Space.com

China's moon exploration program is readying an ambitious robotic mission, one composed of an orbiter, a lander, a rover, a hopper, and a wide range of international experiments including a U.S.-supported payload.

In April of this year, Chang'e-7 hardware was transported to the Wenchang launch site, targeting an Aug. 24 (Beijing time) launch atop a Long March 5 Y14 rocket. The lander's destination is the edge of Shackleton Crater in the lunar south pole region.

After launch, the Chang'e-7 orbiter will spend several months orbiting the moon before releasing its lander for an attempted touchdown near the end of the year. While Chang'e-7 will carry out ambitious, groundbreaking lunar science, it will also serve to lay the groundwork for the first Chinese human landing on the lunar surface by 2030.

James Head is a leading moon scientist at the department of geological sciences at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He says China's upcoming moon launch will set a new benchmark for lunar science voyages.

"Chang'e-7 is the most ambitious, comprehensive, and complex robotic lunar mission ever attempted by any nation or entity," Head told Space.

Likewise, Zhang Jingbo, a spokesman for the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) agency, said earlier this year that the mission will "fully leverage the technological expertise and practical experience accumulated over decades" to "spare no effort to strive for the goal of achieving the first Chinese landing on the moon by 2030."

Pockets of water ice

Once unleashed from the Chang'e-7 lander, the hopper is slated to "jump" from sunlit areas to shadowed craters in a quest to find pockets of water ice. The hopper utilizes active shock-absorption technology to safely land on slopes. The lander will also deploy China's inaugural deep-space "landmark image navigation" system.

While scientists around the globe believe there's water ice on the moon, said Ye Peijian, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, no one has definitively found and fully evaluated that resource as yet.

"Now China is going to look for it, [...] And we're using many methods, from searching the surface to exploring inside craters," Ye told China Central Television (CCTV).

The rim of Shackleton crater; the lunar south pole is located on the rim near the upper right corner of the image. (Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)Back-to-back duties

The Chang'e-7 mission will adopt an integrated exploration approach, added CCTV, combining orbiting, landing, roving, and hopping, to survey the environment and resources of the lunar south pole, while also carrying out international cooperation.

Moreover, a Chang'e-8 mission is set for around 2028, designed to test technologies for building habitats using lunar soil.

Taken together, the two robotic projects  — Chang'e-7 and Chang'e-8  — are assigned duties to assist in orchestrating China's planned, multi-phased, International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

The combination of the Chang'e-7 lunar probe and the Long March-5 Y14 carrier rocket at the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on Aug. 19, 2026 in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China. (Image credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images)Variety of instruments

Chang'e-7 mission hardware is outfitted with a variety of instruments from other nations and organizations, such as:

• On the lander, a Russian Academy of Sciences' PmL-Ch7 suite to detect lunar dust and a Langmuir probe to gauge the temperature and density of nearby plasma.
• An Italian laser retroreflector array on the lander is provided by the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati.
• A small, state-of-the-art, wide-field optical telescope mounted on the lander developed by the International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA Hawaii) and the Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong (HKU-LSR).
• LunaHcam, a camera attached to the Chang'e-7 orbiter and jointly developed by the Bahrain Space Agency and the Egyptian Space Agency to churn out high-resolution hyperspectral images of the moon's surface.
• Moon Aiming Thai-Chinese Hodoscope (MATCH) onboard the orbiter and developed by the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand. It will assess high-energy particles related to space weather and cosmic radiation tossed out by the sun.
• Moon-based Dual-channel Earth Radiation Spectrometer on the orbiter has been provided by Switzerland's Physical Meteorological Observatory.

Compact lunar camera

The ILO-C instrument from ILOA Hawaii and the Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong will be housed directly on the Chang'e-7 lunar lander, bound for the illuminated rim of Shackleton Crater.

"The HKU Lab for Space Research is proud to partner with ILOA for this historic lunar mission and we look forward to working with them to maximize the scientific return this exceptional wide field optical lunar camera will deliver," said Quentin Parker, professor emeritus of the University of Hong Kong.

Through visible color imaging, the ILO-C camera project aims to spark public interest in lunar exploration, astronomy, and space science, Parker said, thereby laying a social foundation for future lunar science missions.

Moon-based vantage point

Operating in the extreme lunar environment, the compact camera will conduct first-ever astronomical color imagery from the moon, said Elisa Perednia, President and Chair of ILOA. The camera is designed to capture unprecedented wide-field, full color imagery of the Milky Way's Galactic plane from a stable, moon-based vantage point, she said.

One sad note: The camera onboard China's moon lander was pioneered by ILOA's founding director Steve Durst who passed earlier this year. He was a visionary leader that worked with Chinese aerospace representatives since the 1980s.

The Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics & Electricity (BISME) built the camera to ILO-C team member specifications.

"We are proud to have joined the mission and to help realize Steve's wonderful vision," Parker at HKU-LSR told Space.com.

We'll have to wait a bit longer for a highly anticipated Starship milestone, it appears.

On Aug. 4, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said the company aimed to attempt the first-ever catch of Starship's upper stage on the vehicle's next test flight, which is tentatively targeted for late August.

But that doesn't seem to be in the cards anymore. "Looks like we will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months," Musk said early this morning (Aug. 20) via X, the social media platform he bought in 2022.

Starship's Ship upper stage floats in the Indian Ocean after surviving the vehicle's Flight 13, which launched on July 24, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX via X)

SpaceX has high hopes for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It consists of a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship.

Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Rapid reuse will be enabled by landings directly on the launch mount, with the aid of the launch tower's "chopstick" arms.

SpaceX has already pulled off such chopstick catches with Super Heavy on three of Starship's 13 suborbital test flights to date. And two of those missions featured a used Super Heavy: Flight 9 used the same booster as Flight 7, and Flight 11 employed the one from Flight 8.

SpaceX has not yet tried to catch Ship, however, because it's a tougher ask: The upper stage comes back down to Earth from much greater heights, and at much higher speeds, than Super Heavy.

But the company has made progress toward this goal recently. For example, on Flight 13, which launched on July 24, Ship survived reentry through Earth's atmosphere and splashed down in its target zone, a patch of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

The vehicle even remained intact after toppling over, a feat none of its predecessors had pulled off. SpaceX subsequently towed Ship to Christmas Island and will study it in depth to inform future iterations of the vehicle.

This encouraging performance led to optimism about a coming tower-catch try for Ship.

"I'd say things look very good, and that's why we, assuming we receive regulatory approval to do so, will attempt to catch the Ship with the tower on the next flight, which is tentatively scheduled for the end of this month," Musk said on Aug. 4, during SpaceX's first call with investors as a public company.

