Space Stories: A Promising Lunar Rover, Pakistani Astronaut on a Chinese Space Station, and Hubble Spots the “Cat’s Tail”

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): NASA’s PROMISE lunar rover. (NASA)

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—Scientific America: “NASA Reveals New Lunar Rover, PROMISE, to Launch to Moon in 2028“

NASA officials on Saturday stressed that the agency is working to speed up testing and development of the hardware that will ensure human missions to the moon. The agency plans to have rovers and other infrastructure already waiting on the moon to greet any human crews when they do eventually arrive there. This is critical, according to NASA chief Jared Isaacman: “the missions themselves will help us characterize an environment that we’ve really not visited in a very long time,” he said at Saturday’s press event…One of the biggest updates to that ambition is the decision to fly a rover, PROMISE (Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping and In-Situ Exploration), which is modeled after the Mars rovers Perseverance and Curiosity. Previously only proposed as a possibility by Isaacman, PROMISE will fly to the moon and land using a Blue Origin lander in late 2028 for an 18-month primary mission.

—Business Times: “Pakistani Astronaut to Join China’s Shenzhou-24 Space Mission“

A Pakistani astronaut will join China’s space station as a payload specialist on the upcoming Shenzhou-24 mission as the Chinese state media reported on Saturday. The milestone marks the first foreign visitor to China’s space station and the first joint spaceflight featuring both Chinese and foreign astronauts in the history of China’s manned space program…In February 2025, China and Pakistan signed an agreement covering astronaut selection, training and participation in Chinese space station flights. Following a rigorous three-stage assessment, two Pakistani pilots Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud were selected as candidates and have been training at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center in Beijing. While one will carry out the primary flight mission and the second will serve as a backup.

—Vice: “There’s a 93-Billion-Mile Structure in Space, and Astronomers Can’t Fully Explain It“

In a study published last month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers at the University of Arizona made a major discovery using the Hubble Space Telescope. They caught a visible-light glimpse of a gargantuan, 93-billion-mile-long cosmic dust feature dubbed the “Cat’s Tail,” sitting just 63 light-years away in the Beta Pictoris system. If you’re trying to wrap your brain around that scale, this thing is roughly 1,000 astronomical units long, long enough to wrap between the Earth and the Sun about 500 times. If I put it in the only measurable terms Americans are familiar with, it would be about 1.3 billion American football fields, endzones included.

Note: Here is the podcast version of this post.

Study Findings: Rare Reoccurring Ionosphere Disturbances Observed During the Artemis-II Lunar Flyby Voyage

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): NASA’s Space Launch System rocket launching on April 1, 2026 with the Orion spacecraft and four crew members. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Geophysical Research Letters abstract of pre-print study findings:

The total electron content observations during the Artemis-II Lunar mission revealed rare reoccurring ionospheric perturbations at three different occasions. The launch at 2235 UT on 1 April 2026 from Kennedy Space Center, USA, induced shock-acoustic and gravity wave modulations. Subsequent Apogee Raise Burn performed at 0023 UT on 2 April triggered shock waves and unprecedented large-scale disturbances that elongated ~50° longitude across North America. The third orbital maneuver conducted as part of trans-Lunar injection burn at 2349 UT on 2 April, about 25 hours after liftoff, again yielded similar, but weaker large-scale ionospheric perturbations. This is the first time a single space mission produced three instances of ionospheric disturbances over the same region during successive orbit maneuvers. The estimated spacecraft trajectory shows that the two orbit maneuvers were initiated at the perigee altitude of 185 km over the longitudes of 120°W-105°W, directly depositing exhaust burn energy within the ionosphere.

Citation: Choi, J., Lin, C., Chou, M. et al. Rare reoccurring ionosphere disturbances observed during the Artemis-II Lunar flyby voyage. Geophys. Res. Lett..

DOI: https://essopenarchive.org/doi/full/10.22541/essoar.15006449/v1

Study-related stories:

Space.com – “NASA’s Artemis II Moon Launch Tore a Hole in Earth’s Upper Atmosphere So Huge It Disrupted GPS Signals”

USA Today – “Artemis II Moon Launch Was So Powerful It Punched a Hole in Atmosphere”

Sacramento Bee – “Lunar Rocket Launch Tore ‘Hole’ in Earth’s Atmosphere, Disrupted GPS, Study Finds”

Pic of the Week: The Starry Night Story

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. (MoMA)

This week’s image is from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. It shows Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night. Created during his time at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, it is believed Van Gogh painted the piece in June 1989. But is it a true recreation of the night sky that June?

