Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.
Tag: NASA
More NASA images.
And what images.
There is more information on the NASA website.
Now a YouTube video.
What terrific images from Hubble.
A unique record taken by the crew.
Human-created photos of this historic mission cannot be replace by articificial intelligence (AI).
This is the reason I am republishing an article from The Conversation.
ooOOoo
Christye Sisson, Rochester Institute of Technology
In early April 2026, the Artemis II mission captivated me and millions of people watching from across the world. The crew’s courage, skill and infectious wonder served as tangible proof of human persistence and technological achievement, all against the mysterious backdrop of space.
People back on Earth got to witness the mission through remarkable photos of space captured by astronauts. Images created and shared by astronauts underscore how photography builds a powerful, authentic connection that goes beyond what technology alone can capture.
As a photographer and the director of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, I am especially drawn to how these photographs have been at the center of the public’s collective experience of this mission.
In an era when image authenticity is often questioned and with the capabilities of autonomous, AI-driven imaging, NASA’s choice to train astronauts in photography has placed meaning over convenience and prioritized their human perspectives and creativity.
Photography was not originally placed as a high priority in NASA’s Apollo era. The astronauts only took photographs if they had the chance and all their other tasks were complete.
Thanks largely in part to public response to those images from Apollo, including “Earthrise” and the “Blue Marble” being widely credited for helping catalyze the modern environmental movement, NASA shifted its approach to utilize photography to help capture the public’s imagination by training their astronauts in photographic practices.
The Artemis II mission’s photographs have helped cut through the increasing volume of artificially generated images circulating on social media. NASA’s social media releases of the crew’s photographs have garnered thousands of shares and comments.
This excitement could be explained by the novelty of photos from space, but these images also distinguish themselves as products of astronauts experiencing these sights and interpreting them through their photographs. These differences require an important distinction around where technology ends and humanity begins.
Photography has long integrated AI-powered software and data-driven tools in a variety of ways: to process raw images, fill in missing color information, drive precise focus and guide image editing, among others. These modern technological assists help human photographers realize their vision.
Artificial intelligence is also increasingly capable of operating machinery competently and autonomously, from cars to drones and cameras.
And AI can generate convincing, realistic images and videos from nothing more than a text prompt, using readily available tools.
Researchers train AI to mimic patterns informed by millions of sample images, and the algorithm can then either take or create a photograph based on what it predicts would be the most likely version of a successful, believable image.
Human-created photos are rooted in direct observation, intent and lived experience, while AI images – or choices made by AI-driven tools – are not. While both can produce compelling and believable visuals, the human photographs carry emotional power because the photographer is drawing from their experiences and perspective in that moment to tell an authentic story.
Artemis II photographs resonate, not only because they are historic, but because they reflect the deliberate choices and intent of a human being in that specific moment and context. The exposure, camera setting, lens choice and composition are all dictated by the astronaut’s vision, skill, perspective and experience. Each image is unique in comparison with the others. These choices give the images narrative power, anchoring them in human perspective.
Photographers choose what to include in the final version of their image to tell a story. In the Artemis II images, this human perspective comes out. In the “Earthset” photo, you see a striking juxtaposition of the Moon’s monochromatic, textured surface in the foreground against a slivered, bright Earth.
The choice to include both in the frame contrasts these objects literally and figuratively, inviting comparison. It creates a narrative where Earth is contrasted against the Moon – life is contrasted against the absence of it.
Another photo shows the nightside of the whole Earth, featuring the Sun’s halo, auroras and city lights. The choice to include the subtle framing of the window of the capsule in the lower left corner reminds the viewer where and how this image was captured: by a human, inside a capsule, hurtling through space. That detail grounds the photograph in the human perspective.
Both photos are reminiscent of Earthrise and the Blue Marble. These past images hold a place in the global collective consciousness, shaped by a shared historical moment.