As that quote indicates, however, a Ship tower catch is not entirely up to SpaceX. It also requires approval from regulators — specifically, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. It's possible that such approval has not yet been secured for Flight 14, and that's why the timeline has shifted.

After all, Musk has continued to voice confidence in Ship's abilities.

"If there had been a tower out to sea where we practiced landing the ship, it would have been caught," he added in this morning's X post. "First reflight of the ship will be either end of this year or early next. That will be a fork in the road of history for consciousness reaching the stars."

Even without a Ship catch attempt, Flight 14 should still feature some exciting action. During the earnings call, Musk said that Starship will go orbital on Flight 14, something it has never done before.

Microbes from Earth might survive the harsh surface of the moon, albeit in a state of suspended animation, a new study finds.

Previous research suggested the surface of the moon was too harsh for microbes to survive. Specifically, a 2019 study found ultraviolet rays and heat from the sun are the greatest barriers for microbial life on the lunar surface.

However, this prior work did not account for the shelter that hills and valleys might supply on the moon. These could prove especially significant at the lunar poles, where the sun never climbs high in the sky, leading to permanently shadowed regions that can host ice — and perhaps more.

In the new study, researchers analyzed three kinds of bacteria and two kinds of fungus. These are all commonly found on crewed space missions, and include microorganisms that prior work discovered were especially durable in the harsh conditions of space. Previous research found these lifeforms are resistant to vacuum, cold and high-energy particles.

The scientists compared previously compiled survivability data of these microbes with lunar maps that captured ultraviolet and heat readings on the moon's surface. They found that both lunar poles likely have areas where microbes could survive, albeit in a state of suspended animation known as cryptobiosis in which they could not move or grow unless more hospitable conditions appeared.

Microbes might not need much in the way of shelter on the moon. "Even a bootprint or a rover's tread may create a habitable area," study co-author Prabal Saxena, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told Space.com.

NASA's Artemis III mission is planned to be the first time humans will explore the lunar south pole. "Our findings show that we need to be even more thoughtful about the materials that we might unintentionally take with us when we are exploring space, and the impacts that we might have," study co-author Heather Graham, an organic geochemist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com.

In addition to the possibility that missions to the moon might bring microorganisms there, the scientists added it might be possible that ancient cosmic impacts might have blasted rocks bearing microbes off Earth that could have landed on the moon. "The moon might be like Earth's freezer, preserving really interesting bits of evidence of Earth's past if they landed at the moon's poles," Saxena said.

Future experiments may test just how well microbes of many kinds might survive on the moon, Saxena said. "We have this great opportunity to really think about the limits of life and how resilient it is even in incredibly extreme environments," he said.

All in all, "the moon is a really diverse and interesting body, and the lunar poles are really unique regions in terms of how they can trap volatiles like water, and the ability to trap life," Saxena said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 19 in the journal Science Advances.

LOS ANGELES – On a Saturday evening in Los Angeles, I found myself watching acclaimed actor Elizabeth Banks sing Tom Petty songs along with her fellow actors while writer/director David Wain played the drums. This incredible, bizarre performance celebrated the 25th anniversary of the raunchy, summer camp cult classic "Wet Hot American Summer." But do you remember that it's actually a space movie?

This movie — the debut feature film from co-creators David Wain and Michael Showalter — follows the events of "Camp Firewood," a sleepaway summer camp set in the summer of 1981. It has a cast chock-full of now-A-list actors, including Banks, Bradley Cooper, Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler and so many more. Looking back, it's almost baffling how star-studded the cast really is.

Campy in every sense of the word, the movie manages to balance vulgar jokes with some serious heart. And while the off-color comedy was infamously a box office bomb, this heart has cemented its status as a beloved cult classic, and watching it has become as time-honored a tradition as summer camp itself.

I am personally biased toward this film, as my teenage summers were spent as a camp counselor and the movie hits that perfect, nostalgic sweet spot. But when I sat down to watch the film again on Aug. 8 at an outdoor anniversary screening, I realized it had been many years since I'd actually seen it.

And while I remembered the warm, summer camp vibes, somehow I had completely forgotten something: The movie hinges on the plot that a piece of Skylab (yes, that Skylab) is falling to Earth, and a nearby, vacationing astrophysicist teams up with the nerdy kids at camp to build a homegrown device to try and stop it.

The strangest part? In 1979, Skylab did fall back to Earth, and a couple of pieces actually survived the trip (just not at Camp Firewood).

An outdoor screening of "Wet Hot American Summer" for its 25th anniversary. (Image credit: Chelsea Gohd/Space.com)

At its core, this beloved camp movie that I used to watch after camp with my fellow counselors (at our own camp, Summer Parks) is … science fiction. It might seem like a b-plot, but if you find yourself rewatching the film, you might be surprised at how much of a space movie it really is.

The first inklings of this emerge when camp director Beth (Janeane Garofalo) meets astrophysicist Professor Henry Newman (David Hyde Pierce), who is vacationing in a cabin near the camp. She asks if he might come to camp and teach some of the kids about space. And while he at first declines, he soon decides to show up at camp to spend time with some of the kids and chat about outer space.

As other camp hijinks are happening, we occasionally cut back to this group of "indoor kids" in the woods, pretending rocks are planets, having a great time. But at some point, it's revealed that the camp is in grave danger. Not only is a piece of Skylab, the first U.S. space station, falling, but it's headed right for camp! In fact, it's headed right for the talent show that's taking place on the last night of camp (of course).

A behind-the-scenes photo of some of the actors of "Wet Hot American Summer" posing with the Skylab model on set, captured by actor Zak Orth. (Image credit: Zak Orth)

Henry and his merry band of science-obsessed campers are quick to act, and they work together to cobble together a makeshift Skylab tracking device. But to transform the device so it can divert Skylab, they need to generate random numbers between one and 20. Thank goodness one of the campers just so happens to be carrying a D20 die.

In the end, Skylab does crash-land into camp, but it narrowly misses the talent show, and no one gets hurt. Did the device work? Did another camper demonstrating their wind-generating superpowers at the talent show secretly help out? Or was their Skylab tracking wrong all along?

After camp is finally over for the summer, we get to see the aftermath as campers walk out to their rides home past a giant hunk of the Skylab space station jutting out of the grass.

It's a fun easter egg to see Skylab crashing to Earth in a campy summer camp flick, and during a panel ahead of the screening, the cast and crew revealed that it was a lot of fun for them, too.

According to the panelists, which included Wain, Banks, Joe Lo Truglio (who plays Neil in the film), and Marguerite Moreau (who plays Katie), everyone on the set was taking turns getting their picture taken with Skylab. This is evident in the image above, snapped and shared with us by actor Zak Orth, who plays J.J.

