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

Posted on by onespaceman2000
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 Stories: Cell Phones in Space, Good News in the Chilean Desert, and Moving Martian Water

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—Mashable: “NASA Clears the iPhone to go to Space“

Apple’s iPhone may be one of the most popular phones on Earth, but it’s about to start conquering space as well. According to NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, NASA astronauts are now cleared to take smartphones into space, starting with the SpaceX Crew-12 and Artemis II missions. “We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world,” he wrote in a tweet.

—Universe Space Tech: “The Sky is Saved: Construction of Industrial Complex in Atacama Canceled“

AES Andes has announced that it will abandon plans to build the INNA industrial complex in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The implementation of this project could jeopardize astronomical observations…On January 23, AES Andes announced that it had decided to discontinue INNA in order to focus on its renewable energy portfolio. “When the cancellation is confirmed, we’ll be relieved that the INNA industrial complex will not be built near Paranal,” said ESO Director General Xavier Barcons. “Due to its planned location, the project would pose a major threat to the darkest and clearest skies on Earth and to the performance of the most advanced astronomical facilities anywhere in the world.”

—Tohoku University: “An Unusual Dust Storm on Mars Reveals How the Red Planet Lost Some of its Water“

The current image of Mars as an arid and hostile desert contrasts sharply with the history revealed by its surface. Channels, minerals altered by water, and other geological traces indicate that the Red Planet was, in its early days, a much wetter and more dynamic world. Reconstructing how this water-rich environment disappeared remains one of the great challenges of planetary science. Although several processes are known that can explain some of this loss, the fate of much of Martian water remains a mystery. A new study from an international team of researchers published in Communications: Earth & Environment on February 2, 2026, has brought us a significant step closer to solving this puzzle. For the first time, researchers demonstrated that an anomalous, intense, but localized dust storm was able to drive the transport of water to the upper layers of the Martian atmosphere during the Northern Hemisphere summer – a time when this process was previously considered to be irrelevant.

Space Stories: Another Artemis II Delay, AI Discovers Cosmic Oddities in Hubble Data, and AI Drives a Martian Rover

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artemis II mission patch. (NASA)

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—CBS News: “Artemis II Moon Rocket Fueling Test Runs into Problems with Hydrogen Leak“

A hydrogen leak at the base of NASA’s Artemis II moon rocket Monday threw a wrench into a carefully planned countdown “wet dress” rehearsal, but engineers were able to manage a workaround and the test proceeded toward a simulated launch. Whether mission managers will be able to clear the rocket for an actual launch as early as Sunday to propel four astronauts on a flight to the moon will depend on the results of a detailed overnight review and post-test analysis. NASA only has three days — Feb. 8, 10 and 11 — to get the mission off this month or the flight will slip to March.

—ZME Science: “Astronomers Unleashed an AI on Hubble’s Archive and Uncovered 1,300 “Cosmic Oddities.” Most Were Completely New to Science“

For more than three decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has collected targeted images to answer specific scientific questions, from mapping galaxies to studying nearby nebulae. Hubble has gathered so much data that despite their best efforts, astronomers haven’t had the time to analyze it all in detail yet…Now, two astronomers have revisited that massive archive with a new plan. They deployed an artificial intelligence system designed to notice when something looks “wrong”. In just 60 hours of computing time, the tool flagged over 1,300 anomalies hidden within 100 million Hubble snapshots. Hundreds of them have never appeared in scientific literature.

—NASA/JPL “NASA’s Perseverance Rover Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars“

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first drives on another world that were planned by artificial intelligence. Executed on Dec. 8 and 10, and led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the demonstration used generative AI to create waypoints for Perseverance, a complex decision-making task typically performed manually by the mission’s human rover planners…During the demonstration, the team leveraged a type of generative AI called vision-language models to analyze existing data from JPL’s surface mission dataset. The AI used the same imagery and data that human planners rely on to generate waypoints — fixed locations where the rover takes up a new set of instructions — so that Perseverance could safely navigate the challenging Martian terrain.

