During The Solar System's Chaotic Era, Jupiter May Have Helped Form Earth's Moon

It would appear that the so-called "great instability" event that wreaked chaos among the planets, sending the gas giants careening through space until they settled into the orbits we know today, occurred between 60 and 100 million years after the birth of the solar system . This is the conclusion of some careful scientific detective work that has connected a type of meteorite to an asteroid that was once pushed around by those marauding planets.

Thanks to studies of the compositions and locations of various types of asteroids and comets , scientists know the aforementioned carnage occurred early in the history of the solar system. Still, there are some puzzles yet to be solved when it comes to how exactly everything went down.

For instance, scientists are aware that the objects in the solar system we see today, including Earth, formed around the sun from a disk of gas and dust. However, some of those objects, namely asteroids and comets, appear to consist of material that was not present in the disk ⁘ at least, the material shouldn't have been present in the locations those objects currently find themselves in. Instead, it'd make more sense for these items to have formed closer to the sun before being scattered farther afield. If Jupiter and the other giant planets migrated from where they formed , maybe asteroids and comets could've as well.

"The idea of this orbital instability is now well established in the planetary community, however the time at which this instability occurred is still a matter of debate," planetary scientist Chrysa Avdellidou of the University of Leicester told Space.com.

The team focused on a kind of meteorite called an EL enstatite chondrite, which has a low iron abundance and is very similar in composition and isotopic ratio to the material that formed Earth. This tells scientists that Earth and EL chondrites likely condensed out of the same part of the planet-forming disk.

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Did UFO Steal Nuclear Technology From U.S. Facility?

Public and government interest in the existence of UFOs has skyrocketed in the past year following testimony from former government officials about the existence of what are being called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP.

The Pentagon has confirmed the existence of a government database with at least 800 reports of "anomalous" objects , launching its All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in July 2022 to investigate what we know about mysterious sightings in the sky.

One video posted on X, formerly Twitter , appeared to have caught such a sighting, showing a flying object in the desert, supposedly interfering with a U.S. nuclear tech site.

The post included a video of what appeared to be a metallic object floating in the desert, attracting another metallic object toward it before it zoomed into the air and out of the shot.

The original video was published four years ago on the YouTube channel Alien Planet, dedicated to computer-generated alien and UFO sightings.

However, the instability of the frame doesn't increase when it's zoomed in. Moreover, the camera abruptly stabilizes between the distant and zoomed-in shots. These inconsistencies indicate that the video was made to make it look like it was filmed when it wasn't.

A clearer indication of its artificiality comes later in the video when the camera magnifies the object in the distance. It is hanging exactly above a cropping of rocks, when another object floats up from behind the same rocks.

The two objects have far clearer fidelity compared to the rocks, despite seemingly being at the same distance, strongly hinting they were painted or added into the frame.

The video posted on X appears to help mask these visual inconsistencies by lowering the quality of the video, slowing it down, and moving the shot around artificially, making it harder to see the object on the screen.

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NASA Deploys New Solar Sail Technology As 80-Square-Meter Sail Unfurls In Space

Propulsion is always a big deal when it comes to space missions. Every gram counts when going up into space, so the more energy-dense your fuel is the better. You also usually can't refuel once you are out there. An alternative solution, which doesn't have this problem, is using a solar sail .

By taking advantage of the radiation pressure from sunlight, one can easily propel a spacecraft. This has been demonstrated several times but the technology still has challenges to overcome. So NASA is testing a new design dubbed the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. It was deployed in orbit just a few days ago after flying on a Rocket Lab launch.

To be effective, the deployed sails and booms need to be as light as possible. For this new experiment, NASA has developed new composite materials that are not just lighter but also stiffer than previous approaches to solar sails.

"Booms have tended to be either heavy and metallic or made of lightweight composite with a bulky design – neither of which work well for today's small spacecraft. Solar sails need very large, stable, and lightweight booms that can fold down compactly," Keats Wilkie, the mission's principal investigator at NASA's Langley Research Center, said in a statement .

"This sail's booms are tube-shaped and can be squashed flat and rolled like a tape measure into a small package while offering all the advantages of composite materials, like less bending and flexing during temperature changes."