Skylab orbiting above Earth. (Image credit: NASA)

While there were no reported injuries or property damage from the debris, roughly 26 tons of material fell to Earth, some of it surviving the trip and landing in Western Australia.

So in an alternate version of history where Camp Firewood is located in a remote area of Australia, this plot could have been more than science fiction.

Want to relive the sci-fi summer camp glory? To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Wet Hot American Summer is returning to select theaters from Aug. 14-21. If you miss that, you can also buy or rent it on Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV.

When the 11,000-ton cruise ship Le Boréal set sail from Nice, France, on Thursday, Aug. 6, its 205 passengers and 136 crew members began a voyage whose success would depend not only on careful planning, but also on the ship's ability to outmaneuver clouds at the last critical hour.

The ship is owned and operated by the French cruise line Compagnie du Ponant. This eclipse cruise was the result of more than a year's planning by Ponant, and most of those who signed on were there specifically to witness the celestial spectacle; that shared purpose heightened the drama of the eclipse itself.

This was going to be a sunset eclipse, with the sun no more than three degrees above the horizon. To picture that height, make a fist and hold it out at arm's length. Place the bottom of your fist on the horizon; the top of your fist measures about ten degrees. During totality, the sun would appear only about one-third of a fist-width above the horizon. Even if the sky overhead was clear, clouds could still gather near the horizon, leaving open the possibility that the sun might be hidden at the critical moment.

I was on board Le Boréal as both a lecturer and the ship's onboard meteorologist. The main advantage of using a cruise ship to view an eclipse is its two-dimensional mobility, allowing it to maneuver around potential cloud cover. In practice, that meant working with Captain Mathieu Tsingrilaras to position Le Boréal on eclipse day in a location free of any clouds that might otherwise obscure the total eclipse.

Although the Iberian Peninsula and the adjacent waters of the Balearic Sea — a body of water between mainland Spain's eastern coast and the Balearic Islands — typically enjoy warm, dry, clear weather in August, the circumstances of this eclipse could still prove problematic.

The cruise ship Le Boréal. (Image credit: Joe Rao)

Also serving as a lecturer for the cruise was Serge Brunier, a well-known French photographer, reporter, and writer who has specialized in popular depictions of astronomical subjects. He is also the co-author of the beautiful coffee-table book, Glorious Eclipses.

Serge would accommodate the French-speaking passengers onboard. Early in the cruise, as we were speaking with each other, a French passenger came up to Serge and asked, "Le temps sera-t-il dégagé pour l'éclipse?" ("Will we have clear weather for the eclipse?"). Serge nodded toward me and replied: "Il faudra demander à Joe ; c'est lui qui s'occupe de la météo." ("You will have to ask Joe; he is in charge of the weather.")

Our itinerary took us to many different places during our eight-day cruise, including two towns in Corsica (Calvi and Bonifacio), the French cities of Marseille and Port-Vendres as well as Spain where we stopped at Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca in the Balearic Islands. Through it all, we experienced weather that was mainly sunny, very warm and quite humid. An upper-level ridge of high pressure acted as a heat dome over much of Europe.

Weather threat on eclipse day

The first warning came on Aug. 10, when a minor disturbance rippled through the heat ridge and produced widespread clouds, showery rains and thunderstorms across eastern Spain, spilling into the eclipse zone over the adjacent Balearic Sea. Had the eclipse taken place that day, no amount of mobility would have brought us a clear view. Fortunately, the disturbance quickly moved east, allowing high pressure to build back over the region.

By eclipse day, Aug. 12, conditions appeared to have turned in our favor. The day began beautifully sunny and continued that way into the afternoon. Our ship was docked at Palma de Mallorca, then set sail at 4 p.m. Central European Summer Time (CEST) for our preselected viewing location, heading west-northwest along the center line of the path of totality.

Shortly after departure, images from EUMETSAT, a geostationary weather satellite looking down from 22,000 miles (35,400 km) above Europe, revealed the problem we had been trying to avoid.

A large convective cloud — formed when warm, damp air rises into colder air above — began to rapidly evolve over part of Spain's coastline just inland from the Gulf of Valencia. It soon became apparent that if we did not alter course, that cloud would almost certainly block our view of the total eclipse.

After consulting with Captain Tsingrilaras, we decided to take Le Boréal southwest. That maneuver would cause the cloud, then directly ahead of us, to shift to the right of the sun as it descended the west-northwest sky, improving our odds for viewing totality.

That course correction became the turning point of the voyage.

Joe Rao (left) and Le Boréal captain Mathieu Tsingrilaras (right). (Image credit: Joe Rao)Totality at sea

As the eclipse began, other cruise ships apparently stayed their original courses. Le Boréal's course change, however, kept us clear of significant cloudiness, aside from a few thin clouds that occasionally crossed the sun but did little to hinder the show. At 7:37 p.m. CEST, the moon took its first bite out of the lower right limb of the sun.

At 8 p.m., Captain Tsingrilaras oriented Le Boréal, so that the back of the ship (the stern) faced directly toward the sun. Crowds gathered on the top three decks of the ship, observing the sun through special eclipse glasses that had been distributed the previous evening.

Passengers aboard Le Boréal prepare for the moment of totality. (Image credit: Joe Rao)

Moments before totality, when only a sliver of sun remained, I told passengers that I had been asked since the start of the day about what our chances were for seeing the total eclipse. "I think our chances of seeing it are now 100 percent!" That comment was met with a resounding cheer.

What was particularly striking was the approach of the moon's shadow; a diffuse darkening accompanied by a rapid west-to-east sweep of darkness. The onset of totality was marked by a dazzling diamond ring effect which lasted a couple of seconds, then a circular corona appeared around the darkened solar disk; it appeared somewhat yellowish in color as opposed to pearly white, likely due to a layer of haze near the horizon.

A total eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026 as seen from the cruise ship Le Boréal near the Balearic Islands. (Image credit: Joe Rao)

An unusually large and brilliant red prominence, readily visible even with the unaided eye, appeared at the 9 o'clock position. Because the sun was so low in the sky, the famous moon illusion caused it to appear especially large. This only added to the beauty of the spectacle.

Totality lasted 95 seconds. Even at its midpoint the overall light never became so dim that the second hand on a watch was hard to see. The only other object that was plainly visible in the sky was Venus, well off to the upper left of the eclipsed sun. The air temperature did not change much, probably due to the thermal inertia of the surrounding water.

The terminal diamond ring was perhaps even more stunning than the first. The corona could be kept in view for several seconds by blocking out the emerging crescent of sunlight with one's thumb. It seems that no shadow bands were observed either before or after totality.

