NASA’s BurstCube, a shoebox-sized satellite designed to study the universe’s most powerful explosions, is on its way to the International Space Station.

The spacecraft travels aboard SpaceX’s 30th Commercial Resupply Services mission, which lifted off at 4:55 p.m. EDT on Thursday, March 21, from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. After arriving at the station, BurstCube will be unpacked and later released into orbit, where it will detect, locate, and study short gamma-ray bursts—brief flashes of high-energy light.

“BurstCube may be small, but in addition to investigating these extreme events, it’s testing new technology and providing important experience for early career astronomers and aerospace engineers,” said Jeremy Perkins, BurstCube’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Short gamma-ray bursts usually occur after the collisions of neutron stars, the superdense remnants of massive stars that exploded in supernovae. The neutron stars can also emit gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time, as they spiral together.

Astronomers are interested in studying gamma-ray bursts using both light and gravitational waves because each can teach them about different aspects of the event. This approach is part of a new way of understanding the cosmos called multimessenger astronomy.

The collisions that create short gamma-ray bursts also produce heavy elements like gold and iodine, an essential ingredient for life as we know it.

Currently, the only joint observation of gravitational waves and light from the same event—called GW170817—was in 2017. It was a watershed moment in multimessenger astronomy, and the scientific community has been hoping and preparing for additional concurrent discoveries since.

“BurstCube’s detectors are angled to allow us to detect and localize events over a wide area of the sky,” said Israel Martinez, research scientist and BurstCube team member at the University of Maryland, College Park and Goddard.

“Our current gamma-ray missions can only see about 70% of the sky at any moment because Earth blocks their view. Increasing our coverage with satellites like BurstCube improves the odds we’ll catch more bursts coincident with gravitational wave detections.”

BurstCube’s main instrument detects gamma rays with energies ranging from 50,000 to 1 million electron volts. (For comparison, visible light ranges between 2 and 3 electron volts.)

When a gamma ray enters one of BurstCube’s four detectors, it encounters a cesium iodide layer called a scintillator, which converts it into visible light. The light then enters another layer, an array of 116 silicon photomultipliers, that converts it into a pulse of electrons, which is what BurstCube measures. For each gamma ray, the team sees one pulse in the instrument readout that provides the precise arrival time and energy. The angled detectors inform the team of the general direction of the event.

BurstCube belongs to a class of spacecraft called CubeSats. These small satellites come in a range of standard sizes based on a cube measuring 10 centimeters (3.9 inches) across. CubeSats provide cost-effective access to space to facilitate groundbreaking science, test new technologies, and help educate the next generation of scientists and engineers in mission development, construction, and testing.

“We were able to order many of BurstCube’s parts, like solar panels and other off-the-shelf components, which are becoming standardized for CubeSats,” said Julie Cox, a BurstCube mechanical engineer at Goddard. “That allowed us to focus on the mission’s novel aspects, like the made-in-house components and the instrument, which will demonstrate how a new generation of miniaturized gamma-ray detectors work in space.”

BurstCube is led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The BurstCube collaboration includes the University of Alabama in Huntsville; the University of Maryland, College Park; the University of the Virgin Islands; the Universities Space Research Association in Washington; the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington; and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

The ice-encrusted oceans of some of the moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter are leading candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life. A new lab-based study led by the University of Washington in Seattle and the Freie Universität Berlin shows that individual ice grains ejected from these planetary bodies may contain enough material for instruments headed there in the fall to detect signs of life, if such life exists.

“For the first time we have shown that even a tiny fraction of cellular material could be identified by a mass spectrometer onboard a spacecraft,” said lead author Fabian Klenner, a UW postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences. “Our results give us more confidence that using upcoming instruments, we will be able to detect lifeforms similar to those on Earth, which we increasingly believe could be present on ocean-bearing moons.”

The open-access study was published in Science Advances. Other authors in the international team are from The Open University in the U.K.; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; the University of Colorado, Boulder; and the University of Leipzig.

