Space Stories: NASA Probes the Northern Lights, India Announces New Telescopes, and Titan May Be a Moon Merger

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Image (Credit): The northern lights from October 2013 as captured by Astronaut Mike Hopkins aboard the International Space Station. (NASA)

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—Space.com “NASA Launches Twin Rocket Missions from Alaska to Study Mysterious Black Auroras“

NASA launched two rockets from Alaska this week to learn more about the electrical “circuitry” within auroras, the colorful light shows that occur when solar wind collides with Earth’s atmosphere. The missions saw two suborbital sounding rockets launch from the Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks, Alaska loaded with scientific equipment that will fly into the atmosphere for a short period of time to gather data. The destination for the rockets in both missions was the northern lights, or aurora borealis.

—Physics World “India Announces Three New Telescopes in the Himalayan Desert“

India has unveiled plans to build two new optical-infrared telescopes and a dedicated solar telescope in the Himalayan desert region of Ladakh. The three new facilities, expected to cost INR 35bn (about £284m), were announced by the Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on 1 February.

—SETI Institute: “Saturn’s Moon Titan Could Have Formed in a Merger of Two Old Moons“

Recent research suggests that Saturn’s bright rings and its largest moon, Titan, may have both originated in collisions among its moons. While Cassini’s 13-year mission expanded our understanding of Saturn, the discoveries of its young rings and Titan’s rapidly shifting orbit raised new questions. Now, a study led by SETI Institute scientist Matija Ćuk proposes an explanation linking the formation of the moons and rings, centering on the possibility that Titan is the product of a moon merger.

Space Quote: An Odd Solar System

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Credit: Image by AstroGraphix_Visuals from Pixabay

“The paradigm of planet formation is that we have rocky inner planets very close to the stars, like in our solar system…This is the first time in which we have a rocky planet so far away from its host star, and after these gas-rich planets.”

-Statement by Thomas Wilson, an assistant professor in the department of physics at the University of Warwick in England, as quoted by KLS.com. He was referring to the findings in his recent paper about a solar system 116 light-years away with four exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf star – an inner rocky exoplanet, two gaseous exoplanets second and third from the parent star, and a final rocky exoplanet. Of course, that’s what we had here until 2006 when some wise guy decided to make Pluto a dwarf planet. It’s all in the definition.

Carnegie Astronomy Lecture Series

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Image (Credit): Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. (Carnegie Science)

If you are stuck inside with the winter weather and looking for something to do, you can either head to sunny California to attend the March Carnegie Astronomy Lectures Series at The Huntington in San Marino or watch them on YouTube. This will be a series of four lectures.

On March 2nd, the first lecture of the series is titled “Ultraviolet Suspects: Using Galaxies to Shed Light on the Early Universe.” It is a free event, but you do need to register.

Here is a little more about this upcoming lecture:

One of the universe’s last phase changes, reionization, took place within the first billion years of its cosmic history. Today, astronomers can use the ultraviolet signals from distant galaxies to investigate the “who,” “when,” and “how” of that critical period. In this talk, Carnegie Science Observatories postdoc Tony Pahl will present his research on the high-energy radiation leaking from galaxies, which leverages data collected with a combination of instruments, including NASA’s JWST, the Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii, and Carnegie’s own twin Magellan telescopes at our Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

The other March astronomy lectures are:

  • March 16: Planetary Habitability: The Origin of Water
  • March 30: Shining a Light on Dark Matter
  • April 13: How To Look Inside An Exoplanet

Information on the upcoming March Astronomy Lecture Series will be posted on the Carnegie Science site.

You can also watch a variety of earlier lectures at the Carnegie Science YouTube link.

Launch of Crew-12 to ISS Goes Without a Hitch

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Image (Credit): NASA’s Crew-12 launches toward the ISS via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 13, 2026. (NASA)

The International Space Station’s (ISS) Crew-12 is safely on its way. As NASA Administrator Isaacman noted:

With Crew-12 safely on orbit, America and our international partners once again demonstrated the professionalism, preparation, and teamwork required for human spaceflight.

The launch carried NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. The four crew members should climb aboard the ISS tomorrow afternoon.

This crew replaces Crew-11, which left the space station earlier than expected last month due to a medical emergency.

Image (Credit): Crew-12 sitting in the SpaceX Dragon capsule in preparation for this week’s launch. From left to right you have Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway and Jessica Mier, and ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot. (NASA)

Update: The four member Crew-12 are now safely aboard the ISS.

Pic of the Week: Another View of the Milky Way

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Image (Credit): The Milky Way galaxy in radio waves as seen from the Southern Hemisphere. (Silvia Mantovanini and the GLEAM-X Team)

The image above was released late last year. It shows the Milky Way galaxy in radio-color captured by astronomers from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). All of this was part of the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) and GLEAM-X (GLEAM eXtended) surveys conducted over 28 nights in 2013 and 2014 as well as 113 nights from 2018 to 2020.

In describing the image, Silvia Mantovanini, one of the astronomers analyzing the survey data, noted:

You can clearly identify remnants of exploded stars, represented by large red circles. The smaller blue regions indicate stellar nurseries where new stars are actively forming.

In this video, you can hear more from astronomers Silvia Mantovanini and Natasha Hurley-Walker who co-wrote a paper on this work titled GaLactic and extragalactic all-sky Murchison Widefield Array survey eXtended (GLEAM-X) III: Galactic plane.