A 'diamond ring' effect near the end of a total eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026 as seen from the cruise ship Le Boréal near the Balearic Islands. (Image credit: Joe Rao)

As the sun gradually emerged from behind the moon, it sank lower in the sky and was still about two-thirds covered when it took on the shape of an orange-red shark fin disappearing beyond the horizon — a fitting final image for a spectacular eclipse at sea.

A partial solar eclipse following a total eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026 as seen from the cruise ship Le Boréal near the Balearic Islands. (Image credit: Joe Rao)Nothing succeeds like success

In the end, Le Boréal's successful eclipse viewing was a reminder that even the most carefully planned astronomical event still depends on swift judgment and adaptability. By combining advance preparation with a timely course correction, the voyage transformed a looming weather threat into an unforgettable view of totality.

I would also like to thank my wife, Renate, who accompanied me on this amazing adventure and for reading so much for reading my first draft of this article and to my daughter Maria and Scott Zimmerman for assisting me with my video and image selections.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

SPOILERS AHEAD! ANYONE YET TO WATCH "LEVEL-FIVE TRANSPORTER ACCIDENT" SHOULD PROCEED WITH CAUTION TO AVOID VIOLATING TEMPORAL PRIME DIRECTIVES.

Back in the late '70s and early '80s, A-list stars were queuing up to guest on "The Muppet Show". Over five glorious seasons, the likes of Steve Martin, Diana Ross and Roger Moore were happy to have themselves upstaged by Kermit the Frog and his legendary felt ensemble. Luke Skywalker, R2-D2, C-3PO and Chewbacca even went on a crossover adventure with the show's resident astro-swine, those famous "Pigs in Space".

Now, the Enterprise's very own Mr Spock gets to join this select group by performing alongside the Jim Henson Company's elite puppeteers in "Level-Five Transporter Accident", the latest episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds". And we're delighted to report that the results are every bit as sensational, inspirational, celebrational, and downright Muppetational as anyone could possibly have hoped for.

It's important to reiterate that this episode makes negligible logical or canonical sense. Even within "Star Trek"'s frequently loose interpretation of "science", the idea that Scotty's transporter experiments on family puppet Little Ricky (a slightly disturbing presence, it has to be said) might transform an entire crew into fabric and stuffing is rather outlandish. Even the writers acknowledge they've exceeded the plausibility threshold when they hint that the whole affair took place in Spock's head.

But frankly, who cares about logic or canon when the results are so much madcap fun?

Even though the puppet versions of the Enterprise crew aren't officially Muppets, they're undoubtedly cut from the same cloth as Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and the rest. Those extremely talented Henson designers have somehow managed to find the sweet spot between the characters' human incarnations and their hilarious felt forms, whether it's Captain Pike's gravity-defying hair or Scotty's Beaker-esque expression of perpetual concern. The cast also throw themselves into their voice performances, relishing the unashamed comedy opportunities and — to quote T'Pring — "hijinks" of their radically redesigned roles.

(Image credit: Paramount)

"We had to do the [voice work] twice because the first time it was just completely wrong," Pike star Anson Mount told SFX magazine. "When the producers got the cut, they were telling me, 'Just do more, just feel more!' I was like, 'What are you talking about?', but when they played the scenes I was like, 'Oh, I need to do what [the puppeteers] are doing'. I had to set aside my ego for a little bit and follow the puppeteer's cues a little bit more."

Putting these puppets on the actual Enterprise set, rather than a scaled-down comedy recreation, is part of the episode's genius. They're dealing with a ship that isn't built for their new forms, from chairs that are way too big to touchscreen controls that don't work with the three fingers and a thumb of a felt hand.

And then there's Pike's realization that their mission to repel the invading Orion will be dependent on answering a long-standing question from an Oscar-winning song: Are they men (and women), or are they Muppets?

(Image credit: Paramount)

The answer falls affirmatively in the latter camp. The finest puppet crew in Starfleet throw themselves at bad guys like the ragdolls they are, and stand on each other's shoulders to masquerade as human-sized crew members (very "Pinky and the Brain").

They also come to embrace the fact they're essentially immortal — a needle and thread is all Pelia needs to recover from being sliced in half, while this week's redshirt guest star doesn't seem particularly fussed about the giant hole blasted in his midriff. There's also a glorious opportunity for the crew to unleash their inner WALL-E by floating through space without a spaceship. Indeed, it seems that when you're a puppet, your prime directive is fun.

"Strange New Worlds" has, at times, been guilty of overdoing the gimmick episodes, from the one that crossed over with "Lower Decks" to the one that temporarily transformed four members of the crew into Vulcans. There was also, of course, "Subspace Rhapsody", the one where everyone made a song and dance out of everything, but that was essentially a less memorable "Trek" spin on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"'s classic musical outing, "Once More, With Feeling" — a tuneful frontier also explored by "Scrubs", "Fringe", "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and more.

(Image credit: Paramount)

The great thing about "Level-Five Transporter Accident", however, is that its felt-covered hijinks feel like "Strange New Worlds"' 'thing', rather than a retread of someone else's idea — as well as being a glorious excuse for the characters to embrace their inner Muppet, and literally have the stuffing knocked out of them.

And by advancing Spock's character arc and his relationship with T'Pring — this is presumably the first time Ethan Peck has ever been asked to kiss a puppet — it's also surprisingly pivotal to the show's continuity, just as "Once More…" was to "Buffy"'s sixth season.

It doesn't make a jot of sense, of course — and may just be a figment of Spock's overactive imagination — but it's also one of the most joyous, unashamedly fun episodes of "Star Trek" ever made. If there's any justice in the Alpha Quadrant, fans will be talking about this particular "Level-Five Transporter Accident" for years to come.

New episodes of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" debut on Paramount+ on Thursdays.

Europe's Mars Express orbiter has captured new, stunning imagery flying low over a geological region of the Red Planet shaped by ancient waterflow billions of years ago.

Mars Express launched in 2003 and is operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). It's equipped with the High Resolution Stereo Camera, which scans multiple points of perspective across regions of Mars' surface to create 3D color renderings. During a low pass on the spacecraft's highly elliptical orbit, Mars Express flew over the planet's Southern Highlands and Schiaparelli Crater — one of Mars' largest impact sites.

Schiaparelli Crater is located in a heavily cratered region of Mars' Southern Highlands, where a wetter and warmer climate supported water flows that shaped the planet's geography 3.7 billion years ago, according to ESA's Mars Express video. Schiaparelli measures more than 285 miles (460 km) across, and has a bit of fictional fame. The crater happens to be the site where astronaut character Mark Watney gets stranded in Andy Weir's "The Martian". It also shares a namesake with ESA's real-life Schiaparelli Mars lander, which crashed on Mars' surface in 2016 (but wasn't headed for Schiaparelli Crater).