The Artemis II photographs are anchored in this collective moment of lived human experience, yet also shaped by each astronaut’s viewpoint. The crew’s unique perspectives exemplify photography’s transformative power by inviting viewers to engage emotionally and intellectually with their journey. These photographs share the astronauts’ awe and wonder and affirm the value of human creativity and its ability to connect us in a captured moment.
Christye Sisson, Professor of Photographic Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
ooOOoo
I am going to repeat a sentence towards the end of the article: “These past images hold a place in the global collective consciousness, shaped by a shared historical moment.”
That global collective consciousness!
The science of looking at other worlds is amazing.
With so much going wrong, primarily politically, in the world, I just love turning to news about distant places; and by distant I mean hugely so. That is why I am republishing this item from The Conversation about other stars.
ooOOoo
Daniel Apai, University of Arizona
On Jan. 11, 2026, I watched anxiously at the tightly controlled Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as an awe-inspiring SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA’s new exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit.
Exoplanets are worlds that orbit other stars. They are very difficult to observe because – seen from Earth – they appear as extremely faint dots right next to their host stars, which are millions to billions of times brighter and drown out the light reflected by the planets. The Pandora telescope will join and complement NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in studying these faraway planets and the stars they orbit.
I am an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona who specializes in studies of planets around other stars and astrobiology. I am a co-investigator of Pandora and leading its exoplanet science working group. We built Pandora to shatter a barrier – to understand and remove a source of noise in the data – that limits our ability to study small exoplanets in detail and search for life on them.
Astronomers have a trick to study exoplanet atmospheres. By observing the planets as they orbit in front of their host stars, we can study starlight that filters through their atmospheres.
These planetary transit observations are similar to holding a glass of red wine up to a candle: The light filtering through will show fine details that reveal the quality of the wine. By analyzing starlight filtered through the planets’ atmospheres, astronomers can find evidence for water vapor, hydrogen, clouds and even search for evidence of life. Researchers improved transit observations in 2002, opening an exciting window to new worlds.
When a planet passes in front of its star, astronomers can measure the dip in brightness, and see how the light filtering through the planet’s atmosphere changes.
For a while, it seemed to work perfectly. But, starting from 2007, astronomers noted that starspots – cooler, active regions on the stars – may disturb the transit measurements.
In 2018 and 2019, then-Ph.D. student Benjamin V. Rackham, astrophysicist Mark Giampapa and I published a series of studies showing how darker starspots and brighter, magnetically active stellar regions can seriously mislead exoplanets measurements. We dubbed this problem “the transit light source effect.”
Most stars are spotted, active and change continuously. Ben, Mark and I showed that these changes alter the signals from exoplanets. To make things worse, some stars also have water vapor in their upper layers – often more prominent in starspots than outside of them. That and other gases can confuse astronomers, who may think that they found water vapor in the planet.
In our papers – published three years before the 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope – we predicted that the Webb cannot reach its full potential. We sounded the alarm bell. Astronomers realized that we were trying to judge our wine in light of flickering, unstable candles.
For me, Pandora began with an intriguing email from NASA in 2018. Two prominent scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Elisa Quintana and Tom Barclay, asked to chat. They had an unusual plan: They wanted to build a space telescope very quickly to help tackle stellar contamination – in time to assist Webb. This was an exciting idea, but also very challenging. Space telescopes are very complex, and not something that you would normally want to put together in a rush.
Pandora breaks with NASA’s conventional model. We proposed and built Pandora faster and at a significantly lower cost than is typical for NASA missions. Our approach meant keeping the mission simple and accepting somewhat higher risks.
Pandora is smaller and cannot collect as much light as its bigger brother Webb. But Pandora will do what Webb cannot: It will be able to patiently observe stars to understand how their complex atmospheres change.