The fully deployed sails measure 80 square meters (860 square feet) or roughly the area of six parking spots. But they pack really tightly and move around an air fryer-sized CubeSat. They will orbit on a Sun-synchronous orbit about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) above the Earth's surface.

"Seven meters of the deployable booms can roll up into a shape that fits in your hand," said Alan Rhodes, the mission's lead systems engineer at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "The hope is that the new technologies verified on this spacecraft will inspire others to use them in ways we haven't even considered."

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Are There Aliens On… K2-18b? Discovery Of Planet Twice As Big As Earth Emitting Gas 'Only Produced By...

Planet K2-18b – which is more than twice as big as Earth and 120 light-years away – sits within the habitable zone of its star in the Leo constellation.  

Now, to confirm the finding, the James Webb Space Telescope will undertake hours of observations of the planet on Friday.  

However, space fans will have to wait several months for the results to be authenticated and published.

Investigations of planet K2-18b are being led by Dr Nikku Madhusudhan, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge. 

He's called it a 'hycean' world – a relatively new term he coined for a rocky planet with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and oceans of water.

'If we do detect DMS [on K2-18b] it does put it basically at the top for potential signs of habitability,' he told the Times . 

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He Left For A Space Mission. When He Returned, His Whole Country Was Gone.

Russian astronaut Sergei Krikalev had to spend 312 days extra in space. What he saw after returning to Earth left him stunned.

Sergei Krikalev, a Russian cosmonaut, was all set to be deployed to the Mir space station on a Soyuz spacecraft in 1991. Set against the backdrop of the Soviet Union's dissolution, the exploratory mission turned out to be a nightmare for the cosmonaut. Initially, marked as a five-month mission, Sergei returned to a changed Earth after almost a year.

The Russian cosmonaut's prolonged stay put financial pressure on the country. To arrange funds, Russia decided to offer space station vacations to Western countries. With the rising talk of selling Mir, concerns sparked among the crew members, but they stayed because had they left Mir, it would have meant the end of the Space Station.

In March 1992, Krikalev finally received the news that he would be replaced and could return to Earth. He landed near Arkalyk, in the independent Republic of Kazakhstan. By the time he landed, his home Leningrad had become St Petersburg of the Russian State.

What was initially assigned as a five-month space routine had unfortunately extended to almost a year for Krikalev, who spent 312 days away from Earth, which took a toll on his health. Upon returning home, he was diagnosed with signs of heavy damage to his physical health, including muscle and bone weakening. But the truly tragic part of Krikalev's story is that he went on to become the last citizen of the Soviet Union and was unable to return to his original home of Leningrad, which is now known as St.Petersburg. Still, his dedication to staying at the Mir station in the face of adversity and his commitment to the Soviet space program displayed true patriotism and professionalism.

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NASA Shares Updated Render Of The Cargo Starship Variant

NASA shared updated renders of the SpaceX and Blue Origin cargo landers that will bring rovers and other equipment to the Moon.

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Lego Reveals NASA Artemis Rocket, Milky Way Galaxy Sets Coming In May

Though the moon can sometimes seem like a distant destination for a rocket, the second newly-announced Lego kit takes in a much wider view of deep space.

The Lego Art The Milky Way Galaxy set (no. 31212; $199.99 / ⁘199.99 / ⁘169.99) creates a colorful, dimensional map of our home galaxy, spanning more than 620,000,000,000,000,000 miles (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers or about 100,000 light years) in a 25.5-inch-wide (65-centimeter) mosaic.

Lego's gorgeous recreation of our cosmic neighborhood features many galactic landmarks such as the Trappist-1 system, the Pleiades star cluster, the Crab Nebula and the Pillars of Creation.

In addition to the astronomical sights, the mosaic also includes a "You are here" sign placed where our solar system is located and what looks to be a spacecraft (though only four probes have just barely left our solar system, with a fifth on its way).

Designed to be hung on a wall, the Milky Way Galaxy set is built up from five different panels, each with its own instructions, so it can be assembled by an individual or as a group activity. Builders can also access (via a QR code) a podcast specially recorded for this set featuring Lego Group host Jack Gardner Vaa; science communicators Camille "Galactic Gal" Bergin and University of Leicester chancellor Maggie Aderin-Pocock; and Lego Group designer Adam Vaughan.

