials that the parent accreted as it was forming.”
NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX Spacecraft Slingshots Past Earth (News Release)
At 1:00 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, September 23, NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX(Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Apophis Explorer) spacecraft flew within 2,136 miles (3,438 kilometers) of Earth.
During approach and as OSIRIS-APEX passed Earth, it looked home, capturing images and data of our home planet to help calibrate its science instruments.
During the spacecraft’s primary mission, the StowCam instrument was used to verify that the capsule full of sample from asteroid Bennu was safely stowed and prepared to journey back to Earth. Now, StowCam provides a view of the instrument panel, including the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter, provided by CSA (Canadian Space Agency) to create detailed 3D topographical maps of Bennu.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and the safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-APEX. Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina of the University of Arizona, Tucson, is the principal investigator. The university leads the science team and the mission’s science observation planning and data processing.
Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft and provides flight operations. NASA Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are responsible for navigating the OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft. International partnerships on this mission include the spacecraft’s laser altimeter instrument from CSA.
OSIRIS-APEX (previously named OSIRIS-REx) is the third mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
NASA’s Mars-bound ESCAPADE Mission Captures First ‘Selfies’ (News Release)
About a week after its launch, NASA’s ESCAPADE(Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission has already captured its first images: a pair of self-portraits showing part of the spacecraft as the twin explorers speed away from Earth.
On November 21, one of the two ESCAPADE spacecraft used its Visible and Infrared Observation System (VISIONS) cameras, provided by Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, to capture these images, showing part of a solar panel on the spacecraft.
The images prove that the cameras are working well. The visible-light image also suggests that the spacecraft should have the sensitivity to image Martian aurora from orbit. The infrared camera will be used at Mars to better understand how materials on the surface heat up and cool down during Mars’ day-night cycle and over the planet’s seasons.
The second ESCAPADE spacecraft also successfully took its first photos, but it was targeted towards deep space, so the images were simply black.
The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft, built by Rocket Lab and ultimately bound for Mars, launched on November 13 aboard a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Once the ESCAPADE spacecraft reach Mars, they will study how a million-mile-per-hour stream of material flowing from the Sun, known as the solar wind, interacts with the Martian environment and how that drives atmospheric loss at the Red Planet.
Before they head for Mars, though, the two spacecraft are following a “loiter” or “Earth-proximity” orbit around a location in space about a million miles from Earth called Lagrange point 2. In November 2026, they will return to Earth to use our planet’s gravity to slingshot their way to Mars. They will arrive at the Red Planet in September 2027.
One week ago, we launched our second New Glenn mission. Today, "Never Tell Me The Odds" is back at LC-36 for refurbishment to prepare for its next flight! pic.twitter.com/1FxeStoeSB
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Science: Yinuo Han (Caltech), Ryan White (Macquarie University); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
Webb First to Show 4 Dust Shells ‘Spiraling’ Apep, Limits Long Orbit (News Release - November 19)
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a first of its kind: a crisp mid-infrared image of a system of four serpentine spirals of dust, one expanding beyond the next in precisely the same pattern. (The fourth is almost transparent, at the edges of Webb’s image.) Observations taken prior to Webb only detected one shell, and while the existence of outer shells was hypothesized, searches using ground-based telescopes were unable to uncover any. These shells were emitted over the last 700 years by two aging Wolf-Rayet stars in a system known as Apep, a nod to the Egyptian god of chaos.
Webb’s image combined with several years of data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile narrowed down how often the pair swing by one another: once every 190 years. Over each incredibly long orbit, they pass closely for 25 years and form dust.
Webb also confirmed that there are three stars gravitationally bound to one another in this system. The dust ejected by the two Wolf-Rayet stars is “slashed” by a third star, a massive supergiant, which carves holes into each expanding cloud of dust from its wider orbit. (All three stars are shown as a single bright point of light in Webb’s image.)
“Looking at Webb’s new observations was like walking into a dark room and switching on the light — everything came into view,” said Yinuo Han, the lead author of a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal and postdoctoral researcher at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “There is dust everywhere in Webb’s image, and the telescope shows that most of it was cast off in repetitive, predictable structures.” Han’s paper coincides with the publication of Ryan White’s paper in The Astrophysical Journal, a PhD student at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
Han, White, and their co-authors refined the Wolf-Rayet stars’ orbit by combining precise measurements of the ring location from Webb’s image with the speed of the shells’ expansion from observations taken by the VLT over eight years.
“This is a one-of-a-kind system with an incredibly rare orbital period,” White said. “The next longest orbit for a dusty Wolf-Rayet binary is about 30 years. Most have orbits between two and 10 years.”
When the two Wolf-Rayet stars approach and pass one another, their strong stellar winds collide and mix, forming and casting out heaps of carbon-rich dust for a quarter century at a time. In similar systems, dust is shot out over mere months, like the shells in Wolf-Rayet 140.