The Cassini mission that ended in 2017 discovered parallel cracks near the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Emanating from these cracks are plumes containing gas and ice grains. NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, scheduled to launch in October, will carry more instruments to explore in even more detail an icy moon of Jupiter, Europa.

To prepare for that mission, researchers are studying what this new generation of instruments might find. It is technically prohibitive to directly simulate grains of ice flying through space at 4 to 6 kilometers per second to hit an observational instrument, as the actual collision speed will be.

Instead, the authors used an experimental setup that sends a thin beam of liquid water into a vacuum, where it disintegrates into droplets. They then used a laser beam to excite the droplets and mass spectral analysis to mimic what instruments on the space probe will detect.

Newly published results show that instruments slated to go on future missions, like the SUrface Dust Analyzer onboard Europa Clipper, can detect cellular material in one out of hundreds of thousands of ice grains.

The study focused on Sphingopyxis alaskensis, a common bacterium in waters off Alaska. While many studies use the bacterium Escherichia coli as a model organism, this single-celled organism is much smaller, lives in cold environments, and can survive with few nutrients. All these things make it a better candidate for potential life on the icy moons of Saturn or Jupiter.

“They are extremely small, so they are in theory capable of fitting into ice grains that are emitted from an ocean world like Enceladus or Europa,” Klenner said.

Results show that the instruments can detect this bacterium, or portions of it, in a single ice grain. Different molecules end up in different ice grains. The new research shows that analyzing single ice grains, where biomaterial may be concentrated, is more successful than averaging across a larger sample containing billions of individual grains.

A recent study led by the same researchers showed evidence of phosphate on Enceladus. This planetary body now appears to contain energy, water, phosphate, other salts and carbon-based organic material, making it increasingly likely to support lifeforms similar to those found on Earth.

The authors hypothesize that if bacterial cells are encased in a lipid membrane, like those on Earth, then they would also form a skin on the ocean’s surface. On Earth, ocean scum is a key part of sea spray that contributes to the smell of the ocean. On an icy moon where the ocean is connected to the surface (e.g., through cracks in the ice shell), the vacuum of outer space would cause this subsurface ocean to boil. Gas bubbles rise through the ocean and burst at the surface, where cellular material gets incorporated into ice grains within the plume.

“We here describe a plausible scenario for how bacterial cells can, in theory, be incorporated into icy material that is formed from liquid water on Enceladus or Europa and then gets emitted into space,” Klenner said.

The SUrface Dust Analyzer onboard Europa Clipper will be higher-powered than instruments on past missions. This and future instruments also will for the first time be able to detect ions with negative charges, making them better suited to detecting fatty acids and lipids.

“For me, it is even more exciting to look for lipids, or for fatty acids, than to look for building blocks of DNA, and the reason is because fatty acids appear to be more stable,” Klenner said.

“With suitable instrumentation, such as the SUrface Dust Analyzer on NASA’s Europa Clipper space probe, it might be easier than we thought to find life, or traces of it, on icy moons,” said senior author Frank Postberg, a professor of planetary sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin.

“If life is present there, of course, and cares to be enclosed in ice grains originating from an environment such as a subsurface water reservoir.”

Billions of years ago, Mars was home to abundant water, and its Gale crater contained a lake. Gradually, the climate changed, drying the red planet and creating the dusty desert world we know today.

Now, an international team of researchers led by Imperial has found signs that water was abundant in Mars’ Gale crater—a 154km-diameter basin just south of the equator—long after the planet was thought to have become dry and inhospitable.

The findings have implications for our understanding of Mars’ changing climate, as well as where we now look for signs of habitability.

Using data and images from NASA’s Curiosity rover, the researchers found clues: deformed layers within a desert sandstone that, they argue, could only have been formed by water.

While they agree that water was present, they are uncertain whether it existed as a pressurized liquid, ice, or brine.

