JWST Finds Dynamic Structural Evolution in Chariklo’s Rings

When we think of asteroids, we often think of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that contains the majority of the known asteroids in our solar system. However, our solar system hosts several other populations of asteroids and icy rocks, including the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that orbit in Jupiter’s orbit, and the icy bodies and comets of the Kuiper Belt. But there’s one population of asteroids that often gets overlooked called Centaurs, primarily because their orbits are not in a fixed location and instead whose orbits cross the orbits of the outer planets.

Carbon Rocks Deep Underground Could Hold the Evidence of Mars' Watery Past.

A new geochemical modeling study led by researchers at JAXA and the University of Tokyo addresses Mars' "missing" stores of carbonate rocks.

Astronomers Find a Sub-Neptune Orbiting Completely Backward Around a Red Dwarf

In our own solar system, all eight planets orbit our Sun in a nice, orderly fashion. None are more than 7° or so out of alignment with the equator, and all of them rotate in the same direction as the Sun itself. But that’s not the case for all solar systems, and a new paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics from a team of researchers led by Yann Carteret, a PhD student at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), describes the first time we’ve ever found an exoplanet orbiting the opposite direction of its red dwarf parent star - and it has major implications for our understanding of planet formation theory.

Perseverance Reveals How Complex Water Systems Shaped the Jezero Crater on Early Mars

A new study reveals that Jezero Crater’s enigmatic ‘Margin Unit’ was shaped by a complex sequence of ancient lakes, groundwater systems, and hydrothermal fluids.

Stanford Engineers Teach Spacecraft to "Dream" Their Way to the Space Station

Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so is a showcase in how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It’s equivalent to traveling down a highway at 28,000 km/hr and parallel parking into an open garage on a multi-billion dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward you actually drift up, and there’s no air friction to naturally slow you down. Oh, and if you hit the lab, everyone onboard both your craft and the station dies, and the resultant debris field could both wipe out dozens of satellites and even people on the ground. No pressure, obviously. For decades, aerospace engineers have been docking successfully using hard coded physics equations and human pilots to correct them. But now, a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at Stanford, is taking a shot at building an AI to perform a series of “mental simulations” that could fundamentally change how future spacecraft interact with each other.

Strange Galaxies in the Early Universe Were Shaped by Weird Stars

Galaxies and their stars in the early Universe look a lot weirder than those we see today, and astronomers want to know why. A team of researchers at the University of Utah decided to survey certain stars in nearby galaxies as analogs of those that existed when the Universe was still in its infancy. The survey, called the "Treasury of Extremely Metal-Poor O Stars (TEMPOS), used the ultraviolet (UV) light streaming from those relatively close-by stars as detected by the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

New Lunar Crater Offers Keys To Moon’s Shallow Subsurface

Asteroids which strike the Moon and create new craters offer lunar scientists a window onto the workings of our natural satellite’s shallow subsurface.