NASA Works MAVEN Spacecraft Issue Ahead of Solar Conjunction (News Release)
NASA is continuing efforts to recontact its MAVEN(Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft, which was last heard from on December 6. In partnership with NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), the MAVEN team has sent commands for spacecraft recovery and is monitoring the network for a spacecraft signal.
The MAVEN team also continues to analyze tracking data fragments recovered from a December 6 radio science campaign. This information is being used to create a timeline of possible events and identify likely root cause of the issue. As part of that effort, on December 16 and 20, NASA’s Curiosity team used the rover’s Mastcam instrument in an attempt to image MAVEN’s reference orbit, but MAVEN was not detected.
Additional analysis will continue, but planned monitoring will be affected by the upcoming solar conjunction.
Mars solar conjunction – a period when Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun – begins on Monday, December 29, and NASA will not have contact with any Mars mission until Friday, January 16. Once the solar conjunction window is over, NASA plans to resume its efforts to reestablish communications with MAVEN.
NRL / NASA / JHUAPL. Movie processed / compiled by Guillermo Stenborg (JHUAPL)
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Observes Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS (News Release)
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe observed interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS from October 18 to November 5, 2025, with its WISPR (Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument. The spacecraft snapped around 10 images of the comet per day. During this period, Parker Solar Probe was speeding away from the Sun following its 25th solar flyby on September 15.
In these initial images — which still need to go through final calibration and processing — the comet can be seen heading behind the Sun from Parker’s point of view. At the time, the comet was near its closest point to the Sun, at a distance of about 130 million miles, placing it just outside the orbit of Mars. The images offer a valuable look at the comet over a period when it couldn’t be seen from Earth because it appeared too close to the Sun from Earth’s perspective.
The WISPR team is continuing to process the data to remove stray sunlight and compensate for exposure times, which differed between the images, causing the comet to appear as if it changed brightness. The final images will ultimately help scientists better study this interstellar visitor.
Comet 3I/ATLAS was discovered by the NASA-funded ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, in July. It is the third known object originating from outside our Solar System discovered passing through our solar neighborhood. Comet 3I/ATLAS was also seen by other NASA heliophysics missions including PUNCH, STEREO and SOHO.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Completes 26th Closest Approach to Sun (News Release)
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe completed its 26th close approach to the Sun on December 13, again matching its record distance of 3.8 million miles (6.2 million kilometers) from the solar surface.
The spacecraft checked in with flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland — where Parker Solar Probe was also designed and built — Thursday, transmitting a beacon tone indicating that its systems were operating normally. The spacecraft was out of contact with Earth and operating autonomously during the close approach.
The spacecraft also equaled its record-setting speed of 430,000 mph (687,000 kph) — a mark that, like the distance, was set and subsequently matched during close approaches on December 24, 2024; March 22; June 19; and September 16. Parker Solar Probe will remain in this orbit around the Sun and continue making observations. The next steps for the mission in late 2026 and beyond are formally under NASA review.
During this solar encounter from December 8 through December 18, Parker’s four scientific instrument packages gathered data from inside the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona. The flyby, as the fifth at this distance and speed, is allowing the spacecraft to conduct unrivaled measurements of the solar wind and solar activity while the Sun is in an active phase of its 11-year cycle.
Parker will begin returning detailed telemetry on its status on Friday, December 19, with science data transmission for this solar encounter set to start on Thursday, January 15, 2026. Parker’s observations of the solar wind and solar events, such as coronal mass ejections and the aftermaths of flares, are critical to advancing humankind’s understanding of the Sun and the phenomena that drive high-energy space weather events that pose risks to astronauts, satellites, air travel, and even power grids on Earth. Understanding the fundamental physics of space weather enables more reliable prediction of astronaut safety during future deep-space missions to the Moon and Mars.