Lead author Dr. Steven Banham of Imperial College London’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering said, “The sandstone revealed that water was probably abundant more recently and for longer than previously thought—but by which process did the water leave these clues?”

“This water might have been pressurized liquid, forced into and deforming the sediment; frozen, with the repeat freezing and thawing process causing the deformation; or briny, and subject to large temperature swings. “

“What’s clear is that behind each of these potential ways to deform this sandstone, water is the common link.”

The results are published in Geology.

An oasis in the desert

Scientists accept that most surface water on Mars was lost by the middle of the Hesperian period, which lasted 3.7-3.0 billion years.

These new findings suggest that water was, in fact, still abundant underground, near the surface of Mars, toward the later Hesperian.

To better understand the planet’s past climate and suitability for life, researchers are using the Curiosity rover to look for clues in Mars’ rock record. The work forms part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission.

Curiosity has been exploring the Gale Crater and the northern flank of its central mountain, called Mount Sharp, since 2012. The crater hosts a 5.5 km-high mountain that was built in layers—first by incoming lake and river sediments and, later, by desert sediments and winds during Mars’ supposed period of drying.

Using Curiosity’s main scientific camera, called the Mastcam instrument, researchers collected pictures of Mount Sharp’s sediment layers to find ‘fingerprints’ of how the rocks formed. They looked at rocks that were deposited in this now-sandy desert and found structures within that indicated water.

Dr. Banham said, “When sediments are moved by flowing water in rivers, or by the wind blowing, they leave characteristic structures which can act like fingerprints of the ancient processes that formed them.”

Rocky fingerprints

As the rover ascended the mountain, it encountered increasingly younger rocks deposited in progressively drier environments. It eventually reached a sandstone deposit draped over the mountainside, known as the Stimson Formation—the preserved relic of a desert containing large sand dunes.

The images it collected revealed that the formation was deposited after Mount Sharp formed, during Mars’ period of supposed drying. They also revealed that part of the formation called the Feòrachas structure, contained features that had clearly been influenced by water.

Study co-author Amelie Roberts, a Ph.D. candidate from Imperial College London’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said, “Usually, the wind deposits sediment in a very regular, predictable way. Surprisingly, we found that these wind-deposited layers were contorted into strange shapes, which suggests the sand had been deformed shortly after being laid down. These structures point to the presence of water just below the surface.”

“The layers of sediment in the crater reveal a shift from a wet environment to a drier one over time—reflecting Mars’ transition from a humid and habitable environment to an inhospitable desert world. But these water-formed structures in the desert sandstone show that water persisted on Mars much later than previously thought.”

The researchers’ discovery has implications for future space exploration missions, particularly in the search for signs of life beyond Earth. On Mars, the Stimson formation and similar desert sandstones were previously considered less promising targets when hunting for biosignatures—evidence of past primordial life—on Mars. Finding these water-formed structures changes that notion.

Dr. Banham said, “Determining whether Mars and other planets were once able to support life has been a major driving force for planetary research for more than half a century. Our findings reveal new avenues for exploration—shedding light on Mars’ potential to support life and highlighting where we should continue hunting for new clues.”

Signs of life have not been found on Mars, and the broader consensus suggests any we might find in the future would indicate the most primitive of primordial life—perhaps as simple as self-replicating molecules.

Amelie said, “Our finding extends the timeline of water persisting in the region surrounding Gale crater, and so the whole region could have been habitable for longer than previously thought.”

An international piece of research, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has found clues to the nature of some of the brightest and hottest stars in our universe, called blue supergiants. Although these stars are commonly observed, their origin has been an old puzzle that has been debated for several decades.

By simulating novel stellar models and analyzing a large data sample in the Large Magellanic Cloud, IAC researchers have found strong evidence that most blue supergiants may have formed from the merger of two stars bound in a binary system. The study is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

B-type blue supergiants are very luminous and hot stars (at least 10,000 times more luminous and 2 to 5 times hotter than the sun), with masses between 16 to 40 times the mass of the sun. They are expected to occur during a very rapid phase of evolution according to conventional stellar lore and thus, should be rarely seen. So why do we observe so many of them?