High-speed ‘skirmish’
The dust-producing Wolf-Rayet stars in Apep aren’t exactly on a tranquil cruise. They are whipping through space and sending out dust at 1,200 to 2,000 miles per second (2,000 to 3,000 kilometers per second).
That dust is also very dense. The specific makeup of the dust is another reason why Webb was able to observe so much more: It largely consists of amorphous carbon. “Carbon dust grains retain a higher temperature even as they coast far away from the star,” Han said.
While the exceptionally tiny dust grains are considered warm in space, the light they emit is also extremely faint, which is why it can only be detected from space by Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument).
Slicing dust
To find the holes that the third star has cut like a knife through the dust, look for the central point of light and trace a V shape from about 10 o’clock to 2 o’clock. “The cavity is more or less in the same place in each shell and looks like a funnel,” White said.
“I was shocked when I saw the updated calculations play out in our simulations,” he said. “Webb gave us the ‘smoking gun’ to prove the third star is gravitationally bound to this system.” Researchers have known about the third star since the VLT observed the brightest innermost shell and the stars in 2018, but Webb’s observations led to an updated geometric model, clinching the connection.
“We solved several mysteries with Webb,” Han said. “The remaining mystery is the precise distance to the stars from Earth, which will require future observations.”
Future of Apep
The two Wolf-Rayet stars were initially more massive than their supergiant companion, but have shed most of their mass. It’s likely that both Wolf-Rayet stars are between 10 and 20 times the mass of the Sun, and that the supergiant is 40 or 50 times as massive compared to the Sun.
Eventually, the Wolf-Rayet stars will explode as supernovae, quickly sending their contents into space. Either may also emit a gamma-ray burst, one of the most powerful events in the Universe, before possibly becoming a black hole.
Wolf-Rayet stars are incredibly rare in the Universe. Only a thousand are estimated to exist in our Milky Way galaxy, which contains hundreds of billions of stars overall. Of the few hundred Wolf-Rayet binaries that have been observed to date, Apep is the only example that contains two Wolf-Rayet stars of these types in our galaxy — most only have one.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our Solar System, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our Universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
View Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Through NASA’s Multiple Lenses (News Release)
NASA is in the midst of an unprecedented Solar System-wide observation campaign, turning its spacecraft and space telescopes to follow comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object to pass through our Solar System. Twelve NASA assets have captured and processed imagery of the comet since it was first discovered on July 1, and several others will have opportunities to capture more images as the comet continues to pass through our Solar System.
By observing the comet from so many locations, NASA has an opportunity to learn about the ways that 3I/ATLAS differs from our Solar System’s home-grown comets and give scientists a new window into how the compositions of other systems may differ from our own.
Observations from Mars
The closest imagery of the comet was taken by NASA spacecraft at Mars. Earlier this fall, 3I/ATLAS passed by Mars from a distance of 19 million miles, where it was observed by three NASA spacecraft. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter(MRO) captured one of the closest images of the comet, while the MAVEN(Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) orbiter obtained ultraviolet images that will help scientists understand the comet’s make-up.
Meanwhile, the Perseverance rover grabbed a faint glimpse from the surface of Mars.
Sun watchers’ view
Some of NASA’s heliophysics missions have the unique ability to observe areas of the sky near the Sun, which allowed them to track comet 3I/ATLAS as it passed behind our Sun as seen from Earth, making observations with ground-based telescopes impossible. NASA’s STEREO(Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) captured images from September 11 to October 2, and the ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA mission SOHO(Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) observed the comet from October 15 to 26. Images from NASA’s PUNCH(Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, which launched earlier this year, reveal the comet’s tail during observations from September 20 to October 3.
Despite previously observing and discovering thousands of comets, this is the first time that NASA’s heliophysics missions have purposefully observed an object originating in another solar system.
Asteroid explorers
NASA’s Psyche and Lucy spacecraft, currently on their respective outbound journeys to study various asteroid targets throughout the Solar System, were able to observe 3I/ATLAS en route. On September 8 and 9, Psyche acquired four observations of the comet over eight hours from a distance of 33 million miles. These images will help scientists refine the comet’s trajectory.
On September 16, Lucy took a series of images from 240 million miles away. Stacking these images together provides detail on the comet’s coma and tail.
The NASA-funded ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) telescope in Chile discovered 3I/ATLAS on July 1. Later that month it was viewed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. In August, both NASA’s James Webb Telescope and SPHEREx(Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) captured imagery.
Comet 3I/ATLAS will fly closest to Earth about Friday, December 19, at 170 million miles, which is almost twice the distance between the Earth and Sun. NASA spacecraft will continue to observe the comet as it makes its journey through the Solar System, passing the orbit of Jupiter in spring 2026.
