Space Stories: New Bacterial Species at NASA, Geologic Life on Venus, and Water Found in Distant Solar System

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Image (Credit): Venus captured by NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—SciTechDaily: “NASA Just Found New Signs of Life Inside Venus – Geologic Life, That Is“

Vast, circular features on the surface of Venus may be signs that the planet is still geologically active. That’s according to new research based on data collected over 30 years ago by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft. Unlike Earth, where giant plates of crust shift and recycle through a process called plate tectonics, Venus doesn’t have these moving plates. But its surface is still being reshaped—likely by molten rock rising from deep within the planet.

—USAToday: “NASA ‘Cleanrooms’ Found Crawling with 26 New Bacterial Species“

 A new study reports 26 new bacterial species were found growing inside cleanrooms associated with NASA space missions. Specifically, scientists looked in the cleanrooms used to prepare the Phoenix Mars lander for its launch in August 2007. In the study, scientists analyzed microorganisms growing in the NASA cleanrooms and discovered many of the new species had genes that made them resilient to decontamination and radiation.

—NASA: “Another First: NASA Webb Identifies Frozen Water in Young Star System“

Is frozen water scattered in systems around other stars? Astronomers have long expected it is, partially based on previous detections of its gaseous form, water vapor, and its presence in our own solar system. Now there is definitive evidence: Researchers confirmed the presence of crystalline water ice in a dusty debris disk that orbits a Sun-like star 155 light-years away using detailed data known as spectra from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. (The term water ice specifies its makeup, since many other frozen molecules are also observed in space, such as carbon dioxide ice, or “dry ice.”)

NASA Advisory Groups Share Concerns About Budget Cuts

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NASA Watch published a letter from representatives of the agency’s advisory groups, including:

The letter highlights the importance of science initiatives at NASA at a time when drastic budget cuts are being considered, and quotes Carl Sagan:

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

It’s a much needed yet bold approach at this time when the White House is eliminating all opposition to its wild cuts and erratic attack on diversity. The White House is actively shutting down advisory committees through the federal government, including NASA.

We can only hope the public listens to the wiser voices from these advisory committees. Someday all of this will need to be rebuilt, including our space program, but for now we need to save as much as we can from random cuts from parties that do not seem to understand the important role of science in our economy and our future.

Space Quote: Soviet-Era Space Probe May Come Down Tonight

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Image (Credit): Replica of the Soviet Union’sVernera 8 landing capsule launched towards Venus. (European Space Agency)

“As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact.”

-Statement by Marco Langbroek, an expert on Space Situational Awareness at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands, pertaining to the Venera 8 probe that was to be sent to Venus by the Soviets more than 50 years ago. However, the probe, renamed Kosmos 482, never left Earth orbit. Only now is it ready to return to the Earth’s surface tonight, though the exact location is unknown.

Update: Sunday morning at 2:24 am EST the lander broke up over the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta.

Space Stories: Solar Orbiter Encounters Venus, White Dwarf Exoplanets, and the End of Gaia

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Credit: ESA

Here are some recent stories of interest..

—European Space Agency: “Solar Orbiter Ready for Close Encounter with Venus’“

The European Space Agency (ESA) is ready to guide the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft through its closest encounter with Venus so far. Today’s flyby will be the first to significantly ‘tilt’ the spacecraft’s orbit and allow it to see the Sun’s polar regions, which cannot be seen from Earth. Studying the Sun’s poles will improve our understanding of solar activity, space weather, and the Sun-Earth connection.

—UC Irvine News: “UC Irvine Astronomers Gauge Livability of Exoplanets Orbiting White Dwarf Stars’“

Among the roughly 10 billion white dwarf stars in the Milky Way galaxy, a greater number than previously expected could provide a stellar environment hospitable to life-supporting exoplanets, according to astronomers at the University of California, Irvine. In a paper published recently in The Astrophysical Journal, a research team led by Aomawa Shields, UC Irvine associate professor of physics and astronomy, share the results of a study comparing the climates of exoplanets at two different stars. One is a hypothetical white dwarf that’s passed through much of its life cycle and is on a slow path to stellar death. The other subject is Kepler-62, a “main sequence” star at a similar phase in its evolution as our sun.

—Uppsala University: “Mission Accomplished for Space Telescope Gaia’“

The space telescope Gaia has created the largest three-dimensional map of the Milky Way ever. On January 15, 2025, Gaia shut down after 11 years in space. But the research on data Gaia collected will continue for many years to come. Gaia is a space telescope onboard a satellite that has orbited the sun for 11 years. With the help of astrometry, which is a technique to measure the positions, distances and movements of stars and other heavenly bodies, Gaia has been able to measure distances and luminosities for up to 2 billion stars, which is about 1% of all stars in the Milky Way.

Space Stories: Classifying Supernovae, Non-Water Liquid on Mars, and Understanding Exoplanet Atmospheres

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Image (Credit): Wolf-Rayet 124 (WR 124), a hot star just about to go supernova, as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Caltech: “Zwicky Transient Facility Leads to Classification of 10,000 Supernovae“

Fast forward to now, and Zwicky’s namesake, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)—a National Science Foundation-funded sky survey that began operations in 2017 using the 48-inch telescope—has detected about a hundred thousand supernovae. These detections, in turn, have led to the spectroscopic classification and confirmation of more than 10,000 supernovae, making ZTF the largest supernova survey to date. “There are trillions of stars in the universe, and about every second, one of them explodes. Reaching 10,000 classifications is amazing, but what we truly should celebrate is the incredible progress we have made in our ability to browse the universe for transients, or objects that change in the sky, and the science our rich data will enable,” says Christoffer Fremling, a staff astronomer at Caltech. Fremling leads the Bright Transient Survey (BTS), ZTF project that discovers and classifies new supernovae.

—MIT News: “Liquid on Mars was Not Necessarily All Water“

Dry river channels and lake beds on Mars point to the long-ago presence of a liquid on the planet’s surface, and the minerals observed from orbit and from landers seem to many to prove that the liquid was ordinary water. Not so fast, the authors of a new Perspectives article in Nature Geoscience suggest. Water is only one of two possible liquids under what are thought to be the conditions present on ancient Mars. The other is liquid carbon dioxide (CO2), and it may actually have been easier for CO2 in the atmosphere to condense into a liquid under those conditions than for water ice to melt. 

—Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences: “A Rare Venus Solar Transit Helps Unravel Exoplanet Atmospheres“

In the next decade, researchers will start probing the atmosphere of planets as small as Earth and Venus orbiting nearby stars. But although these two solar system planets are similar in size and bulk density—so that some call them “twins”—their atmospheres are nothing alike. Would scientists be able to set them apart if seen from light-years away? A team led by the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA) pretended Venus was faraway in another planetary system—an exoplanet—and asked what kind of information they could extract. The results were published in an article in the journal Atmosphere and prove that techniques being used to study large hot exoplanets can be effectively applied to those with a diameter 10 times smaller.