An important clue to their origin lies in the fact that most blue supergiants are observed to be single, that is, they have no detectable gravitationally bound companion. However, most young massive stars are observed to be born in binary systems with companions. Why are blue supergiants single? The answer: massive binary stellar systems ‘merge’ and produce blue supergiants.

In a pioneering study led by IAC researcher Athira Menon, an international team of computational and observational astrophysicists simulated detailed models of stellar mergers and analyzed a sample of 59 early B-type blue supergiants in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

“We simulated the mergers of evolved giant stars with their smaller stellar companions over a wide range of parameters, taking into account the interaction and mixing of the two stars during the merger. The newly-born stars live as blue supergiants throughout the second longest phase of a star’s life, when it burns helium in its core,” explains Menon.

According to Artemio Herrero, IAC researcher and co-author of the article, “The results obtained explain why blue supergiants are found in the so-called ‘evolutionary gap’ from classical stellar physics, a phase of their evolution where we would not expect to find stars.”

But can such mergers also explain the measured properties of blue supergiants? “Remarkably, we found that stars born from such mergers have greater success in reproducing the surface composition, particularly the nitrogen and helium enhancement, of a large fraction of the sample than conventional stellar models. This indicates that mergers may be the dominant channel to produce blue supergiants,” says Danny Lennon, an IAC researcher who also participated in the study.

This study makes a big leap towards solving an old problem of how blue supergiants form and indicates the important role of stellar mergers in the morphology of galaxies and their stellar populations. The next part of the study will attempt to explore how these blue supergiants explode and contribute to the black hole-neutron star landscape.

Russia aborted the launch of three astronauts to the International Space Station moments before they were scheduled to lift off Thursday, but the crew was safe, officials said.

The Russian Soyuz rocket was to carry NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, Oleg Novitsky of Roscosmos and Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus from the Russian-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan.

The launch was aborted by an automatic safety system about 20 seconds before the scheduled liftoff at 1321 GMT. Russia’s Roscosmos space corporation and NASA said the crew was safe, and Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov said the next launch attempt is set for Saturday.

Borisov told reporters that experts quickly pinpointed the cause of the launch abort, saying it was triggered by a voltage drop in a power source

The space station, which has served as a symbol of post-Cold War international cooperation, is now one of the last remaining areas of collaboration between Russia and the West amid tensions over Moscow’s military action in Ukraine. NASA and its partners hope to continue operating the orbiting outpost until 2030.

For Dyson, it was to be her third trip to the orbital complex, where she was due to spend six months. Novitsky, who was to make his fourth flight to the orbiting outpost, and Vasilevskaya, on her first space mission as her country’s first astronaut, were set to return to Earth after spending 12 days in orbit.

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The three astronauts were to join the station’s crew consisting of NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara, Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub, and Alexander Grebenkin.

Russia has continued to rely on modified versions of Soviet-designed rockets for commercial satellites, as well as crews and cargo to the space station.

While the crew wasn’t in danger, Thursday’s aborted launch was a significant mishap for the Russian space program.

It followed an Octюber 2018 launch failure, when a Soyuz rocket carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’ Alexei Ovchinin to the International Space Station failed less two minutes after the blastoff, sending their rescue capsule into a steep ride back to a safe landing.

Hague and Ovchinin had a brief period of weightlessness when the capsule separated from the malfunctioning Soyuz rocket at an altitude of about 50 kilometers (31 miles), then endured gravitational forces of 6-7 times more than is felt on Earth as they came down at a sharper-than-normal angle. The 2018 launch failure was the first such accident for Russia’s manned program in over three decades.