ESA / Webb, NASA & CSA, J. H. Kastner (Rochester Institute of Technology)
The Red Spider Nebula, Caught by Webb (News Release)
This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features a cosmic creepy-crawly called NGC 6537 — the Red Spider Nebula. Using its Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), Webb has revealed never-before-seen details in this picturesque planetary nebula with a rich backdrop of thousands of stars.
Planetary nebulae like the Red Spider Nebula form when ordinary stars like the Sun reach the end of their lives. After ballooning into cool red giants, these stars shed their outer layers and cast them into space, exposing their white-hot cores. Ultraviolet light from the central star ionises the cast-off material, causing it to glow.
The planetary nebula phase of a star’s life is as fleeting as it is beautiful, lasting only a few tens of thousands of years.
The central star of the Red Spider Nebula is visible in this image, glowing just brighter than the webs of dusty gas that surround it. The surprising nature of the nebula’s tremendously hot and luminous central star has been revealed by Webb’s NIRCam. In optical-wavelength images, such as from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the star appears faint and blue.
But in the NIRCam images, it shows up as red; thanks to its sensitive near-infrared capabilities, Webb has revealed a shroud of hot dust surrounding the central star. This hot dust likely orbits the central star, in a disc structure.
Though only a single star is visible in the Red Spider’s heart, a hidden companion star may lurk there as well. A stellar companion could explain the nebula’s shape, including its characteristic narrow waist and wide outflows. This hourglass shape is seen in other planetary nebulae such as the Butterfly Nebula, which Webb also recently observed.
Webb’s new view of the Red Spider Nebula reveals for the first time the full extent of the nebula’s outstretched lobes, which form the ‘legs’ of the spider. These lobes, shown in blue, are traced by light emitted from H2 molecules, which contain two hydrogen atoms bonded together. Stretching over the entirety of NIRCam’s field of view, these lobes are shown to be closed, bubble-like structures that each extend about 3 light-years.
Outflowing gas from the centre of the nebula has inflated these massive bubbles over thousands of years.
Gas is also actively jetting out from the nebula’s centre, as these new Webb observations show. An elongated purple ‘S’ shape centred on the heart of the nebula follows the light from ionised iron atoms. This feature marks where a fast-moving jet has emerged from near the nebula’s central star and collided with material that was previously cast away by the star, sculpting the rippling structure of the nebula seen today.
The observations used to create this image come from Webb GO programme #4571(PI: J. Kastner) as part of a joint Chandra-JWST observing programme, which aims to understand how bipolar planetary nebulae like the Red Spider Nebula are shaped by the outflows and jets that emerge from the stars at their cores.
New Glenn Launches NASA’s ESCAPADE, Lands Fully-Reusable Booster (News Release)
Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. — The New Glenn orbital launch vehicle successfully completed its second mission, deploying NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers(ESCAPADE) twin spacecraft into the designated loiter orbit, and landing the fully-reusable first stage on Jacklyn in the Atlantic Ocean.
New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines ignited on Thursday, November 13, 2025, at 3:55:01 PM EST / 20:55:01 UTC from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
“We achieved full mission success today, and I am so proud of the team,” said Dave Limp, CEO, Blue Origin. “It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds had perfect odds—never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try. This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.”
The ESCAPADE spacecraft will begin their journey to Mars once the planets have returned to the ideal alignment in fall 2026. ESCAPADE will use two identical spacecraft to investigate how the solar wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic environment and how this interaction drives the planet’s atmospheric escape. In addition to deploying the NASA spacecraft, the Viasat HaloNet demonstration onboard New Glenn’s second stage successfully executed the first flight test of Viasat’s telemetry data relay service for NASA’s Communications Services Project.
“Congratulations to Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, UC Berkeley and all of our partners on the successful launch of ESCAPADE," said the acting NASA Administrator, Secretary Sean Duffy. "This heliophysics mission will help reveal how Mars became a desert planet, and how solar eruptions affect the Martian surface. Every launch of New Glenn provides data that will be essential when we launch MK-1 through Artemis.”
New Glenn is foundational to advancing our customers’ critical missions and our own. The vehicle underpins our efforts to establish sustained human presence on the Moon, harness in-space resources, provide multi-mission, multi-orbit mobility through Blue Ring, and establish destinations in low-Earth orbit.
The New Glenn program has several vehicles in production and multiple years of orders. In addition to NASA and Viasat, customers include Amazon’s Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile, and several telecommunications providers, among others. The mission marked the vehicle’s second National Security Space Launch (NSSL) certification flight.
Blue Origin is certifying New Glenn with the U.S. Space Force for the NSSL program to meet emerging national security objectives.
"Today was a tremendous achievement for the New Glenn team, opening a new era for Blue Origin and the industry as we look to launch, land, repeat, again and again," said Jordan Charles, Vice President, New Glenn. "We've made significant progress on manufacturing at rate and building ahead of need. Our primary focus remains focused on increasing our cadence and working through our manifest."