The wide strip of land in Utopia Planitia imaged by Mars Express. The dark volcanic material is on the right, while grabens can be seen on the left. (Image credit: European Space Agency)

Both are named for Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910), who made detailed observations of Mars during the planet's closest approach in 1877. Schiaparelli created a map of "canali," Italian for "channels," he saw as dark lines across its surface, which he assumed were filled with water. That was later mistranslated by English-speaking astronomers as "canals," leading to speculation about intelligent life on Mars constructing artificial structures.

Though that hypothesis for Mars' surface features was disproven by later astronomers (to date, there have been no discoveries on Mars that suggest intelligent life once lived there), it has since been discovered that Mars once did have active bodies of water on its surface. Schiarapelli's contributions to the astronomical field were significant enough to land him the honor of a Martian crater in his name.

Despite its massive diameter, Schiaparelli is considered shallow compared to other Martian craters its size. It was once much deeper, but sediment deposited by wind and ancient water flows, volcanic eruptions and asteroid impact debris have filled the crater over the last several billion years.

In addition to showcasing Mars Express' new footage, the ESA video also provides an explanation for how the satellite uses its High Resolution Stereo Camera to observe five simultaneous viewing angles over a four-color spectrum as it flies low over the planet. The low-orbit passes allow Mars Express to capture swaths of 3D data that span hundreds to thousands of miles long and dozens of miles across. Those are then stitched together to form more complete regional maps, which can be added to scientists' increasingly complex model of the entire Martian globe.

The Richat Structure (also known as the "Eye of Africa" in Mauritania in Africa as photographed by NASA astronaut Jessica Meir from aboard the International Space Station. (Image credit: Jessica Meir/NASA)

The "Eye of Africa" swirls across Mauritania in a hypnotizing snapshot captured from space.

What is it?

A 25-mile-wide (40 kilometer-wide) circular structure made up of concentric ridged rings sticks up from the Earth in Mauritania, a country on the coast of northwestern Africa. While it might look like an elaborate, hand-carved piece of artwork, it's actually a natural geologic feature.

Formally known as the Richat Structure and nicknamed the "Eye of Africa," this geologic formation can be seen clearly from space.

The first time this feature was seen from space was in 1965 when NASA astronauts Ed White and James McDivitt photographed it during the Gemini IV mission.

61 years later, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir has photographed the feature from aboard the International Space Station where she is working as part of Expedition 75.

Why is it incredible?

Meir shared the photo of the structure on social media along with other photographs from that region.

"The Richat Structure (or Eye of Africa) in Mauritania is photographed from above by many astronauts, but something about the lighting and coloring on this day captured my artistic eye. This palette and textures of this region of Africa scream pure Earth Art, at least in my brain!" Meir said in the post where she shared her photos.

Amazingly, because of its massive size, this geologic feature is perhaps most clearly seen from space. While astronauts aboard the ISS are orbiting our planet from hundreds of miles away, theit vantage point actually allows them to see the full, expansive circles that make up the "Eye of Africa." And while we've been seeing it from space since 1965, the view really never gets old.

On Aug. 20, 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 2 spacecraft on a mission to explore the outer planets. Despite its name, this was the first of the two Voyager missions NASA launched that year.

Voyager 2: Sailing Among Giant Planets

Thanks to a rare alignment of the planets, NASA had the opportunity to send a spacecraft on an unprecedented journey to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.While Voyager 1 ended its planetary mission after Saturn, Voyager 2 completed a 12-year journey to Neptune. But they didn't stop there!

Voyager 1 left the solar system and entered interstellar space in 2012, and Voyager 2 followed suit in 2018. As it approaches 50 years of operation, the probe continues to return data from three functioning science instruments.

NASA's Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977. (Image credit: NASA)Why it mattered

Nearly half a century later, it remains the only spacecraft to visit all four has giants in our solar system, and the only spacecraft humanity has ever sent past Uranus and Neptune. Some of Voyager 2’s biggest surprises came from the moons orbiting those planets. Its images of Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, revealed active geyser-like plumes blasting nitrogen miles above the surface — making it one of only three geologically active moons in the solar system (maybe four, depending on what Europa Clipper finds).

Decades beyond its original mission, Voyager 2 has begun studying the Kuiper Belt environment beyond the Sun’s protective heliosphere, giving scientists measurements from a region no spacecraft had been designed to reach. Voyager 2's plutonium power supply drops in efficiency about four watts per year, and NASA engineers were recently able to reduce how much power Voyager 2 needs by switching off a number of non-science components to adapt a less demanding method of warming the spacecraft while it continues traveling ever farther away from the sun.

Imagine looking at a vast city on Earth from a great distance, knowing nothing about that city; you may assume that its only buildings are the largest, most visible skyscrapers. But, get closer or look with a far more powerful tool, and you would begin to discover smaller buildings between mountainous skyscrapers.

Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered that this looks like that is a fitting analogy for early galaxies.

Astronomers are finding that in between the brightest stars, the 'tallest skyscrapers' in the above analogy, there are much fainter stars analogous to smaller buildings. That means early galaxies may actually have a lot more mass packed into them than we believed.

The team behind this research reached this conclusion by using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study nine early galaxies that have passed through their period of intense star formation. They combined this data with observations from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) here on Earth to measure the population of small and faint stars in these galaxies for the first time. What they found was that the proportion of small stars in these galaxies is much greater than is found in modern galaxies like the Milky Way. This comes as something of a surprise to scientists who have assumed these populations would be similar.

"This means that the galaxy as a whole is much more massive than previous estimates suggested," team member Chloe Cheng of Leiden University, Netherlands, said in a statement.

The first 'cosmic cities' weren't dominated by skyscrapers, it just looks that way

Astronomers study galaxies and calculate their stellar population rates using the total light, or spectrum, coming from these cosmic metropolises. The problem is, the more massive a star is, the brighter it is. Thus, the overall spectrum of a galaxy is dominated by the most massive stars, while smaller stars are drowned out.

The sensitivity of the JWST has allowed astronomers to finally give these smaller stars a chance to shine and stand out, like spotting an incredible piece of architecture in a vast metropolis of glass and steel.

"Until recently, this type of measurement was simply not possible," team member Martje Slob of Leiden University said. "We needed not only a telescope that collects sufficient light, but also spectra of exceptional quality and new analysis techniques to reliably distinguish the subtle features of small stars."

Nine galaxies studied by the James Webb Space Telescope. Their spectrum reveals that there are many more relatively small stars in these galaxies (Image credit: Cheng et al/ Nature Astronomy 2026)

The team's discovery has implications for our understanding of young galaxies in the early universe. This is because scientists had always assumed the stars of different masses were born in the same proportion across cosmic history. Now that seemingly isn't the case.