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Japan’s space agency and its prime contractor said Thursday they hope to be able to forge a profitable launch business with their new H3 rocket after its first successful flight last month in an increasingly competitive market dominated by Space X.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have been developing the H3 as a successor to the soon-to-retire current mainstay H-2A, which enjoyed a 98% success rate but its high launch cost made it less competitive in the global market.

Mayuki Niitsu, MHI’s H3 rocket project manager, said it plans at least six launches a year to meet rapidly growing demand for communication, observation and security satellites.

“Today, the commercial market has a big demand for rockets, and there is a substantial shortage of rockets,” he said, standing next the rocket’s second stage at a news conference. “Space X is virtually dominating the market right now, but I believe there are high expectations of our role as an alternative.”

An H3 rocket successfully reached orbit and released two small observation satellites on Feb. 17 following a failed debut launch last year in which the second-stage engine did not ignite.

Mitsubishi Heavy will eventually take over H3 production and launches from JAXA and hopes to make it commercially viable.

The H3 rocket’s first and second stages were shown to the media before their planned shipment later this week to the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan for final assembly with the main engines and a fairing. When combined, the rocket will be 57 meters (187 feet) long.

The H3 is designed to carry larger payloads than the H-2A at about half its launch cost, or about 50 billion yen ($330 million), to be globally competitive.

That, however, is still considered expensive, and MHI officials say they hope to achieve better price competitiveness after about a dozen launches.

Niitsu said there are other ways to be competitive, for example by providing flexible launch schedules and being better at meeting clients’ needs.

In January, a H-2A rocket successfully placed a spy satellite into orbit, and days later JAXA’s unmanned spacecraft SLIM made the world’s first “pinpoint” moon landing.

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

After more than 70 successful flights, a broken rotor ended the remarkable and groundbreaking Ingenuity helicopter mission on Mars. Now, NASA is considering how a larger, more capable helicopter could be an airborne geologist on the Red Planet. For the past several years scientists and engineers have been working on the concept, proposing a six-rotor hexacopter that would be about the size of the Perseverance rover.

Called the Mars Science Helicopter (MSH), it would not only serve as an aerial scout for a future rover, but more importantly, it could also carry up to 5 kg (11 lbs) of science instruments aloft in the thin Martian atmosphere and land in terrain that a rover can’t reach.

A new paper presented at the March 2024 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference outlines the geology work that such a helicopter could accomplish.

The paper, “Unraveling the Origin and Petrology of the Martian Crust with a Helicopter,” notes there are several outstanding questions about the makeup and history of Mars’ surface, especially with recent discoveries of unexpected dichotomies in the composition of basaltic rocks. In observations from the Mars rovers and orbital spacecraft, some regions appear to have been influenced by water while some have not.

“Up to last decade, we thought that magmatic rocks were only basaltic on Mars,” said Valerie Payré from the University of Iowa, the paper’s lead author. “But with recent rover and orbital measurements, we observed that there is a wide diversity of magmatic rocks similar to what we see on Earth.”

Payré explained via email that there are rocks on Mars with elevated silica concentrations called felsic rocks—feldspar and silicate—that are rich in elements and were not expected to be found on the Martian surface.

“We measured these with the Curiosity rover and have some hints of where there might be others using orbital measurements,” Payré said. “However, close-up images (millimetric scale) and composition analyses are lacking from the orbital dataset to know if these felsic rocks are widespread on Mars or just at a few locations. This is yet highly important to understand what the crust of Mars is made of and if it is similar to Earth’s crust, which has implications regarding the formation of the planet and even past climate.”

Payré and her team feel that a helicopter would be perfect to explore places where a rover could never traverse, such as terrains that are too high in altitude, since landing there would require too much fuel.

The instruments they propose include a miniaturized visible and near-infrared (VNIR) spectrometer for small scale mineralogical mapping and a small Laser Induced Breakdown Spectrometer (LIBS) with a micro-imager, an instrument similar to the ChemCam laser instrument on both the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. In their paper, the team writes that a helicopter with these instruments could travel kilometers to detect promising felsic terrains, and measure their composition at a micron scale.