Parker Solar Probe was developed as a part of NASA’s Living With a Star (LWS) program to explore aspects of the Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. The LWS program is managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Johns Hopkins APL manages Parker Solar Probe for NASA and designed, built and operates the mission.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Ready to Roll for Miles in Years Ahead (News Release)
After nearly five years on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has traveled almost 25 miles (40 kilometers), and the mission team has been busy testing the rover’s durability and gathering new science findings on the way to a new region nicknamed “Lac de Charmes,” where it will be searching for rocks to sample in the coming year.
Like its predecessor Curiosity, which has been exploring a different region of Mars since 2012, Perseverance was made for the long haul. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built Perseverance and leads the mission, has continued testing the rover’s parts here on Earth to make sure the six-wheeled scientist will be strong for years to come. This past summer, JPL certified that the rotary actuators that turn the rover’s wheels can perform optimally for at least another 37 miles (60 kilometers); comparable brake testing is underway as well.
Over the past two years, engineers have extensively evaluated nearly all of the vehicle’s subsystems in this way, concluding that they can operate until at least 2031.
“These tests show the rover is in excellent shape,” said Perseverance’s deputy project manager, Steve Lee of JPL, who presented the results on Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, the largest gathering of planetary scientists in the United States. “All the systems are fully capable of supporting a very long-term mission to extensively explore this fascinating region of Mars.”
Perseverance has been driving through Mars’ Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake and river system, where it has been collecting scientifically compelling rock core samples. In fact, in September, the team announced that a sample from a rock nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” contains a potential fingerprint of past microbial life.
More efficient roving
In addition to a hefty suite of six science instruments, Perseverance packs more autonomous capabilities than past rovers. A paper published recently in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics highlights an autonomous planning tool called Enhanced Autonomous Navigation, or ENav. The software looks up to 50 feet (15 meters) ahead for potential hazards, then chooses a path without obstacles and tells Perseverance’s wheels how to steer there.
Engineers at JPL meticulously plan each day of the rover’s activities on Mars. But once the rover starts driving, it’s on its own and sometimes has to react to unexpected obstacles in the terrain. Past rovers could do this to some degree, but not if these obstacles were clustered near each other.
Past rovers also couldn’t react as far in advance, resulting in the vehicles driving slower while approaching sand pits, rocks and ledges. In contrast, ENav’s algorithm evaluates each rover wheel independently against the elevation of terrain, trade-offs between different routes, and “keep-in” or “keep-out” areas marked by human operators for the path ahead.
“More than 90% of Perseverance’s journey has relied on autonomous driving, making it possible to quickly collect a diverse range of samples,” said JPL autonomy researcher Hiro Ono, a paper lead author. “As humans go to the Moon and even Mars in the future, long-range autonomous driving will become more critical to exploring these worlds.”
New science
A paper published Wednesday in Science details what Perseverance discovered in the “Margin Unit,” a geologic area at the margin, or inner edge, of Jezero Crater. The rover collected three samples from that region. Scientists think that these samples may be particularly useful for showing how ancient rocks from Mars’ deep interior interacted with water and the atmosphere, helping create conditions supportive for life.
From September 2023 to November 2024, Perseverance ascended 1,312 feet (400 meters) of the Margin Unit, studying rocks along the way — especially those containing the mineral olivine. Scientists use minerals as timekeepers because crystals within them can record details about the precise moment and conditions in which they formed.
Jezero Crater and the surrounding area holds large reserves of olivine, which forms at high temperatures, typically deep within a planet, and offers a snapshot of what was going on in the planet’s interior. Scientists think the Margin Unit’s olivine was made in an intrusion, a process where magma pushes into underground layers and cools into igneous rock. In this case, erosion later exposed that rock to the surface, where it could interact with water from the crater’s ancient lake and carbon dioxide, which was abundant in the planet’s early atmosphere.
Those interactions form new minerals called carbonates, which can preserve signs of past life, along with clues as to how Mars’ atmosphere changed over time.
“This combination of olivine and carbonate was a major factor in the choice to land at Jezero Crater,” said the new paper’s lead author, Perseverance science team member Ken Williford of Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle. “These minerals are powerful recorders of planetary evolution and the potential for life.”
