Category Archives: Phys.org

From the mountains of Turin to the deserts of Arizona, a core element of Gateway, humanity’s first lunar space station, is now one step closer to the moon. As seen in this April 1, 2025, photo, HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost), Gateway’s first pressurized module and one of its foundational elements, recently arrived in Gilbert, Arizona, following its fabrication by Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy.

A recent study published in the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing highlights how China’s FengYun-3 (FY-3) meteorological satellites have improved global tracking of land surface temperature (LST) throughout daily cycles.

A day at Uranus just got a little longer.

With their ability to store carbon, forests are often considered the lungs of the Earth, but they are vulnerable to the world’s ills, too. A new study, using NASA laser technology from the International Space Station, reveals the impact of climate change on global tropical forests with greater depth and breadth than ever before.

A mission will deliver rock and soil from Mars to laboratories on Earth in the 2030s. Mars Sample Return (MSR) is led by NASA with participation from the European Space Agency (ESA). The mission will allow scientists to use the best laboratory instruments on Earth to determine whether Mars hosted microbial life billions of years ago.

For the first time since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight in 1963, a spacecraft will enter orbit with only women aboard. Blue Origin’s all-female space flight crew, which includes popstar Katy Perry, is set to take off this spring.

El Niño, a climate troublemaker, has long been one of the largest drivers of variability in the global climate. Every few years, the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean seesaws between warm (El Niño) and cold (La Niña) phases. This reshuffles rainfall patterns, unleashing floods, droughts and storms thousands of miles from the Pacific origin.

This week, researchers reported on nine rivers and lakes in the Americas that defy hydrologic expectations. Geologists report that Earth’s first crust probably had chemical features similar to today’s continental crust. And engineers advanced quantum technology by merging two exotic, lab-synthesized materials into an artificial structure, atom by atom.

The subject of today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week is the stunning spiral galaxy NGC 5530. NGC 5530 is situated 40 million light-years away in the constellation Lupus (The Wolf). This galaxy is classified as a “flocculent” spiral, meaning that its spiral arms are patchy and indistinct.

In anticipation of the upcoming 35th anniversary of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, ESA/Hubble is kicking off the celebrations with a new image of the star cluster NGC 346, featuring new data and processing techniques. This prolific star factory is in the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the largest of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies.

Turns out, it’s as tough to drop inward into the inner solar system, as it is to head outward. The problem stems from losing momentum from a launch starting point on Earth. It can take missions several years and planetary flybys before capture and arrival in orbit around Mercury or Venus.

Multiple plans exist to explore Mars in the coming decades using robotic and crewed missions. The ultimate goal of these missions is to determine whether human beings could actually live there someday. This requires access to building materials, water, cutting-edge manufacturing technology, and closed-loop habitation systems with bioregenerative life support systems (BLSS). Basically, future settlers will need to create conditions that mimic Earth’s self-sustaining ecological systems—essentially, we need to “take Earth with us” to other planets.

A pair of planetary scientists at the University of California, working with a colleague from the California Institute of Technology, has discovered that a massive amount of ammonia is churned up and down in Jupiter’s atmosphere during major storms. In their study published in Science Advances, Chris Moeckel, Imke de Pater, and Huazhi Ge analyzed data from multiple sources focused on a major storm that occurred on Jupiter starting in 2016.

Honda will partner with US companies to test in orbit a renewable energy technology it hopes to one day deploy on the moon’s surface, the Japanese carmaker announced Friday.

University of Warwick astronomers have discovered an extremely rare, high-mass, compact binary star system only ~150 light years away. These two stars are on a collision course to explode as a type 1a supernova, appearing 10 times brighter than the moon in the night sky.

A huge asteroid that was briefly feared to strike Earth now has a nearly 4% chance of smashing into the moon, according to new data from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Though wildly different in so many ways, Earth and Saturn’s moon Titan have something important in common. Among all the objects in the solar system, they’re the only two with liquids on their surfaces. There are parallels in how the liquids move in cycles on both worlds and a new mission proposal outlines how we can understand Titan better by studying these parallel processes.

A Michigan State University researcher saw X-rays coming from a black hole using the NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory telescope.

Sometimes, the best way to learn how to do something is just to do it. That is especially true if you’re learning to do something using a specific methodology. And in some cases, the outcome of your efforts is something that’s interesting to other people.

How can Uranus be used to indirectly study its moons and identify if they possess subsurface oceans? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated using passive radar sounding methods from Uranus to study its five largest moons: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of Uranus and its largest moons despite a spacecraft not currently visiting Uranus.