That is especially true if more early galaxies are like one particularly striking example examined in this study. This galaxy, which formed less than 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, contains up to four times the mass previously estimated thanks to its huge population of smaller stars.

Thus, our models of galaxy formation may need some serious revision in the near future.

"This result shows that much more mass than previously thought is hidden in small stars," team leader Mariska Kriek of Leiden University said. "That has implications for all kinds of fields within astronomy. Because many planets orbit small stars, it could even mean that more planets formed in the early universe than we previously assumed."

An illustration of the JWST which continues to break new ground in astronomy. (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))

The team now intends to apply this method to more of the universe's earliest galaxies, hoping to stretch their investigation back to the universe's first stars.

The team's research was published on Wednesday (August 18) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The countdown is on for the deep partial lunar eclipse of Aug. 27-28. Over the next week, we'll be bringing you the latest eclipse news, viewing tips as well as live updates throughout eclipse night.

Although this isn't quite a total lunar eclipse, it's pretty close! At maximum eclipse, 96.2% of the moon will slip into Earth's dark central shadow known as the umbra, according to Time and Date. Much of the moon may take on a rusty red hue, while a thin sliver remains brightly illuminated.

It's the deepest partial lunar eclipse visible anywhere on Earth until Dec. 31, 2028, making it a must-see event worth staying up late — or setting an alarm early — for.

1 week to go until the deepest partial lunar eclipse until 2028

The partial phase of a lunar eclipse captured over Sydney in September 2025. (Image credit: Photo by Saeed KHAN / AFP via Getty Images)

We're officially one week away from one of the best skywatching events of the year!

On the evening of Aug. 27 (for North America), or the early hours of Aug. 28 (for western Europe), Earth's shadow will creep across the full moon during a very deep partial lunar eclipse. At maximum eclipse, 96.2% of the moon will be immersed in Earth's dark central shadow.

The eclipse will be visible, at least in some part, from North and South America, Europe, Africa and parts of western Asia, weather permitting. Observers in the Americas are well-positioned for the best views while skywatchers across Europe will need to look toward the western horizon before sunrise as the eclipse reaches its peak.

Read more: A 96% partial lunar eclipse is just 1 week away: Here's what you need to know.

We're just one week away from a stunning partial lunar eclipse on Aug. 27-28, when billions across North America, South America, Africa and Europe will see Earth's shadow dye the moon a subtle crimson hue, while leaving a thin crescent exposed to direct sunlight.

August's partial lunar eclipse will occur as Earth passes directly between the sun and moon during the full moon phase — an imperfect alignment that will see our planet's intense inner shadow cover 96% of the visible face of our natural satellite.

Stargazers on the night side of Earth will catch their first glimpse of our planet's umbra (the darkest, innermost part of its shadow) creeping onto the moon's surface at 10:33 p.m. EDT on Aug. 27 (0233 GMT on Aug. 28), according to TimeandDate.com. The vast shadow will continue its advance across the crater-scarred landscape in the hours that follow, until it hits the point of maximum eclipse at 12:12 a.m. EDT on Aug. 28 (0412 GMT).

Around this time, you may notice the shadowed region of the moon take on a reddish-orange color, as sunlight filtered through Earth's atmosphere is bent onto the lunar surface — a phenomenon often referred to as a "Blood Moon" during a total eclipse.

Each phase of a lunar eclipse occurs simultaneously for everyone viewing from the night side of Earth, where the lunar disk is visible. However, local timings will differ significantly depending on your location on Earth.

A partial lunar eclipse captured in the skies over the capitol city of Manila in the Philippines. (Image credit: Photo by Ted ALJIBE / AFP via Getty Images)

If you're watching from a city on the West Coast of the United States like California, then the point of maximum eclipse will occur shortly after midnight local time on the night of Aug. 27-28.

Viewers in the United Kingdom, meanwhile, won't observe the moment of maximum eclipse until shortly before sunrise on Aug. 28, as the moon lurks low on the southwestern horizon. Be sure to check out a trusted website like TimeandDate for eclipse timings specific to your location.

You won't need any special kit to protect your eyes during a lunar eclipse as you would during a solar eclipse, when there is a serious risk of vision damage from looking directly upon the sun. However, a pair of quality binoculars or a telescope will give you a stunning view of Earth's shadow as it races across the lunar disk.

Need to upgrade your equipment? Then be sure to read our roundups of the best binoculars and telescopes available in 2026. You should also check out our guide to photographing a lunar eclipse, along with our picks of the top cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you capture a photo of the lunar eclipse and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Rocket Lab launched a private Japanese satellite to orbit this morning (Aug. 20), adding to a growing constellation of Earth-observing spacecraft.

An Electron vehicle lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site at 9:04 a.m. EDT (1304 GMT; 1:04 a.m. on Aug. 21 local New Zealand time), carrying aloft a radar satellite for the Tokyo-based company iQPS.

The nine 3D-printed Rutherford engines that power Electron's first stage shut off as planned about 2.5 minutes after liftoff. Separation with the rocket's second stage immediately followed, which burned for another 6.5 minutes before releasing Electron's "kick stage" with the IQPS payload for a 40-minute coast phase.

Electron lifts off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand launch site at 9:04 a.m. EDT (1304 GMT) on Aug. 20. (Image credit: Rocket Lab)

This was Rocket Lab's ninth launch for iQPS, which is building a constellation of 36 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). Such spacecraft can study Earth day or night, and they can peer through cloud cover as well.

The iQPS network "is being developed and deployed at a rapid pace to provide high resolution and near-real time SAR imagery to its global users," Rocket Lab wrote in a description of today's mission, which it calls "The Lightning God Defends."

That name is a reference to the satellite going up today: It's nicknamed SUSANOO-II, after a Japanese lightning god.

Following the 40-minute coast phase of Electron's kick stage, the rocket completed one final burn to circularize its orbit and successfully deployed SUSANOO-II about 50 minutes after launch, at an altitude of 357 miles (575 kilometers).

Today's flight was Rocket Lab's 14th of 2026 and 93rd overall. The company's most recent launch, on Aug. 6, also lofted an iQPS satellite to LEO.

The vast majority of the company's flights have been performed by Electron, a 59-foot-tall (18 meters) rocket that gives small satellites dedicated rides to Earth orbit and beyond. Rocket Lab also operates a suborbital variant of Electron called HASTE, which allows customers to test sensors and other tech in the hypersonic flight environment.

Astronomers have found the fastest known star in the Milky Way, a faint object racing around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. Dubbed S301, the star reaches about 15,500 miles (25,000 kilometers) per second at its fastest — more than 8% the speed of light.