Together, the olivine and carbonates record the interplay between rock, water and atmosphere inside the crater, including how each changed over time. The Margin Unit’s olivine appeared to have been altered by water at the base of the unit, where it would have been submerged. But the higher Perseverance went, the more the olivine bore textures associated with magma chambers, like crystallization, and fewer signs of water alteration.
As Perseverance leaves the Margin Unit behind for Lac de Charmes, the team will have the chance to collect new olivine-rich samples and compare the differences between the two areas.
NASA JPL Shakes Things Up Testing Future Commercial Lunar Spacecraft (News Release)
As Firefly Aerospace prepares to follow its successful soft landing on the Moon, an engineering model for its next lander is being put through its paces.
The same historic facilities that some 50 years ago prepared NASA’s twin Voyager probes for their ongoing interstellar odyssey are helping to ready a towering commercial spacecraft for a journey to the Moon. Launches involve brutal shaking and astonishingly loud noises, and testing in these facilities mimics those conditions to help ensure that mission hardware can survive the ordeal. The latest spacecraft to get this treatment are Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 2 vehicles, set to launch to the Moon’s far side next year.
The Environmental Test Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California is where dozens of robotic spacecraft have been subjected to powerful jolts, extended rattling, high-decibel blasts of sound, and frigid and scorching temperatures, among other trials. Constructed in the 1960s and modernized over the years, the facilities have prepared every NASA spacecraft built or assembled at JPL for the rigors of space, from the Ranger spacecraft of the dawning Space Age to the Perseverance Mars rover to Europa Clipper, currently en route to the Jupiter system.
That legacy, and the decades of accumulated experience of the Environmental Test Laboratory team at JPL, is also supporting industry efforts to return to the Moon as part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and its Artemis campaign, which will bring astronauts back to the lunar surface.
In recent months, a full-scale model of Firefly’s uncrewed Blue Ghost Mission 2 spacecraft was put through its paces by the experts in the lab’s vibration and acoustic testing facilities. Lessons learned with this model, called a structural qualification unit, will be applied to upcoming testing of the spacecraft that will fly to the Moon as early as 2026 through NASA’s CLPS.
“There’s a lot of knowledge gained over the years, passed from one generation of JPL engineers to another, that we bring to bear to support our own missions as well as commercial efforts,” said Michel William, a JPL engineer in the Environmental Test Laboratory who led the testing. “The little details that go into getting these tests right — nobody teaches you that in school, and it’s such a critical piece of space launch.”
Testing just right
The Environmental Test Laboratory team led environmental testing for Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 lander in 2024, and seeing the spacecraft achieve a soft Moon landing in March was a point of pride for them. Firefly’s next CLPS delivery debuts a dual-spacecraft configuration and hosts multiple international payloads, with the company’s Elytra Dark orbital vehicle stacked below the Blue Ghost lunar lander. Standing 22 feet (6.9 meters) high, the full structure is more than three times as tall as the Mission 1 lander.
This fall, a structural qualification model of the full stack was clamped to a “shaker table” inside a clean room at JPL and repeatedly rattled in three directions while hundreds of sensors monitored the rapid movement. Then, inside a separate acoustic testing chamber, giant horns blared at it from openings built into the room’s 16-inch-thick (41-centimeter-thick) concrete walls. The horns use compressed nitrogen gas to pummel spacecraft with up to 153 decibels, noise loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss in a human.
Each type of test involves several increasingly intense iterations. Between rounds, JPL’s dynamics environment experts analyze the data to compare what the spacecraft experienced to computer model predictions. Sometimes a discrepancy leads to hardware modifications, sometimes a tweak to the computer model. Engineers and technicians are careful to push the hardware, but not too far.
“You can either under-test or over-test, and both are bad,” William said. “If you over-test, you can break your hardware. If you under-test, it can break on the rocket. It’s a fine line.”
