Space

wired.com Japan Is Launching a Probe to Collect the First-Ever Samples From a Martian Moon Ritsuko Kawai 5–6 minutes

Two Mercury-bound spacecraft left their mother ship behind on Thursday and headed down the home stretch of their nearly decade-long voyage to the solar system’s smallest and closest-to-the-sun planet.

On August 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched from Florida and will spend the next three months heading to its new home: a Sun-Earth Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth, where the gravity of the two larger bodies are in equilibrium. It’s a comfy place to be for a space telescope; Roman can say hi to her old classmate Webb, who got there four years ago and has been sending back brilliant images and doing good science.

Jeff Foust

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches Aug. 30 and is probably the space-thing I’ve been most excited about since the deployment of the JWST. Build from a leftover reconnaissance telescope (like Hubble was), Roman is designed to make catalogs of large swaths of the sky, find new planets (including in very bright areas like the center of our own galaxy), and study supernovae and their remnants.

Nuking a ‘City Killer’ Asteroid Might Not Be the Worst Idea. Scientists Tested It.

I believe that a Korean orbiter had images on the 6th but these seem higher resolution.

…Historically, scientists have viewed the cosmos as akin to a rock—complex, perhaps even beautiful, but formed through arbitrary events. Evolutionary cosmologists instead argue that universes, like living organisms, grow and reproduce, spinning off new universes with small variations from their progenitors. In doing so, these cosmic offspring are refined across generations into forms that maximize the number of universes yet to be born. Since the Big Bang, our universe, like any developing child, has been unfurling into an optimal shape.

The ISS is equipped with two such antennas and only one is needed for normal operations. But it’s a critical system, and managers would like to have two healthy antennas in place for redundancy.

A US Airforce flight headed to Antarctica was forced to turn around on Tuesday after a notice was issued advising of potentially hazardous “space activity”.

theguardian.com The great silence: why haven’t we found any aliens yet? Adam Kirsch 27–34 minutes

theguardian.com Astronomers discover a new kind of cosmic object – a black hole ‘star’ Ian Sample 3–4 minutes

…The setup starts with an idea from last year. Certain exotic forms of dark matter, arranged in a halo with a particular relationship between pressure and density, can produce black holes with no singularity at the center. These are so-called “regular black holes,” where the equations stay sensible all the way to the center. Tan and Wang asked what happens if you drop an ordinary neutron star into the middle of one of these halos…

wired.com Space Agencies Are Trying to Keep Astronauts From Losing Their Sight Isabella Ward 4–5 minutes

The researchers also monitor to ensure satellite operators are complying with their licences and track foreign “adversaries”.

Happy birthday song for Curiosity

The #lunar crash of a Falcon 9 upper stage is expected at 06:35:37.5 UTC +/- a few seconds: https://www.projectpluto.com/25010d.htm#where - find out more in the papers https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14625 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23904 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00360 while on https://www.youtube.com/live/9J9-U307w7U and https://www.youtube.com/live/ZfgrV4nmvcg and https://www.youtube.com/live/UKIIMm6TwT8 live views of the Moon at impact time are planned.

…Primordial black holes (PBHs) are only hypothetical, but they generate a lot of interest. If they’re real, they formed immediately after the Big Bang from direct collapse of dense clumps of subatomic matter, without the need for any stellar progenitor. Researchers have long thought that they could be the prime component, or even the only component, of dark matter…

…In April 2018, a team led by Oxford planetary physicist Patrick Irwin reported the first clear detection of hydrogen sulfide gas sitting above Uranus’s main cloud deck…

https://archive.ph/Xp7qa

Warwick University researchers have led an international effort to uncover some of the faintest debris in geosynchronous orbit that have ever been observed, finding fragments as small as 5 cm in size and obtaining valuable data for characterising their behaviour.

Archived link

…"Once you have super-conducting technology available in space, you can then create very strong magnetic fields and you can use them for various use cases,” he said. “You can accelerate things in space very fast or change the trajectory of a satellite completely without fuel.”…

wired.com Good News! Turns Out the Earth Will Never Be Swallowed by the Sun Simone Valesini 5–6 minutes

…a Yale-led team measured the internal motions of a faint, diffuse galaxy called NGC 1052-DF9 and found its stars moving too slowly to hide a normal dark matter halo. The galaxy joins two earlier oddballs, DF2 and DF4, and all three lie along the same narrow line of galaxies in the NGC 1052 field…

…After a long, challenging cruise phase with nine planetary flybys (one by Earth, two by Venus and six by Mercury), BepiColombo finally closed this chapter last Monday by permanently switching off its SEP thrusters…

In 2025, astronomers reported one of the largest rotating structures ever found: a cosmic filament some 50 million light-years long, holding close to 300 galaxies, with many of them turning in step with the filament as a whole. The coordinated motion is difficult to reconcile with the way galaxies are thought to acquire their spin…

…In May 2026, a team of researchers reported evidence for primordial black holes (PBHs) by spotting a short-lived flicker of light from a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud. They monitored millions of stars in this galaxy using DECam. They spotted one star that briefly brightened for less than an hour. They interpreted this as a gravitational microlensing event. Microlensing occurs when a tiny object passes in front of a star and its gravity briefly bends and magnifies the star’s light like a lens.

The discovery of all five nucleobases on Ryugu strengthens the idea that life’s molecular ingredients formed in space before reaching Earth.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/5jQwd