“We could fly over these possible felsic terrains and look at their minerals using a visible/near infrared spectrometer, land on locations of interest, take close-up images, and measure the compositions of these rocks with the LIBS,” Payré said. “We could finally know what Mars’ crust is, and better constrain how it formed.”

There could also be an onboard a magnetometer, which measures magnetic field anomalies, to better understand how Mars’ magnetic field operated, which is still uncertain. Mars does not presently have a global magnetic field, but had one early in its lifetime.

“Such payload would finally enable us to better understand the past climate on Mars by measuring the composition and minerals of sedimentary rocks of various age,” Payré told Universe Today.

A conceptual design paper published in 2020 proposed a Mars hexacopter with a mass of about 31 kg (70 lbs) and a total diameter of just over 4 meters (13 feet). Each set of rotors would have blades about 0.64 meters (2 ft) long. The helicopter would be powered by a rechargeable solar cell. This would not only power the rotors, but the desired scientific instruments.

This helicopter could move as fast as 30 meters a second (60 mph) but also could hover over a spot for as long as five minutes. Engineers from Ames Research Center, the Jet Propulsion Lab and the University of Maryland wrote that MSH could fly with a range of up to 10 km (6.2 miles) per flight. With this speed and range, MSH could potentially cover as much ground in a few days as rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity have traversed in years.

“The fact that a helicopter can fly would facilitate the mission to visit to places that would be inaccessible for a rover, and we could access locations that we never imagined before,” Payré said.

Payré and team proposed several landing sites including Gale Crater Gale crater where evolved felsic rocks were found by the Curiosity Rover; the massive canyon of Valles Marineris, where orbital observations have revealed a deep crust with feldspar-bearing rocks; and Hellas basin, 2,300 km impact crater known to have layers of feldspar.

The moon is practically begging to be explored, and the momentum to do so is building. The Artemis Program’s effort to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the Apollo missions captures a lot of attention. But there are other efforts underway.

In 2023, the ESA put out a call for small lunar missions. The call was associated with their Terra Novae exploration program, which will advance the ESA’s exploration of the solar system with robotic scouts and precursor missions. “Humankind will benefit from the new discoveries, ambitions, science, inspiration, and challenges,” the ESA explains on their Terra Novae website.

Terra Novae has several goals, one of which is to “Land multiple scientific payloads on the surface of the moon, prospecting for the presence of water and other volatile materials that will both reveal its history and help prepare sustainable exploration by locally sourced space resources.”

In response to the ESA’s call, a team of European researchers have proposed the LunarLeaper. The LunarLeaper is a hopping robot that would visit a lunar skylight, a collapsed part of a lunar lava tube. The robot would give us our first look at the lunar subsurface and the lava tubes.

There are good reasons to explore these lava tubes. The lunar surface is exposed to solar and cosmic radiation without the benefit of a protective atmosphere or magnetosphere like Earth. Astronauts could shelter in these tubes inside habitat modules. Several meters of rock overhead would provide protection from radiation and from the moon’s temperature swings. There could be laboratory modules and other modules as well. The tubes, if suitable, could shelter an entire base.

The other reason is scientific. These tubes are a window into the moon’s volcanic past. They’re a record of the magnitude and timing of volcanic activity.

The LunarLeaper is a ~10 kg (22 lbs) leaping robot with three legs. It’s based on the ETH SpaceHopper design which has been refined over four years of development. SpaceHopper is designed to visit asteroids with much weaker gravity than the moon, but the design can be adapted to work on the lunar surface.

The LunarLeaper team proposes a mission to the Marius Hills region. It’s a region in Oceanus Procellarum, a vast lunar mare on the near side of the moon. It’s a volcanic region covered in basalt floods from ancient volcanic activity. Marius Hills is named after the 41 km (25 mi) diameter crater Marius and is littered with volcanic features like rilles, domes, and cones.