Since the model isn’t itself launching to the Moon, Firefly’s recent Environmental Test Laboratory visit didn’t include several types of trials that are generally completed only for flight hardware. A launch pad-bound spacecraft would undergo electromagnetic testing to ensure that signals from its electronic parts don’t interfere with one another. And, in what is probably the most well-known environmental test, flight-bound hardware is baked or chilled at extreme temperatures in a thermal vacuum chamber from which all of the air is sucked out.
The multiple thermal vacuum chamber facilities at JPL include two large historic “space simulators” built within NASA’s first few years of existence: a chamber that’s 10 feet in diameter and another that’s 25 feet across.
Qualifying for launch
The completion of Environmental Test Laboratory testing on Firefly’s structural qualification model helps prove that the spacecraft will survive its ride out of Earth’s atmosphere aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 2 team is now turning its focus to completing assembly and testing of the flight hardware for launch.
Once at the Moon, the Blue Ghost lander will touch down on the far side, delivering its payloads to the surface. Those include LuSEE-Night, a radio telescope that is a joint effort by NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. A payload developed at JPL called User Terminal will test a compact, low-cost S-band radio communications system that could enable future far-side missions to talk to each other and to relay orbiters.
Meantime, Firefly’s Elytra Dark orbital vehicle will have deployed into lunar orbit ESA’s (European Space Agency’s)Lunar Pathfinder communications satellite — a payload on which NASA is collaborating. Both vehicles will remain in orbit and able to relay data from the far-side surface back to Earth.
“Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 2 will deliver both NASA and international commercial payloads to further prove out technologies for Artemis and help enable a long-term presence on the Moon,” said Ray Allensworth, Firefly’s spacecraft program director. “The extensive spacecraft environmental testing we did at JPL for Mission 1 was a critical step in Firefly’s test campaign for our historic lunar mission. Now we’re collaborating again to support a successful repeat on the Moon that will unlock even more insights for future robotic and human missions.”
NASA Continues MAVEN Spacecraft Recontact Efforts (News Release)
NASA’s MAVEN(Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission team, in partnership with the agency’s Deep Space Network, continues recovery activities after losing contact with the spacecraft on December 6. To date, attempts to reestablish contact with the spacecraft have not been successful.
Although no spacecraft telemetry has been received since December 4, the team recovered a brief fragment of tracking data from December 6 as part of an ongoing radio science campaign. Analysis of that signal suggests that the MAVEN spacecraft was rotating in an unexpected manner when it emerged from behind Mars. Further, the frequency of the tracking signal suggests MAVEN’s orbit trajectory may have changed.
The team continues to analyze tracking data to understand the most likely scenarios leading to the loss of signal. Efforts to reestablish contact with MAVEN also continue.
NASA is also working to mitigate the effect of the MAVEN anomaly on surface operations for NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers. Four orbiters at Mars, including MAVEN, relay communications to and from the surface to support rover operations. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s)ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter all remain operational.
For the next two weeks of scheduled surface operations, NASA is arranging additional passes from the remaining orbiters, and the Perseverance and Curiosity teams have adjusted their daily planning activities to continue their science missions.
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!
So how much did this guy pay Boba Fett to bring Han Solo's carbonite-encased body back to his palace on Tatooine? Trump's new nickname should be Pedo the Hutt.
🚨 BREAKING: Oversight Dems received 95,000 new photos from Jeffrey Epstein's estate. These disturbing images raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world.
NASA Teams Work MAVEN Spacecraft Signal Loss (News Release)
NASA’s MAVEN(Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft, in orbit around Mars, experienced a loss of signal with ground stations on Earth on December 6. Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the Red Planet. After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.
The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available.
The MAVEN spacecraft launched in November 2013 and entered Mars’ orbit in September 2014. The mission’s goal is to explore the planet’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and interactions with the Sun and solar wind to explore the loss of the Martian atmosphere to space. Understanding atmospheric loss gives scientists insight into the history of the Red Planet’s atmosphere and climate, liquid water and planetary habitability.
MAVEN also serves as a communications relay station for rovers on the Martian surface. Last year, the spacecraft celebrated its 10th anniversary in orbit at Mars.
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.”