Space Stories: Moon Kills Earth Water Theory, Astronauts in Quarantine, and China Loses Two Rockets

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: NASA

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—Universities Space Research Association: “Our Moon’s 4 Billion-Year Impact Record Suggests Meteorites Didn’t Supply Earth’s Water“

A long-standing idea in planetary science is that water-rich meteorites arriving late in Earth’s history could have delivered a major share of Earth’s water. A new study by Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and University of New Mexico argues that the Moon’s surface record sets a hard limit on that possibility: even under generous assumptions, late meteorite delivery since about 4 billion years ago could only have supplied a small fraction of Earth’s water...In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by Dr. Tony Gargano at USRA’s Lunar and Planetary Institute and the University of New Mexico analyzed a large suite of Apollo lunar regolith samples using high-precision triple oxygen isotopes. Earth has erased most of its early bombardment record through tectonics, and constant crustal recycling. The Moon, by contrast, preserves a continuously accessible archive: lunar regolith, the loose layer of debris produced and reworked by impacts over billions of years

—Florida Today: “NASA Artemis Astronauts in Quarantine Ahead of Rocket Launch in Florida“

The four astronauts who will soon become the first humans in more than half a century to fly on a lunar mission have begun the quarantine process – a crucial sign that NASA believes a launch could be imminent. Sequestering themselves away from others for the next several days ensures that the three Americans and one Canadian selected for a mission known as Artemis 2 are at low risk of becoming sick and jeopardizing the mission. The crew members have entered quarantine in Texas as NASA makes final preparations in Florida to ready the towering rocket that will get the mission off the ground as early as February.

—Technology.org: “China’s Space Ambitions Hit Turbulence: Two Rockets Fail Within 12 Hours“

The Long March 3B departed Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 11:55 Eastern (1655 UTC) on January 16. Amateur footage confirmed the rocket left the pad on schedule. Then came silence. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) waited nearly 12 hours before acknowledging what observers already suspected. “The specific cause is under further analysis and investigation,” state media Xinhua reported…Less than 12 hours after the Long March 3B failure, Galactic Energy attempted something the company had been working toward for months: the first flight of its Ceres-2 rocket. After repeatedly postponed launch windows, the solid-fueled rocket finally lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 11:08 p.m. Eastern on January 16 (0408 UTC, January 17). It didn’t work. Galactic Energy confirmed an anomaly had occurred and that investigation was underway.

Space Stories: A Peruvian Solar Observatory, NASA Rocket Traffic, and a Reborn Back Hole

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Aerial view of the fortress at Chankillo. (Servicio Aerofotográfico Nacional, Lima)

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—Discover Magazine: “The Earliest-Known Astronomical Observatory in the Americas May Offer New Insights“

There was a time when Stonehenge was believed to be a kind of “Neolithic computer.” Archaeology has since corrected that misconception. Today, the evidence points strongly in another direction: to an arid hill in the Casma Valley on Peru’s northern coast, about 200 miles north of Lima. There stands Chankillo, a complex built around 250 B.C.E., considered the earliest known solar observatory in the Americas and the clearest known example of a monument designed to track the sun’s position throughout the entire year, according to a study in Science. Modest in appearance and largely absent from tourist posters and classic postcards, Chankillo has renewed attention as archaeologists report preliminary findings from ongoing excavations.

—CBS News: “NASA Juggling Piloted Moon Mission and Space Station Crew Replacement Flight“

With a space station medical evacuation safely completed, NASA is focused on two challenging missions proceeding in parallel: launching four astronauts on a flight around the moon, at the same time as the agency is planning to send four replacement astronauts to the International Space Station...The Artemis 2 mission and Crew 12’s planned space station flight present a unique challenge for NASA. The agency has not managed two piloted spacecraft at the same time since a pair of two-man Gemini capsules tested rendezvous procedures in low-Earth orbit in 1965. The agency has never flown a deep space mission amid another launch to Earth orbit.

—Royal Astronomical Society: “‘Reborn’ Black Hole Spotted ‘Erupting like Cosmic Volcano’“

One of the most vivid portraits of “reborn” black hole activity – likened to the eruption of a “cosmic volcano” spreading almost one million light-years across space – has been captured in a gigantic radio galaxy. The dramatic scene was uncovered when astronomers spotted the supermassive black hole at the heart of J1007+3540 restarting its jet emission after nearly 100 million years of silence.

Note: Please ignore the previous posting for today about the Apollo 17 mission. It’s a good story, but I will need to retell it at another time (that is, on December 19th).