In a recent study, scientists from South Korea stated they now believe the painting shows the night sky on July 22, 1989 with its portrayal of the Moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster in the constellation Taurus. The team of scientists used various pieces of evidence, including letters from the artist, to get a better idea of the night sky and weather during that summer.

You can read more about this new study, The Actual Sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night: a Multidisciplinary Reconstruction, at this link.

If you are simply interested in the art itself, this link at MoMA will tell you more.

Study Findings: Two Families of Multi-planet Systems With Distinct Architectures and Stellar Hosts

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by YourAveragePhotographer from Pixabay.

Nature Astronomy abstract of study findings:

The rapidly growing census of exoplanets now includes over a thousand multi-planet systems, revealing architectures that span more than four orders of magnitude in mass and five in orbital scale. Explaining the origin of this striking diversity remains a central challenge for planet formation theory, compounded by observational biases that limit access to Solar System-like regimes. Here we introduce architecture-agnostic metrics to uniformly analyse four independently defined samples of multi-planet systems, uncovering unifying patterns across their diversity. We identify a clear bimodality in system masses, dividing known architectures into two distinct families. The lower-mass family, predominantly hosted by subsolar-to-solar stars, exhibits tightly packed configurations with mass distributions consistent with the ‘peas-in-a-pod’ pattern and modal dynamical excitation comparable with that of the Solar System. By contrast, the high-mass family forms in metal-rich environments around solar-to-supersolar stars, displays gravitationally compact architectures and is an order of magnitude dynamically hotter than both the Solar System and the lower-mass counterparts. Their high level of dynamical excitation points to violent evolutionary pathways driven by global instabilities and planet–planet scattering. Together, these results show that the architectures of planetary systems are born from the combined influence of formation processes and host star properties. Signatures of these roots are preserved across the post-formation dynamical evolution that reshaped most known multi-planet systems.

Citation: Turrini, D., Danielski, C., Polychroni, D. et al. Two families of multi-planet systems with distinct architectures and stellar hosts. Nat Astron (2026).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-026-02990-8

Study-related stories:

Phys.org – “Planetary Systems Reveal Two Distinct Families Tied to Their Host Stars”

Earthsky – “Planetary Systems Fall Into 2 Distinct Families, Astronomers Say”

Scienmag – “Exoplanet Census Reveals Two Distinct Families of Planetary Systems”

Study Findings: Volatile Depletion in Rocky Planets as a Chemical Fingerprint of Hybrid Accretion

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Curiosity Mars rover on the Martian surface. (NASA)

Nature Astronomy abstract of study findings:

Volatile depletion in rocky planets relative to their host stars is commonplace in both the Solar System and exoplanetary systems, yet the connections between planet formation and composition remain elusive. Here we model devolatilization during pebble accretion in combination with collisional growth from volatile-depleted planetesimals to explore the formation pathways of Earth and Mars. Using Bayesian inference, we found that bulk silicate Earth is best reproduced by ≳75% contribution from two protoplanets formed via pebble accretion, supplemented by up to ~25% material from planetesimals that are compositionally akin to the asteroid Vesta. Using instead a planetesimal volatile-depletion curve that is not observed among known meteorite parent bodies would allow the planetesimal contribution to reach %. In comparison, bulk silicate Mars reflects 27 ± 5% pebble-accreted material and 73 ± 5% Vesta-like planetesimals. We identified volatile depletion as a chemical fingerprint of hybrid accretion, in which both pebble accretion and collisional assembly contribute to terrestrial planet growth. By quantitatively linking formation pathways to volatile budgets, our findings demonstrate how planetary accretion histories can be inferred from elemental signatures, with broad implications for interpreting the chemical diversity of rocky exoplanets.

Citation:  Wang, H.S., Johansen, A., Xu, Z. et al. Volatile depletion in rocky planets as a chemical fingerprint of hybrid accretion. Nat Astron (2026).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-026-02984-6

Study-related stories:

University of Copenhagen Global Institute – “New Study Rekindles Contested Question: Earth and Mars Had Different Origins”

Quantum Zeitgeist– “Volatile Loss Reveals How Rocky Planets Grow”