"What is special about this star is that it's orbiting Sagittarius A* on a very tight orbit, taking just 8.7 years to complete it, and is approaching the black hole at a mere 12 times the distance of Earth to the sun. That is unprecedented," study author Felix Mang, a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, said in a statement.

The discovery gives astronomers a new way to probe the roughly 4.3-million-solar-mass black hole. General relativity predicts that a rotating black hole drags spacetime along with it, an effect known as frame dragging, or Lense-Thirring precession. That distortion should gradually alter S301's orbit — because the star ventures so close to Sagittarius A*, those changes may become measurable within about a decade.

This visible light wide-field view shows the rich star clouds in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer) in the direction of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The entire image is filled with vast numbers of stars — but far more remain hidden behind clouds of dust and are only revealed in infrared images. This view was created from photographs in red and blue light and form part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. (Image credit: ESO and Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin and S. Guisard)

For the first time, we would actually be able to measure very directly the spin of a massive black hole, which would be a key test of Einstein's theory," said study co-author Stefan Gillessen, also of the Max Planck Institute.

This sequence of images, taken with the GRAVITY instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), show several stars orbiting Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. One of these stars, known as S301, was recently found to pass much closer to the black hole than any other known star. (Image credit: ESO/GRAVITY collaboration)

Researchers spotted S301 in 2023 using the GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer in Chile, then traced it back through observations from 2021 and 2017. Its highly elongated orbit suggests S301 may once have belonged to a binary system that wandered too close to Sagittarius A*. The black hole could have captured S301 while flinging its companion outward at tremendous speed.

Astronomers plan to keep tracking S301 with GRAVITY+ and, eventually, ESO's Extremely Large Telescope. With its next close pass expected in 2031, observations spanning two full orbits could reveal Sagittarius A*'s spin for the first time.

The team's research was published on August 19 in the journal Nature.

NASA is calling off the effort to save its Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory after a private rescue spacecraft couldn't overcome its own problems in orbit.

LINK, the specialized probe from Katalyst Space that NASA contracted for the Swift Boost mission, was delivered to space on an air-launched Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket on July 3. The vehicle was designed to rendezvous with the Swift Observatory in order to grapple and raise it to a more stable orbit, but LINK ran into trouble when it began to spin uncontrollably about three weeks after launch.

Today (Aug. 19), NASA announced an official end to LINK's efforts to boost Swift's orbit, citing ongoing attitude control issues with the private spacecraft, but the agency hasn't canceled the mission outright. LINK will still attempt a rendezvous with Swift in order to practice proximity operations and demonstrate its capabilities other than spacecraft capture, which could aid future missions down the road.

From its inception, the Swift Boost mission was always viewed as a long shot. Increased solar activity had already begun decaying the observatory's orbit faster than anticipated when NASA awarded the $30 million Swift Boost contract to Katalyst in 2025, giving the Arizona-based company less than a year to complete LINK's design, manufacture and testing before time to save Swift would run out.

"NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement today. "This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting. The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future."

Swift is a one-of-its kind orbital observatory designed to study high-energy phenomena across the universe. It can detect sudden events like gamma-ray bursts and quickly direct its instruments to study them in X-ray, ultraviolet and visible light. The spacecraft is also routinely redirected for rapid response research to study things like newly discovered supernovae, black-hole ejections, fast radio bursts and other short-lived astronomical events.

With LINK now incapable of boosting Swift's orbit, NASA estimates the observatory will dip catastrophically low into Earth's atmosphere before the end of the year. After Swift dies, the agency says it will "continue to prioritize finding new options to react rapidly to cosmic events, using current missions to help fill the gap in the meantime."

Katalyst is working closely with NASA as the Swift Boost mission enters its next phase. Together, the company and space agency are evaluating logistics for LINK's rendezvous and maneuvering demonstration within Swift's vicinity, which will provide data for potential future servicing missions to other satellites, NASA's statement says.

If you have ever shared a room with multiple people for days on end, you may know how clothes and living conditions can rapidly turn rather smelly. Imagine that happening in a confined spacecraft.

Even worse, since water on a space mission is in short supply, space travelers can't easily do their laundry. This is more than a body odor problem — unclean clothes and linens are ripe feeding grounds for infectious bacteria. Astronauts might wear the same clothes for days or even weeks, seal away used clothes in airtight bags, then return them to Earth for cleaning or cast them away to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

This is fine for short trips near Earth, but what about a months-long odyssey to Mars? Engineers have devised a new way for astronauts to dry-clean their dirty laundry. They've crafted a prototype "laundry gun" that sterilizes fabric by shooting violet-colored plasma into it.

"This will reduce the microbial load and keep clothes and other soft surfaces clean, at least microbially, for astronaut health," says Gabe Xu, a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and one of the laundry gun's creators, in a statement. "It could also be used to sterilize space suits and tools before they leave the habitat and step foot on Mars."

A plasma is an energized soup of charged particles, ions and electrons. While many plasmas like that in the sun are very hot, the laundry gun's plasma is "cold," closer to room temperature.

Its electrons are key to killing bacteria. As the laundry gun shoots plasma into fabric, the electrons collide with gas molecules in the surrounding air, such as oxygen (O2) and water vapor (H2O). These collisions create other molecules like ozone (O3), which chemists call "oxidizing species". These oxidizing species can chemically react with the membrane that surrounds a bacterium, damaging and destroying it.

In collaboration with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Xu and colleagues have created a prototype plasma gun, about the size of a pen, which can sanitize about a square centimeter at a time. In their tests, the prototype reduced spore colonies on a scrap of fabric by more than 75%.

Earthly disinfectants like peroxide and bleach also attack bacteria by oxidizing them in this way. The laundry gun's creators could allow astronauts to travel without such cleaning chemicals. Instead, the apparatus creates its cleaning plasma from the spacecraft’s own air and water vapor. In space travel, where every gram of mass matters, this is a major advantage.

The plasma gun at work. (Image credit: Gabe Xu | UAH)

"The use of plasma treatment could significantly reduce the mass of goods needed for a human mission, especially one to Mars where resupply is difficult," Xu wrote in the statement.

That said, the "laundry gun" is not a perfect replacement for the standard washing machine — not yet, at any rate. "This won't remove coffee or grass stains (though we haven't tried that)," Xu wrote in the statement.

Moreover, a pen-sized laundry gun is too small to be practical. Xu and colleagues are planning to build larger, but still handheld, devices. They'll also need to deal with their plasma gun's ozone, which can be harmful in large quantities — they're working on a filtration system to remove this.

Space laundry is a rather active area of research today — astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) recently tested a space detergent, and the Chinese space program has developed a washing machine suitable for low-water use.