By staring at a star for 24 hours with visible and infrared cameras, it will measure subtle changes in the star’s brightness and colors. When active regions in the star rotate in and out of view, and starspots form, evolve and dissipate, Pandora will record them. While Webb very rarely returns to the same planet in the same instrument configuration and almost never monitors their host stars, Pandora will revisit its target stars 10 times over a year, spending over 200 hours on each of them. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Inxe5Bgarj0?wmode=transparent&start=0 NASA’s Pandora mission will revolutionize the study of exoplanet atmospheres.
With that information, our Pandora team will be able to figure out how the changes in the stars affect the observed planetary transits. Like Webb, Pandora will observe the planetary transit events, too. By combining data from Pandora and Webb, our team will be able to understand what exoplanet atmospheres are made of in more detail than ever before.
After the successful launch, Pandora is now circling Earth about every 90 minutes. Pandora’s systems and functions are now being tested thoroughly by Blue Canyon Technologies, Pandora’s primary builder.
About a week after launch, control of the spacecraft will transition to the University of Arizona’s Multi-Mission Operation Center in Tucson, Arizona. Then the work of our science teams begins in earnest and we will begin capturing starlight filtered through the atmospheres of other worlds – and see them with a new, steady eye.
Daniel Apai, Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences, University of Arizona
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
ooOOoo
It may not be for everyone but for me I find this news from NASA incredible. Well done The Conversation for publishing this article.
NASA hasn’t landed humans on Mars yet. But thanks to robotic missions, scientists now know more about the planet’s surface than they did when the movie, The Martian, was released.
Our human knowledge is constantly growing. In many, many directions. Here is a fascinating (well it is to me!) article from The Conversation.
ooOOoo
Ari Koeppel, Dartmouth College
Andy Weir’s bestselling story “The Martian” predicts that by 2035 NASA will have landed humans on Mars three times, perfected return-to-Earth flight systems and collaborated with the China National Space Administration. We are now 10 years past the Hollywood adaptation’s 2015 release and 10 years shy of its fictional timeline. At this midpoint, Mars exploration looks a bit different than how it was portrayed in “The Martian,” with both more discoveries and more controversy.
As a planetary geologist who works with NASA missions to study Mars, I follow exploration science and policy closely. In 2010, the U.S. National Space Policy set goals for human missions to Mars in the 2030s. But in 2017, the White House Space Policy Directive 1 shifted NASA’s focus toward returning first to the Moon under what would become the Artemis program.
Although concepts for crewed missions to Mars have gained popularity, NASA’s actual plans for landing humans on Mars remain fragile. Notably, over the last 10 years, it has been robotic, rather than crewed, missions that have propelled discovery and the human imagination forward.
Since 2015, satellites and rovers have reshaped scientists’ understanding of Mars. They have revealed countless insights into how its climate has changed over time.
As Earth’s neighbor, climate shifts on Mars also reflect solar system processes affecting Earth at a time when life was first taking hold. Thus, Mars has become a focal point for investigating the age old questions of “where do we come from?” and “are we alone?”
The Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have driven dozens of miles studying layered rock formations that serve as a record of Mars’ past. By studying sedimentary layers – rock formations stacked like layers of a cake – planetary geologists have pieced together a vivid tale of environmental change that dwarfs what Earth is currently experiencing.
Mars was once a world of erupting volcanoes, glaciers, lakes and flowing rivers – an environment not unlike early Earth. Then its core cooled, its magnetic field faltered and its atmosphere drifted away. The planet’s exposed surface has retained signs of those processes ever since in the form of landscape patterns, sequences of layered sediment and mineral mixtures.
One focus of scientific investigation over the last 10 years is particularly relevant to the setting of “The Martian” but fails to receive mention in the story. To reach his best chance of survival, protagonist Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, must cross a vast, dusty and crater-pocked region of Mars known as Arabia Terra.
In 2022 and 2023, I, along with colleagues at Northern Arizona University and Johns Hopkins University, published detailed analyses of the layered materials there using imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey satellites.
By using infrared imagery and measuring the dimensions of surface features, we linked multiple layered deposits to the same episodes of formation and learned more about the widespread crumbling nature of the terrain seen there today. Because water tends to cement rock tightly together, that loose material indicates that around 3.5 billion years ago, that area had a drying climate.