The Space Launch System and Milky Way will be available to order for members of Lego Insiders, the company's loyalty program, on May 15. The sets will then be released for sale to all both online and at Lego Stores beginning on May 18.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Robert Pearlman is a space historian, journalist and the founder and editor of collectSPACE.com , an online publication and community devoted to space history with a particular focus on how and where space exploration intersects with pop culture. Pearlman is also a contributing writer for Space.com and co-author of "Space Stations: The Art, Science, and Reality of Working in Space⁘ published by Smithsonian Books in 2018. He previously developed online content for the National Space Society and Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, helped establish the space tourism company Space Adventures and currently serves on the History Committee of the American Astronautical Society, the advisory committee for The Mars Generation and leadership board of For All Moonkind. In 2009, he was inducted into the U.S. Space Camp Hall of Fame in Huntsville, Alabama. In 2021, he was honored by the American Astronautical Society with the Ordway Award for Sustained Excellence in Spaceflight History.

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Companies Offer Proposals For Apophis Asteroid Missions

WASHINGTON — Companies ranging from Blue Origin to a startup are proposing concepts for missions to visit an asteroid before it makes a very close flyby of Earth in five years.

The asteroid Apophis, about 350 meters across, will pass closer to the Earth than geostationary orbit on April 13, 2029, a flyby that scientists say happens only once every thousand years for an asteroid of that size. There is zero chance that the asteroid will hit Earth either in the 2029 flyby or subsequent flybys into the next century, but the close approach is of scientific interest.

NASA has already agreed to send one mission to Apophis, using the main spacecraft for the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission. That mission, rechristened OSIRIS-APEX , will rendezvous with Apophis shortly after the asteroid's 2029 flyby.

Scientists, though, are interested in sending additional missions to Apophis, particularly those that would fly by or orbit the asteroid before the flyby so that researchers can better the understand what impact tidal forces from the flyby might have on the asteroid. Several such mission concepts were discussed during an April 22–23 workshop at a European Space Agency center in The Netherlands.

A "very preliminary and very conservative" mission profile he presented showed the Blue Ring mission launching in October 2027 — ironically on a Falcon 9 and not the company's own New Glenn vehicle — arriving at Apophis in January 2029 carrying two metric tons of payload. "We haven't optimized this yet. We can do better," he said, including using New Glenn to launch the mission.

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Meadors Named Director Of Arkansas Space Grant Consortium - News

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock is happy to announce Dr. Constance Meadors as the new director of the Arkansas Space Grant Consortium (ASGC) and NASA Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program.

"I am only the third director since the Arkansas Space Grant Consortium began in 1991," she said. "I think it's a wonderful opportunity. My NASA experience started here at UA Little Rock conducting hybrid rocket research as a graduate student. Immediately upon entering the program, I was identified as the recipient of a NASA fellowship. That was the first time I became involved in NASA, and it was beyond anything I imagined as a young African American female from a small town. It feels like I have come full circle in coming back to the place where it all started."

ASGC partners with 17 four-year universities and colleges across Arkansas, dedicated to advancing space science education, research, and public outreach. The ASGC recently partnered with six higher education institutions in Arkansas to provide funding and solar eclipse glasses for free STEM festivals where the public could watch the solar eclipse and learn about STEM activities in Arkansas. ASGC employees spent April 8 at Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, where NASA scientists, partnering researchers, and citizen scientists spent the day conducting research experiments for the total solar eclipse.

"This was ground zero for NASA research in Arkansas," Meadors said. "We had research teams launching balloons, and we completed several workshops, including one workshop where we taught citizen scientists how to use their phones to collect data during the eclipse. We had scientists join us from Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and North and South Carolina."

Meadors joined UA Little Rock in 2023 as the associate director of ASGC, and she brings a diverse wealth of space research and NASA experience. In the Office of STEM Engagement, she served as the first Minority Serving Institution (MSI) STEM Engagement Liaison-Faculty Fellow for NASA Intergovernmental Personnel Assignees (IPA). The NASA EPSCoR advisory council was established and led by her.

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Watch A Hotspot Orbit Our Galaxy's Black Hole - Sky ⁘ Telescope

Astronomers have used artificial intelligence to reconstruct a 3D video that shows a hot pocket of gas orbiting a stone's throw away from our galaxy's central black hole.