The particular feature of interest in Marius Hills is the Marius Hills Pit (MHP), a collapsed skylight granting access into what might be an extensive lunar lava tube system. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured an image of the intriguing opening featured in the lead image. That’s where the LunarLeaper would do its work.

The Leaper would move around the rim of the MHP, capturing images of the pit walls and the floor. It would also use its suite of scientific instruments to gather pertinent data. Its instrument suite would include a gravimeter, a ground-penetrating radar, a dedicated science camera, and hopefully a spectrometer.

The LunarLeaper team outlines four questions the mission hopes to answer:

1. Is there a lava tube under Marius Hills? It certainly appears like there could be, but there’s no confirmation yet, and only a mission to the region can answer the question for certain.
2. Could astronauts use the tube for habitation? If it’s stable enough they could, and that’s something the LunarLeaper can figure out.
3. How were the tube and pit formed? What volcanic processes were at work? There are lava tubes on Earth. Did they form the same way on the moon? LunarLeaper can examine the layers on the walls of the tube for clues.
4. What’s contained in the regolith outside the tube? Are there ancient pieces of paleoregolith underground near the pit? Surface lunar rocks are degraded and eroded, but buried regolith could hold clues to the early solar system, including the sun.

Though there are hundreds of similar pits on the moon, MHP appears to be the most promising one. It’s been imaged from different illumination angles, and the imaging supports the idea that a tube extends underground beyond the skylight. Since the Marius Hills is filled with volcanic features, an extended tube isn’t unlikely.

The LunarLeaper would travel around the surface near the MHP and use its ground-penetrating radar to uncover the extent of the tube system. Other proposed missions are aimed at lava tubes and skylights, but they tend to be more complex, larger, and more expensive. As a 10 kg hopping robot, LunarLeaper would be a wise choice for the first mission to characterize the MHP prior to sending a more complex, thorough mission.

When it comes to exploring the pit, the LunarLeaper has a significant advantage over a wheeled rover. Wheeled rovers select routes based on obstacle avoidance. They have some strict limitations when it comes to the terrain they can safely and effectively traverse.

However, the rim of the MHP is expected to be challenging. There is likely complex terrain and steep slopes right near the opening. Getting as close as possible to the rim will give better imaging and science results. The LunarLeaper has an advantage over wheeled rovers in this type of terrain, though the tradeoff is its much lighter payload.

However, as a first step in exploring the MHP, the LunarLeaper has some clear advantages.

The LunarLeaper team says that the small robot could be delivered to the lunar surface by one of the several small landers being designed by different companies. They peg the cost at about 50 million euros. They also say that this type of legged jumping robot could be a big part of future space exploration and that their mission, if chosen, could be a key development for the future.

The dust of comets fills the space between the planets, collectively called the zodiacal cloud. Still, severe breakdown has reduced that dust in size so much that it now scatters sunlight efficiently, causing the faint glow in the night sky known as the “zodiacal light.”

It was long thought that high-speed collisions pulverized the comet ejecta, but now a 45-member team of researchers reports, in a paper published online in the journal Icarus this week, that heat is to blame.

“Comets eject most debris as large sand-grain to pebble-sized particles, called meteoroids, that move in meteoroid streams and cause the visible meteors in our meteor showers,” says Dr. Peter Jenniskens, meteor astronomer at the SETI Institute. “In contrast, the zodiacal cloud is mostly composed of particles the size of tobacco smoke that even radars have difficulty detecting as meteors.”

Why do pebbles pulverize after they leave the comet?

“Meteor showers show us this loss of pebbles over time because older showers tend to contain fewer bright meteors than young showers,” said Jenniskens. “We set out to investigate what is responsible.”

Jenniskens leads a NASA-sponsored global network called “CAMS” that monitors the night sky for meteors with low-light video security cameras. Most co-authors on the paper are the researchers and citizen scientists who built and operated the 15 CAMS camera networks in ten countries.