To make the discussions about this area easier, we even worked with the International Astronomical Union to name a few previously unnamed craters that were mentioned in the story. For example, one that Watney would have driven right by is now named Kozova Crater, after a town in Ukraine.
Despite rapid advances in Mars science, many unknowns remain. Scientists still aren’t sure of the precise ages, atmospheric conditions and possible signatures of life associated with each of the different rock types observed on the surface.
For instance, the Perseverance rover recently drilled into and analyzed a unique set of rocks hosting organic – that is, carbon-based – compounds. Organic compounds serve as the building blocks of life, but more detailed analysis is required to determine whether these specific rocks once hosted microbial life.
The in-development Mars Sample Return mission aims to address these basic outstanding questions by delivering the first-ever unaltered fragments of another world to Earth. The Perseverance rover is already caching rock and soil samples, including ones hosting organic compounds, in sealed tubes. A future lander will then need to pick up and launch the caches back to Earth.
Sampling Mars rocks could tell scientists more about the red planet’s past, and whether it could have hosted life.
Once home, researchers can examine these materials with instruments orders of magnitude more sensitive than anything that could be flown on a spacecraft. Scientists stand to learn far more about the habitability, geologic history and presence of any signs of life on Mars through the sample return campaign than by sending humans to the surface.
This perspective is why NASA, the European Space Agency and others have invested some US$30 billion in robotic Mars exploration since the 1960s. The payoff has been staggering: That work has triggered rapid technological advances in robotics, telecommunications and materials science. For example, Mars mission technology has led to better sutures for heart surgery and cars that can drive themselves.
It has also bolstered the status of NASA and the U.S. as bastions of modern exploration and technology; and it has inspired millions of students to take an interest in scientific fields.
Colonizing Mars has a seductive appeal. It’s hard not to cheer for the indomitable human spirit while watching Watney battle dust storms, oxygen shortages and food scarcity over 140 million miles from rescue.
Much of the momentum toward colonizing Mars is now tied to SpaceX and its CEO Elon Musk, whose stated mission to make humanity a “multi-planetary species” has become a sort of rallying cry. But while Mars colonization is romantic on paper, it is extremely difficult to actually carry out, and many critics have questioned the viability of a Mars habitation as a refuge far from Earth.
Now, with NASA potentially facing a nearly 50% reduction to its science budget, the U.S. risks dissolving its planetary science and robotic operations portfolio altogether, including sample return.
Nonetheless, President Donald Trump and Musk have pushed for human space exploration to somehow continue to progress, despite those proposed cuts – effectively sidelining the robotic, science-driven programs that have underpinned all of Mars exploration to date.
Yet, it is these programs that have yielded humanity’s richest insights into the red planet and given both scientists and storytellers like Andy Weir the foundation to imagine what it must be like to stand on Mars’ surface at all.
Ari Koeppel, Postdoctoral Scientist in Earth and Planetary Science, Dartmouth College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
ooOOoo
Nothing to add from yours truly except to say that this quote is highly relevant: “Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.” – Joshua J. Marine
(And this was the result of me looking online for quotes and coming across 50 quotes from USA Today.)
Just a single image today!
That of 50 years ago.
In other words when Apollo 8 was in Lunar Orbit and William Anders, who died on June 7th, aged 90, captured Earth-rise.
Image credit: NASA
What a photograph!
A change from our dear dogs.
I really hope you enjoy these as much as we have!
There is quite a long introduction but it helps enormously in explaining the background to the photographs.
ooOOoo
This image is released as part of the Early Release Observations from ESA’s Euclid space mission. All data from these initial observations are made public on 23 May 2024 – including a handful of unprecedented new views of the nearby Universe.
