Space Stories: A New Player in the Race for Mars, Swarming Exoplanet Seekers, and a Over-sized Pink Exoplanet

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Martian dunes at Endurance Crater as viewed by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. (NASA/JPL/Cornell)

Here are some recent space-related stories.

—Techcrunch: “NASA Picks Eric Schmidt’s Rocket Company for Mars Mission, Setting Up a Race with SpaceX“

Relativity Space — a rocket maker acquired by former Google executive chair Eric Schmidt last year after stumbling on the path to orbit — might just beat SpaceX to Mars. On Tuesday, NASA said it hired the company to build a spacecraft to house a suite of scientific instruments, launch it into space, and fly it to Mars. The structure of the contract is akin to the deals that NASA made with SpaceX to fly cargo to the International Space Station, or Firefly Aerospace to put a lander on the moon. The government agency handles the science, while the private company provides low-cost infrastructure.

—Universe Today: “Astronomers Want to Build a Swarm of Telescopes to Find LIFE“

Current plans for flagship telescopes in the 2040s are focused on answering a simple question – are we alone? Our best telescopes to date, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have only given us tantalizing glimpses into the atmospheres or other worlds, but not enough to truly determine whether or not life as we know it exists there. Astronomers have been waiting for technology to catch up to their dreams of what is possible in terms of new types of telescopes, and recently the W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies released a report detailing the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE) mission, which they hope will help provide a definitive answer to that simple question.

—BBC Sky at Night: “The Pink Planet is So Weird, Astronomers Struggle to Define It. And They’ve Just Found It’s Covered in Salty Clouds“

There’s a pink planet, just a stone’s throw from Earth, that astronomers have been trying to decipher for over a decade. Known as the Pink Planet or, officially, GJ504b, this strange world orbits a Sun-like star 57 lightyears from Earth. Astronomers aren’t even sure if it’s a planet at all. About 25 times the mass of Jupiter, it’s so massive it’s on the boundary between giant planets and brown dwarfs (a type of failed star). But observations with the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed direct evidence for something rather strange at the Pink Planet: salty clouds.

Note: Here is the podcast version of this post.

Space Stories: New Lunar Lander on Display, Caltech Approves a Radio Telescope, and Missing Galactic Dark Matter

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Astrobotic Technology’s Griffin-1 lunar lander. (Astrobotic Technology)

Here are some recent space-related stories.

—Satnews: “Pittsburgh’s Moonshot: Astrobotic Unveils Griffin-1 Lander Ahead of Historic NASA ‘Moon Base II’ Mission“

Emerging as a powerful symbol of regional industrial pride and the rapid privatization of deep-space logistics, Astrobotic Technology has officially unveiled its massive Griffin-1 lunar lander. The vehicle, which has been formally designated by NASA as the primary infrastructure vehicle for the Moon Base II task order under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, represents a critical stepping stone toward establishing a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on the lunar surface. Unlike smaller, first-generation commercial scouts, the Griffin platform is an “infrastructure-class” logistics vehicle engineered to transport heavy industrial cargo. Boasting a massive 625 to 650-kilogram payload capacity, the stout aluminum isogrid lander is designed to ferry bulky machinery, scientific sensor arrays, and alternative energy installations directly to the rugged, hazardous terrain of the lunar south pole.

—Newser: “Giant Nevada Project Could Transform Astronomy“

Caltech has approved the final design for the Deep Synoptic Array, a $200 million radio telescope project that will blanket a chunk of desert with 1,650 dishes over roughly 120 square miles—an array designed to scan the sky about 100 times faster than any existing telescope. Backed in part by Schmidt Sciences, the philanthropic effort of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, the project is slated to be finished by 2029 and will be powered by a supercomputer that turns torrents of radio signals into sharp images on the fly.

—W.M. Keck Observatory: “Astronomers Discover Third Galaxy Without Dark Matter“

Astronomers using W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, have discovered the third known galaxy apparently lacking dark matter, part of a strange linear structure that may have formed during a violent collision between galaxies. The discovery strengthens evidence for a rare and previously unseen process in which ordinary matter becomes separated from dark matter, offering astronomers a powerful new way to study one of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Note: Here is the podcast version of this post.

Space Stories: Nancy Roman Ahead of Schedule, ISS Leak Still a Problem, and US Grant Process Worries Space Scientists

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. (NASA)

Here are some recent space-related stories.

—Techspot: “NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is Launching August 30, Eight Months Ahead of Schedule“

NASA is planning to launch its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on August 30, a full eight months ahead of schedule and even earlier than the space agency’s previous target of September. Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, are in the process of packing the telescope for its journey to Kennedy Space Center in Florida later this month. Upon arrival, it’ll go to the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility to undergo a full post-travel inspection.