“We developed software that detects meteors in videos recorded from different locations and then triangulates their trajectory in the atmosphere,” said detection specialist Peter S. Gural. “Meteors arriving from the same direction each day belong to a meteor shower.”

Nightly maps showing from what direction those meteors arrive at Earth are at the website: After 13 years of observations, the combined maps were recently published as a book, “Atlas of Earth’s Meteor Showers,” an encyclopedia of information on each known meteor shower.

“As part of this work, we determined the age of meteor showers from how much they had dispersed,” says Stuart Pilorz of the SETI Institute, “and then examined how rapidly they were losing their large meteoroids compared to the smaller ones.”

To investigate what is responsible, the team examined how close those streams came to the sun. If collisions were to blame, then the pebbles were expected to be destroyed faster directly proportionally to their proximity to the sun.

“Because there is more comet dust closer to the sun, we had expected collisions there would pulverize the pebbles that much faster,” says Jenniskens. “Instead, we found that the pebbles survived better than expected.”

The research team concluded that, instead, the pebbles are destroyed proportional to the peak temperature they reach along their orbit. Thermal stresses are likely to blame for breaking up the large meteoroids near Earth and all the way to the orbit of Mercury, while deep inside the orbit of Mercury, the particles are heated so much that they fall apart from losing material.

“Here at Earth, we sometimes see that process in action when in a short time of say 10 seconds, we detect ten or twenty meteors in part of the sky, a meteor cluster, the result of a meteoroid having fallen apart by thermal stresses just before entering Earth’s atmosphere,” says Jenniskens.

The paper is published in the journal Icarus.

Using observations made with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) a study led from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) has confirmed that the asteroid 2023 FW14, discovered last year, is accompanying the red planet in its journey round the sun, ahead of Mars and in the same orbit.

With this new member, the group of Trojans that accompany Mars has increased in number to 17. But it shows differences in its orbit and chemical composition which may indicate that it is a captured asteroid, of a primitive type. The results are published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A team from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) has observed and described for the first time the object 2023 FW14, a Trojan asteroid that shares its orbit with Mars. After Jupiter, the red planet has the largest number of known Trojans, totaling 17 with this new identification.

The Trojan asteroids are small bodies in the solar system that share the orbit of a planet, occupying one of the points of stable equilibrium called the Lagrange points, situated 60º in front of (L₄) and 60º behind (L₅) the planet.

Although the majority of the Martian asteroids seem to have accompanied the planet since the epoch of its formation, 2023 FW14 arrived at its Trojan trajectory around a million years ago, and it may leave it in some 10 million years, according to the numerical results obtained by the study.

“While the orbital evolution of the 16 previously known Trojans shows long-term stability, the orbit of the new one is not stable,” explains Raul de la Fuente Marcos, a researcher in the Department of Earth Science and Astrophysics at the UCM, who has led the study. “There are two possibilities for its origin: it could be a fragment of the Trojan 1999 UJ7, or it may have been captured from the population of asteroids close to the Earth that cross the orbit of Mars.”

The spectrum obtained with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTCI) at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the Island of La Palma has allowed the researchers to determine the chemical composition of 2023 FW14, showing new differences compared to the rest of the Martian Trojans.

“Although the spectrum of 2023 FW14 obtained with the GTC is somewhat different from that of the other L₄ Trojan 1999 UJ7, both of them belong to the same composition group, they are asteroids of a primitive type, in contrast to the L₅ Trojans, all of them rocky and rich in silicates,” says Julia de León, an IAC researcher, and co-author of the article.

Increasing the number of known Martian Trojans allows researchers to deepen their understanding of these objects, whose existence was first predicted from mathematical calculations. “Studying real Trojans rather than only those predicted mathematically allows us to test the reliability of our theoretical models,” concludes de la Fuente Marcos.