The Dorado Group of galaxies is one of the richest galaxy groups in the southern hemisphere. Here, Euclid captures signs of galaxies evolving and merging ‘in action’, with beautiful tidal tails and shells visible as a result of ongoing interactions. As Dorado is a lot younger than other clusters (like Fornax), several of its constituent galaxies are still forming stars and remain in the stage of interacting with one another, while others show signs of having merged relatively recently. In size, it sits between larger galaxy clusters and smaller galaxy groups, making it a useful and fascinating object to study with Euclid.
This dataset is enabling scientists to study how galaxies evolve and collide over time in order to improve our models of cosmic history and understand how galaxies form within halos of dark matter, with this new image being a true testament to Euclid’s immense versatility. A wide array of galaxies is visible here, from very bright to very faint. Thanks to Euclid’s unique combination of large field-of-view and high spatial resolution, for the first time we can use the same instrument and observations to deeply study tiny (small objects the size of star clusters), wider (the central parts of a galaxy) and extended (tidal merger tails) features over a large part of the sky.
Scientists are also using Euclid observations of the Dorado Group to answer questions that previously could only be explored using painstakingly small snippets of data. This includes compiling a full list of the individual clusters of stars (globular clusters) around the galaxies seen here. Once we know where these clusters are, we can use them to trace how the galaxies formed and study their history and contents. Scientists will also use these data to hunt for new dwarf galaxies around the Group, as it did previously with the Perseus cluster.
The Dorado Group lies 62 million light-years away in the constellation of Dorado.
All images are: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi
Composite image of five astronomical views, three at the top, two at the bottom. All are dotted with stars and galaxies against a black background. Striking features are three bright glowing structures in the first image. The second image has an orange veil-like structure spanning across. In the third we see a stunning spiral galaxy with many arms. The fourth image features light from galaxies lying behind a bright cluster distorted into arcs. And the fifth image shows a variety of galaxies in all shapes and sizes
An elongated bright cloudy ellipse, tilted at a 45-degree angle in front a black background dotted with small white stars and galaxies. Above the ellipse floats a smaller, cloudy ellipsoid.
A dark orange filamentary structure seems to enclose stars. Centrally, three bright star-forming regions shine brightly through the orange veil in a traffic-light like formation.
The image shows hundreds of stars, some brighter than others. The stars seem to light up their cloud-like surroundings in purple. A darker structure spans the image in an arch from upper left to bottom right. The bottom of this arch runs into dense clouds forming the darkest part of the image.
This breathtaking image features Messier 78 (the central and brightest region), a vibrant nursery of star formation enveloped in a shroud of interstellar dust. This image is unprecedented – it is the first shot of this young star-forming region at this width and depth.
ooOOoo
Fabulous. It is an example of just how clever the science is getting!
I can only look at these images in awe. For example, Messier 78 is part of the Orion constellation, has a radius of five light-years, and is only 1,600 light-years from Planet Earth. (Using the figure from below of the distance of a single light-year, that puts Messier 78 as 1,600 times 6 trillion miles from our planet or 9,600 trillion miles.)
And in case you forgot it, one light year is:
The light-year is a measure of distance, not time. It is the total distance that a beam of light, moving in a straight line, travels in one year. To obtain an idea of the size of a light-year, take the circumference of the earth (24,900 miles), lay it out in a straight line, multiply the length of the line by 7.5 (the corresponding distance is one light-second), then place 31.6 million similar lines end to end. The resulting distance is almost 6 trillion (6,000,000,000,000) miles!
I am reproducing a recent article published by The Conversation.
It is a reflection of the latest research undertaken by NASA, it is beyond fascinating!
ooOOoo
Ryan Keeley, University of California, Merced
Astronomers have known for decades that the universe is expanding. When they use telescopes to observe faraway galaxies, they see that these galaxies are moving away from Earth.
To astronomers, the wavelength of light a galaxy emits is longer the faster the galaxy is moving away from us. The farther away the galaxy is, the more its light has shifted toward the longer wavelengths on the red side of the spectrum – so the higher the “redshift.”