For all its "supermassive" status, our resident behemoth, dubbed Sgr A*, is quiet as such black holes go. Perhaps due to strong magnetic fields that constrict its diet, it only picks at the gaseous buffet around it. Even so, it emits minor flares up to several times a day at X-ray, infrared, and radio wavelengths.

These flares were a nuisance to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team, which produced an image of Sgr A*'s dark silhouette, based off of data collected in 2017. Now, Aviad Levis (Caltech) and collaborators, including several members of the EHT team, have utilized some of this 2017 data for a new project: following the motion of a flaring hotspot in the tumultuous gas flowing around the black hole.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), high in the Atacama Desert in Chile, was imaging Sgr A* on April 11, 2017, as part of the EHT project. While data taken earlier in the month was ultimately used for the EHT image, because the black hole was quieter then, the radio-wave data collected on April 11th was interesting in its own right, as it coincided with an X-ray flare.

However, while the combined EHT data revealed an exquisitely high-resolution image of Sgr A*, the ALMA data taken alone is 100,000 times fuzzier. Basically, all of the information that the team was interested in was packed into a single pixel.

The researchers started with the idea that flares come from hotspots within gas flowing around the central maw. Magnetic fields snap-crackle-popping very close to the black hole can heat and energize this gas.

If a flare comes from such a hotspot, then information about the flare's origin is encoded in the pixel's changing brightness: Gas flowing into the black hole won't change much over a few hours, but hot pockets of gas will shear out and fade more quickly. The radio waves' polarization , which tells us at what angle the light waves are oscillating, is also expected to be higher when the light is coming from a hot bubble of plasma.

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Sentient Humanoid’ Robots As Tesla Flounders

If ever there was a way to distract from Tesla's lackluster corporate results on Tuesday, it was this: CEO Elon Musk declared during the company's earnings call that he hopes to sell "sentient humanoid" robots by the end of next year.

Before then, the robots known as "Optimus" will likely be used at Tesla's factories sometime this year, he said. "I think Optimus will be more valuable than everything else [at Tesla] combined," Musk boasted. "If you've got a sentient humanoid that is able to navigate reality and do tasks…there is no meaningful limit to the size of the economy."

Before the dawn of its not-yet-proven humanoid robot era, Tesla faces big financial issues in the short term. During the first quarter of the year, its profits tanked 55 percent—to $1.1 billion—the company announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, its revenue sank 9 percent, to $21.3 billion. Earlier this month, the carmaker announced that it would lay off 10 percent of its staff in an effort to shore up its finances.

Investors evidently thought the company's results would be even worse on Tuesday, as Tesla's stock rose more than 10 percent in after-hours trading.

On the earnings call, Musk pressed the case for electric vehicles despite industry headwinds, arguing that gas-powered cars without autonomous capabilities will one day be viewed the same way horse-drawn carriages are today.

He also detailed Tesla's plans to launch an army of robotaxis; within a decade, he forecasted, the company will have tens of millions of vehicles in operation that it may be able to utilize to that end. It's worth noting, however, that Musk has previously made outlandish predictions about company timelines that did not pan out.

The billionaire insists that he is fully focused on the carmaker, despite the headaches at X. Considering his proposed pay package, investors will need to believe him.

This month, the company said it will ask shareholders to vote on Musk's unprecedented compensation agreement , which is worth about $50 billion. The pay package was previously approved, but a Delaware judge tossed it out earlier this year, saying stockholders weren't sufficiently informed about the "unfathomable sum" of money bestowed on him.

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Planet 9 Could Be Lurking Behind Neptune, Study Finds Strong Evidence

The simulation findings showed that the orbital properties of Neptune-crossing objects closely matched those predicted by a model that included Planet 9.

Researchers may have found the "strongest statistical evidence" yet of Planet 9 (also called Planet X)⁘s existence. 

For years, astronomers have been on the hunt for a mysterious planet that could be lurking in the farthest reaches of our solar system.

In 2015, Caltech astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown (well known for reclassifying Pluto) presented compelling evidence for the existence of this hypothetical planet. They proposed that Planet 9 likely follows an unusually elongated orbit in the outer solar system.