—Space News: “Astronauts Briefly Shelter in Dragon During ISS Leak Repair“

NASA instructed astronauts on the International Space Station to briefly shelter in a Dragon spacecraft June 5 as cosmonauts attempted to repair an air leak in a Russian module. Shortly after 9 a.m. Eastern, NASA Mission Control in Houston instructed the four members of Crew-12, the Crew Dragon mission that has been at the station since February, to shelter in that spacecraft. Joining them was NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who flew to the ISS last November on a Soyuz spacecraft.The move was prompted by a decision by Roscosmos to have cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev attempt to repair an air leak in a portion of the Zvezda service module known as PrK. That is a vestibule that links a docking port with the rest of the module and has had a long-running, but small, air leak.

—Sky & Telescope: “Proposed U.S. Grant Funding Rules Spark Worry, Backlash in Astronomy“

On Friday, May 29th, the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a 412-page document rewriting how federal grants should be issued and overseen across all agencies. The changes to the procedures, which were previously altered in 2024 to make the grants process clearer, were sweeping, touching on areas from international collaboration to academic publication costs. But the through line is made explicit: to align federal grant-making with “administration policies and priorities set by the President.” Immediately, it has sparked backlash from astronomers and planetary scientists, who see grave challenges for science if the rules come to fruition.

Note: Here is the podcast version of this post.

Space Stories: A Massachusetts Meteor, The Red Dwarf Diet, and an Extra Ice Giant in Our Solar System

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): A exploding meteor off the coast of Massachusetts as captured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Lightning Mapper on May 30, 2026. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

Here are some recent space-related stories.

—WCVB5 News: “Meteor That Rattled Massachusetts Was Bigger Than First Thought, NASA Says“

A meteor that created a sonic boom heard by thousands in Massachusetts and parts of the Northeast Saturday afternoon was larger than previously believed, NASA said Monday. Scientists now say the meteor was 5 feet in diameter, up from the initial thought of 3 feet, NASA said. “The meteor was about 5 feet (1.6 meters) in diameter with a mass of 5.6 metric tons and entered Earth’s atmosphere at roughly 42,000 mph,” NASA said Monday. Scientists believe it traveled through the atmosphere from northwest to southeast for 26 miles before breaking up at an altitude of 31 miles and producing a meteorite fall into Cape Cod Bay.

—Royal Astronomical Society: “Red Dwarf Stars Detected ‘Eating’ Earth-like Planets“

Astronomers have found some of the strongest evidence yet that stars can swallow their own planets. A new study, published in Monthly Notices of the Astronomical Society, supports the long-held belief that young stars are capable of ‘eating’ nearby worlds as planetary systems form. Researchers from Keele University and the University of Exeter studied thousands of stars and found evidence that six different red dwarfs – the smallest, coolest, and most common type of star in the universe – had engulfed Earth-like rocky planets.

—Phys.org: “One of Our Planets May Be Missing, And it Could Explain Why the Solar System Looks the Way it Does“

Our solar system has two ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, but there may have been a third. According to a new study published in the journal Icarus, this extra world might have triggered a violent planetary shuffling billions of years ago that could have disrupted some of Jupiter’s and Uranus’s moons and possibly led to the formation of others.

Note: Here is the podcast version of this post.

Space Stories: ESA & China Are Smiling, Blue Origin Beats SpaceX to the Moon, and JWST Analyzes Exoplanet Atmosphere

Posted on by onespaceman2000

Here are some recent space-related stories.

—European Space Agency: “Smile Lifts Off on Quest to Reveal Earth’s Invisible Shield Against the Solar Wind“

The Smile spacecraft lifted off on a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana at 04:52 BST / 05:52 CEST (00:52 local time) on 19 May 2026. The launch marks the beginning of an ambitious mission to better understand solar storms, geomagnetic storms, and the science of space weather…Smile is a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It will reveal how Earth responds to the streams of particles and bursts of radiation from the Sun, using an X-ray camera to make the world’s first X-ray observations of Earth’s magnetic shield, and an ultraviolet camera to watch the resulting northern lights non-stop for 45 hours at a time.

—The Guardian: “Nasa Selects Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for First of Three Uncrewed Lunar Missions“

Nasa announced on Tuesday ambitious plans for three uncrewed lunar missions this year to kickstart construction of a $20bn moon base, and said it had chosen the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to conduct the first...[NASA’s Administrator] said the three missions planned for 2026 would be followed by “more than a dozen” more in the coming years to test systems and equipment. He said the highly successful Artemis II mission last month that sent four astronauts around the moon for the first time since 1972 had been both a catalyst and incentive to advance the moon base plan.

—Astrobiology: “Astronomers Observe Exoplanet Atmospheres With New Cloud-detecting Method“

Every morning, clouds roll in, and by evening, they have cleared off. This sounds like a weather forecast for a coastal city here on Earth — but it’s for WASP-94A b, a well-studied gas giant orbiting a star located nearly 700 light-years away. A new study published in the journal Science documents the first detection of repeating cloud cycles on a hot Jupiter exoplanet. The first author of the study is Sagnick Mukherjee, a 51 Pegasi b postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. Mukherjee is part of a research team that analyzed data from the James Webb Space Telescope targeting WASP-94 A b, a gas giant in the constellation Microscopium. The team discovered that the planet’s morning side is blanketed in clouds of magnesium silicate, the same mineral found in common rocks, while its evening side is under clear skies.

Note: Here is the podcast version of this post.