Because the speed of light is finite, fast, but not infinitely fast, seeing something far away means we’re looking at the thing how it looked in the past. With distant, high-redshift galaxies, we’re seeing the galaxy when the universe was in a younger state. So “high redshift” corresponds to the early times in the universe, and “low redshift” corresponds to the late times in the universe.
But as astronomers have studied these distances, they’ve learned that the universe is not just expanding – its rate of expansion is accelerating. And that expansion rate is even faster than the leading theory predicts it should be, leaving cosmologists like me puzzled and looking for new explanations.
Scientists call the source of this acceleration dark energy. We’re not quite sure what drives dark energy or how it works, but we think its behavior could be explained by a cosmological constant, which is a property of spacetime that contributes to the expansion of the universe.
Albert Einstein originally came up with this constant – he marked it with a lambda in his theory of general relativity. With a cosmological constant, as the universe expands, the energy density of the cosmological constant stays the same.
Imagine a box full of particles. If the volume of the box increases, the density of particles would decrease as they spread out to take up all the space in the box. Now imagine the same box, but as the volume increases, the density of the particles stays the same.
It doesn’t seem intuitive, right? That the energy density of the cosmological constant does not decrease as the universe expands is, of course, very weird, but this property helps explain the accelerating universe.
Right now, the leading theory, or standard model, of cosmology is called “Lambda CDM.” Lambda denotes the cosmological constant describing dark energy, and CDM stands for cold dark matter. This model describes both the acceleration of the universe in its late stages as well as the expansion rate in its early days.
Specifically, the Lambda CDM explains observations of the cosmic microwave background, which is the afterglow of microwave radiation from when the universe was in a “hot, dense state” about 300,000 years after the Big Bang. Observations using the Planck satellite, which measures the cosmic microwave background, led scientists to create the Lambda CDM model.
Fitting the Lambda CDM model to the cosmic microwave background allows physicists to predict the value of the Hubble constant, which isn’t actually a constant but a measurement describing the universe’s current expansion rate.
But the Lambda CDM model isn’t perfect. The expansion rate scientists have calculated by measuring distances to galaxies, and the expansion rate as described in Lambda CDM using observations of the cosmic microwave background, don’t line up. Astrophysicists call that disagreement the Hubble tension.
Over the past few years, I’ve been researching ways to explain this Hubble tension. The tension may be indicating that the Lambda CDM model is incomplete and physicists should modify their model, or it could indicate that it’s time for researchers to come up with new ideas about how the universe works. And new ideas are always the most exciting things for a physicist.
One way to explain the Hubble tension is to modify the Lambda CDM model by changing the expansion rate at low redshift, at late times in the universe. Modifying the model like this can help physicists predict what sort of physical phenomena might be causing the Hubble tension.
For instance, maybe dark energy is not a cosmological constant but instead the result of gravity working in new ways. If this is the case, dark energy would evolve as the universe expands – and the cosmic microwave background, which shows what the universe looked like only a few years after its creation, would have a different prediction for the Hubble constant.
But, my team’s latest research has found that physicists can’t explain the Hubble tension just by changing the expansion rate in the late universe – this whole class of solutions falls short.
To study what types of solutions could explain the Hubble tension, we developed statistical tools that enabled us to test the viability of the entire class of models that change the expansion rate in the late universe. These statistical tools are very flexible, and we used them to match or mimic different models that could potentially fit observations of the universe’s expansion rate and might offer a solution to the Hubble tension.
The models we tested include evolving dark energy models, where dark energy acts differently at different times in the universe. We also tested interacting dark energy-dark matter models, where dark energy interacts with dark matter, and modified gravity models, where gravity acts differently at different times in the universe.
But none of these could fully explain the Hubble tension. These results suggest that physicists should study the early universe to understand the source of the tension.
Ryan Keeley, Postdoctoral Scholar in Physics, University of California, Merced
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
ooOOoo
Ryan Keeley explains it above. Hopefully most of you who read this understand the physics involved. Ryan has a website here.