Previous studies have shown how Planet 9's gravitational impact could explain the strange orbits of objects in the outer solar system.

The researchers ran computational simulations that included gravitational interactions with all large planets, the Galactic tide, and even passing stars. They also incorporated initial conditions reflecting the migration of giant planets and the early evolution of the Sun within a star cluster.

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James Webb Space Telescope To 'Unlock The Secrets' Of Seven Planets In Search For Alien...

Commissioned back in 2018 and launching into the cosmos in 2021, the NASA telescope is at the forefront of deep space discovery through its hi-tech equipment.

Just this month, Webb found yet another supermassive black hole that was red in colour and devouring everything around it .

It's also coming across some outright bizarre discoveries in the images it sends back to Earth, including a 'question mark' sitting in space in what is one of the most fascinating things scientists have ever seen.

Sitting some 40 light years away from Earth and the solar system is a star known as TRAPPIST-1, which has seven planets orbiting it.

Doug Hudgins, Exoplanet Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said that if they have atmosphere, Webb will then be 'key to unlocking their secrets'.

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Pascagoula Holds Viewing Party For Netflix Documentary On 1973 UFO Sighting

"Files of the Unexplained" features chilling encounters from people across the world. Events are what witnesses describe as "unexplainable and strange occurrences."

For five decades, the story has been debated about what exactly took place on the Pascagoula River in October 1973.

"We're celebrating that. We have had a lot of traction about that. It's been really good to see the story told on film. We're excited. It's been nearly 51 years. We have the marker underneath the Pascagoula Bridge where it happened. People are able to go and visit there whenever they like," said Susannah Northrop, Executive Director of Pascagoula Main Street.

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Space Technology Conferences (STC) In Turkiye

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University Of Florida Scientist To Fly On Blue Origin Suborbital Mission - News - University Of...

University of Florida Distinguished Professor Rob Ferl will be the first NASA-funded academic researcher to conduct an experiment as part of a commercial space crew on an upcoming mission of Blue Origin⁘s New Shepard rocket.

Now, funded through a grant from NASA⁘s Flight Opportunities program, Ferl has an opportunity to personally conduct experiments on how the transition to and from microgravity impacts gene expression in cells and, more broadly, to develop protocols for future ⁘researcher-tended⁘ suborbital flights.

⁘The University of Florida is committed to the mission of space exploration and research,⁘ UF President Ben Sasse said. ⁘The discoveries that will result from this work will be breathtaking. We⁘re proud of Rob, grateful for our partners, and excited about the work ahead.⁘

Ferl and colleague Anna-Lisa Paul, also a professor of horticultural sciences, have spent their careers seeking to understand plant gene expression in microgravity, but most of their experiments have been done by astronauts in space. As Paul puts it, on launches to the space station, astronauts now generally fly separately from science payloads, meaning that science is done ⁘in space⁘ and not ⁘on the way to space.⁘

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Why Does NASA Want A Time Zone On The Moon? | Space News

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Experts Suggest Using SpaceX's Starship To Rescue Stranded Samples On Surface Of Mars

An independent review board  balked last year at the Mars Sample Return mission's "unrealistic" budget, highly complex mission design, and glaring management failures.

Earlier this year, budget cuts forced the agency's Jet Propulsion Lab to let go of a whopping 530 employees , with NASA leaders racing to keep the MSR mission from imploding completely.

The space agency announced this week that it would solicit proposals from the private space industry for "innovative designs" to return Martian samples collected and bagged by its Perseverance rover over the last couple of years.

"Starship has the potential to return serious tonnage from Mars within [around] five years," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk suggested in a tweet earlier this week, responding to the announcement.

"It's encouraging companies to use infrastructure built for Artemis," he told SA . "The only conclusion you can really draw from that is they're hoping Starship somehow is the solution here."

Former NASA chief scientist Jim Green, who helped establish MSR at the agency, agreed that it could make sense to "leverage assets that we didn't have" when the plan was first devised.

There are an astonishing number of moving parts when it comes to NASA's current plan to return samples from the surface of Mars, an interplanetary Rube Goldberg machine that's already required an astronomical amount of funding and years of planning.

Needless to say, a rocket that could both land and lift off from the Martian surface could help streamline the endeavor significantly.

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