A joint research team from South Korea has developed a fascinating wheel inspired by origami and Da Vinci bridge principles that could unlock access to the Moon’s most dangerous and scientifically useful terrain. The wheel expands from 230 mm to 500 mm in diameter on demand, allowing small rovers to navigate steep lunar pits and lava tube entrances that would trap conventional vehicles.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the largest planet forming disk ever observed around a young star, stretching nearly 40 times the diameter of our Solar System. Nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito” for its hamburger like appearance when viewed edge on, this massive disk reveals an unexpectedly chaotic and asymmetric structure with wisps of material extending far above and below its central plane. The discovery offers an unprecedented window into how planets might form in extreme environments, challenging previous assumptions about the orderly nature of planetary nurseries.
At the end of their lives, most satellites fall to their death. Many of the smaller ones, including most of those going up as part of the “mega-constellations” currently under construction, are intended to burn up in the atmosphere. This Design for Demise (D4D) principle has unintended consequences, according to a paper by Antoinette Ott and Christophe Bonnal, both of whom work for MaiaSpace, a company designing reusable launch vehicles for the small satellite market.
Launched in March, NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky in 102 colors. This map will enable 3D distance measurements to other galaxies and allow astronomers to measure the influence of Cosmic Inflation on the large-scale structure of the Universe.
Solar sails have some major advantages over traditional propulsion methods - most notably they don’t use any propellant. But, how exactly do they turn? In traditional sailing, a ship’s captain can simply adjust the angle of the sail itself to catch the wind at a different angle. But they also have the added advantage of a rudder, which doesn’t work when sailing on light. This has been a long-standing challenge, but a new paper available in pre-print from arXiv, by Gulzhan Aldan and Igor Bargatin at the University of Pennsylvania describes a new technique to turn solar sails - kirigami.
Ready for another amazing year of skywatching? 2025 was a wild year, with a steady parade of comets knocking on naked eye visibility, and one extra special interstellar comet, 3I/ATLAS. The sky just keeps on turning into 2026. Watch for mutual eclipse season for the major moons of Jupiter, as the moons pass one if front of the other. The ongoing solar cycle is also still expected to be active into 2026, producing sunspots space weather and more. And (finally!) we’ll see the return of total solar eclipses on August 12th, as umbral shadow of the Moon crosses Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was involved in yet another first discovery recently available in pre-print form on arXiv from Cicero Lu at the Gemini Observatory and his co-authors. This time, humanity’s most advanced space telescope found UV-fluorescent carbon monoxide in a protoplanetary debris disc for the first time ever. It also discovered some features of that disc that have considerable implications for planetary formation theory.