As I said at the start it is beyond fascinating! In the truest sense, out of this world!
I just find this incredible!
Firstly, I am simply going to post three YouTube videos of this amazing feat by NASA.
The first by Associated Press at less than two minutes:
And the next two from NASA with the second at just over an hour long:
and the third at over three hours long:
Then I am going to republish, hopefully with permission, an article from Nature that further explains what has just happened:
ooOOoo
Special delivery! Biggest-ever haul of asteroid dust and rock returns to Earth
Samples collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission excite scientists with their potential to reveal secrets of the Solar System.
The OSIRIS-REx sample capsule, which contains pieces of the asteroid Bennu, landed safely in the Utah desert on 24 September. Credit: Keegan Barber/NASA via Getty
Dugway Proving Ground, Utah
A saucer-shaped capsule parachuted down gently in the Utah desert today, after a years-long journey through space. Its cargo is a precious collection of rocks and dust from the asteroid Bennu — the first time NASA has ever brought pieces of this type of celestial object back to Earth.
Over the coming days, NASA will fly the bits of Bennu to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. There, curators will carefully disassemble the container and begin analysing the chemistry and mineralogy of the pristine samples — which might hold clues to the origins of the Solar System.
“I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve who is just too excited to go to sleep,” says Michelle Thompson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and a member of the ‘quick look’ team who will have the first chance to study the rocks.
Space hoover
The material comes from the US$1.2-billion OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) mission, which launched in 2016 and arrived at Bennu in 2018. It spent nearly two years studying the dark-coloured, diamond-shaped asteroid before extending its robotic arm to the rocky surface, blasting it with a puff of gas and collecting the dust and rocks it kicked up. That ‘fist bump’ hoovered up so much material that pieces of rock got jammed in the collection mechanism, allowing some of the smaller pebbles to escape. Watching some of those samples get away was “heart breaking”, says Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who was the first principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission.
Still, the spacecraft managed to collect around 250 grams of rocks and dirt — a large cupful — including several chunks that are at least one centimetre long. It is by far the largest amount of material ever brought back from an asteroid. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) had previously collected less than one milligram from the asteroid Itokawa in 2005, and 5.4 grams from the asteroid Ryugu in 2019.
Bringing planetary samples back to Earth allows researchers to use cutting-edge laboratory techniques to study what the rocks are made of. The NASA curation team planned to put the Bennu samples into an atmosphere of pure nitrogen soon after the capsule touched down, to reduce the potential for contamination. That will enable scientists to study the asteroid’s geology and chemistry, preserved all the way back to the formation of the Solar System, more than 4.5 billion years ago. The pristine material hasn’t been altered by passing through Earth’s atmosphere, as happens with meteorites. “The thing that will really be different about this sample is we’ll have that chain of custody of keeping it protected from Earth’s atmosphere,” says Nicole Lunning, the mission’s lead sample curator at the Johnson Space Center.
Precious cargo
Bennu is a carbon-rich asteroid, so the samples might resemble carbon-rich meteorites that have fallen to Earth, Thompson says. The bits collected by OSIRIS-REx probably contain organic compounds — carbon-based molecules found in many meteorites that are the building blocks of many exciting types of chemistry, including those conducive to life. “What I find most fascinating are the nucleobases, the components of the genetic code that make up all life from DNA and RNA,” says Daniel Glavin, the senior scientist for sample return at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. These compounds have been found in meteorites before, but those rocks have not been as pristine as the Bennu samples are expected to be. “We can trust the results, because this stuff is clean,” he says.
NASA curators will work their way through unpacking and studying the dust and pebbles inside OSIRIS-REx’s storage container in the coming weeks. Using nitrogen-filled gloveboxes, technicians will analyse the samples with scanners and other instruments to discern how many rock types were collected, and they will record the samples’ colour, volume and porosity.
Mission specialists prepare the OSIRIS-REx sample capsule for transport to a clean room after its landing in the Utah desert on 24 September.Credit: Keegan Barber/NASA via Getty
The curators will collect up to 100 milligrams for the quick-look team to analyse over the first 72 hours. That initial sample will probably be made up of fine-grained material obtained from the outermost parts of the sample capsule, Thompson says. After that, the team will get a chance to study grains that were picked up by 24 stainless-steel contact pads on the outside of the sample container — which were the first things to actually come into contact with Bennu. It will probably be several weeks before the curators open the heart of the sample container and begin extracting the bulk of the material inside.
Early experiments could include looking at how material that was on the surface of Bennu compares with what came from deeper inside the asteroid, Thompson says. OSIRIS-REx’s robotic arm might have plunged as deep as 40 centimetres under Bennu’s rubbly surface when executing its fist bump.
Work interrupted?
NASA has scheduled a press conference on 11 October to unveil the first scientific results. But its work on the mission could be interrupted if the US government shuts down on 1 October. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been battling over priorities for funding the federal government in 2024.
After OSIRIS-REx fist-bumped the asteroid Bennu in 2020, it pulled the collected samples into the spacecraft (left) and stowed them inside its sample-return capsule (right).Credit: NASA/Goddard/Univ. Arizona/Lockheed Martin
If the situation remains in a stalemate by the time the US fiscal year ends on 30 September, then federal agencies, including NASA, might close until an agreement can be reached. If that were to happen while the Bennu sample is at NASA, then “certain steps leading to its highly anticipated analysis will possibly be delayed, but the sample will remain protected and safe”, says Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary sciences division. “The sample waited for more than 4 billion years for humans to study it, and if it takes us a little longer, I think we’ll be okay.”
At least 70% of the Bennu material will be saved for scientists outside NASA and for future generations to study. Furthermore, 4% of the sample will go to the Canadian Space Agency, which helped to build a laser instrument aboard OSIRIS-REx, and 0.5% will go to JAXA in exchange for samples of Ryugu, so that researchers can compare the two asteroids.
Meanwhile, the rest of the OSIRIS spacecraft continues to fly through space after dropping off its sample-return capsule. It is headed to study Apophis, an asteroid with a different, ‘stony’, chemical composition that will whizz dramatically close past Earth in 2029.
Copyright © 2023, Springer Nature Limited
ooOOoo
There we go, my credit to an incredible feat of exploration that, hopefully, will lead to some interesting results over the next few weeks.
Just had to share this incredible vista with you!
The James Webb Space Telescope is amazing. Wikipedia have a long article on the telescope from which one reads (in part):
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope specifically designed to conduct infrared astronomy. Its high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments allow it to view objects too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope. This enables investigations across many fields of astronomy and cosmology, such as observation of the first stars and the formation of the first galaxies, and detailed atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets.
But I want to share with you this video, please watch it now it is just a minute long:
Time to forget about our earthly challenges for just a short time.
And for those that want more here is the home page of the Webb Telescope.
Just astounding!
I was looking for something else on YouTube and came across this 8:56 video of what the James Webb has seen.
ooOOoo
Every Stunning Image Captured By James Webb Space Telescope So Far
21 Jul 2023
The James Webb Space Telescope has completed its first year of science operations. In its first year, the $10-billion infrared space observatory challenged our understanding of the cosmos and showed the universe in a way no other telescope in the past could. In this video, you will find every James Webb Space Telescope image released so far: From the mesmerizing images of the planets of the solar system to the gigantic galaxies seen at the edge of time.
Sunday Discovery Series: https://bit.ly/369kG4p
COSMOS in a Minute Series: https://bit.ly/470VLL8
Music 1: Ambient Piano by LukePN
Music 2: Interstellar by Stereonuts
Created by: Rishabh Nakra
Images: NASA/ESA/JWST
ooOOoo
Not everyone’s cup of tea but for those that cast their eyes to the stars this was astounding!
Learning from Dogs 