Despite our love for little "Baby Yoda", "The Mandalorian and Grogu" wasn't the thrilling "Star Wars" feature film to drag fans back to theaters when it dropped back in May. It wasn't bad, but it felt more like a TV special than a cinematic event.

But now the $166 million space opera — recruited from the Disney+ series that ran for three seasons from 2019-2023 — is now about to enter Earth orbit and finally land in the streaming sphere when it hits Disney+ starting Sept. 2, 2026. Will this be the way?

Directed by Jon Favreau and starring Pedro Pascal as the laconic bounty hunter clad in his stylish Beskar armor and also featuring that pint-sized alien dynamo formally known as Baby Yoda, "The Mandalorian and Grogu" was the first big-screen "Star Wars" movie in seven years since 2019's "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker."

Could the underperforming spinoff film become a surprise hit with general streaming audiences since that's where the characters were born, or has the dynamic duo's time come and gone?

Will Mando and Grogu be welcomed home to Disney+ on September 2? (Image credit: Disney+)

"The evil Empire has fallen, and Imperial warlords remain scattered throughout the galaxy," states the official synopsis. "As the fledgling New Republic works to protect everything the Rebellion fought for, they have enlisted the help of legendary Mandalorian bounty hunter Din Djarin and his young apprentice Grogu."

While some fans would have potentially welcomed a fourth season of "The Mandalorian" — which is where this cobbled-together feature was derived from — the majority of disgruntled "Star Wars" acolytes were still wincing from the series' lackluster third outing (yes, we're staring at you, Jack Black and Lizzo!).

As they say, time heals all wounds, and despite disappointing reviews and fan reactions, the movie did manage to scrape together $345 million worldwide. Now that it's coming back to its streaming home, perhaps all will be forgiven? We're certainly willing to give it another shot or a fair first screening. How about you?

Also starring Sigourney Weaver and Jeremy Allen White, "The Mandalorian and Grogu" steers its way back onto Disney+ beginning on Sept. 2, 2026.

Astronomers have discovered that a jet of plasma erupting from a distant supermassive black hole at near-light-speed is being gravitationally lensed by an unseen clump of dark matter. The discovery could tell us about the source of cosmic "ghost" particles called neutrinos.

The supermassive black hole in question is powering a type of quasar called a blazar. All quasars involve supermassive black holes surrounded by vast quantities of material upon which the black holes feed. Material that isn't consumed by these feasting cosmic titans is channeled to the poles of the black holes, from where it is blasted out as plasma jets. A blazar differs from quasars in general because the jets it blasts out are directed at Earth. Blazars, like the one central to this study, designated PKS 2233-148, have long been proposed to be the cosmic particle accelerators that blast out neutrinos.

Neutrinos get their ghostly nickname because they carry no charge and very little mass, meaning that 100 trillion of them can pass through your body every second without you noticing a thing. This makes them hard to both detect and trace back to a source. This gravitationally lensed blazar could assist in that hunt, finally proving blazars are filling the universe with cosmic ghosts.

"These large-scale jets are cosmic accelerators and might be generating neutrinos," Silke Britzen at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany told Phys.org. "We study them to search for any peculiarities which might help us to gain a better understanding of neutrino emission."

Blazar jet receives a cosmic course correction

Astronomers have long been interested in PKS 2233-148, identifying this blazar as one that could solidify the link between neutrinos and the jets of feeding supermassive black holes. That is because one of its polar jets is aligned along our line of sight from Earth.

Britzen and colleagues took a new look at observations of PKS 2233-148 made by the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) on Earth, the Fermi space telescope, which viewed the blazar in gamma rays, and the X-ray instrument aboard the Swift space observatory.

An illustration of the Swift spacecraft which observed PKS 2233-148 in X-rays. (Image credit: NASA)

This revealed how the motion of the jet of PKS 2233-148 changed over time, uncovering hitherto hidden details, including the fact that this blazar jet had been suddenly shifted from its expected path.

"We are very happy to have discovered as-yet-undetected phenomena in the jet, as well as in the gamma-ray light curve," Britzen said.

What could have caused this cosmic course correction? A phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein back in 1915 and an unseen cluster of the universe's strangest stuff, dark matter.

What is gravitational lensing and how can dark matter cause it?

The concept of gravitational lensing emerged from Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity. General relativity states that objects with matter warp the very fabric of space, much like a bowling ball placed on a stretched rubber sheet. Gravity arises from that curvature.

And just as a cannonball would dent that hypothetical rubber sheet more than a bowling ball, an object with greater mass would cause a more extreme warp in space; its gravitational influence is greater.

Something cool happens when light passes this warped space; its usually straight path is curved. This means that when light from a background source passes a massive foreground object acting as a gravitational lens, it arrives at our telescopes at different times, meaning that the background source is magnified or, in extreme cases, can appear in multiple places in the same image.

In this case, it is the jet of PKS 2233-148 that is being lensed. But there is no object of great mass, like a galaxy or galaxy cluster, that can be seen in the right position to be doing the lensing. That leaves the possibility that the lensing body is something that can't be seen at all. Dark matter fits the bill.

An illustration shows the basic principles behind gravitational lensing (Image credit: NASA, ESA & L. Calçada)

Dark matter is effectively invisible because it doesn't directly interact with electromagnetic radiation, or light. In other words, dark matter doesn't emit light, and light doesn't bounce off it. That means even a clump large enough to play the role of a gravitational lens would be undetectable. But that doesn't mean light can't respond to the curvature of space caused by dark matter, just as it does to curvature caused by any body composed of "ordinary" matter like a star or a galaxy.

Like any gravitational lensing set-up, the lensing of the jet of PKS 2233-148 caused by this clump of dark matter requires precise alignment, and that means it is only a temporary thing.

"Because these are short-term phenomena, they are hard to find," Britzen said. "This is the first time that we find a lensing phenomenon which might hint at dark matter substructure."

Britzen and colleagues now hope to find other similar lensing events to further solidify the connection between blazars and neutrino factories.

The team's research was published on July 31 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

NASA's veteran moon-circling spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), has imaged the impact site of that errant Falcon 9 upper stage.

The photos were taken on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12, just a few days after the SpaceX rocket body slammed into the moon near Einstein Crater at 5,400 mph (8,690 kph).

LRO's high-resolution camera system, known as LROC, got good views of the aftermath from a variety of angles, snapping away every 117 minutes, the time it takes the orbiter to circuit the moon.

This is an animated before-and-after view of the crater formed after a Falcon 9 upper stage struck the moon's surface on Aug. 5, 2026. The after images were taken on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12 by the Narrow-Angle Camera on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images are enlarged three times from the original, with north facing up, and they cover an area about a quarter of a mile wide. (Image credit: NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines)Diameter and depth

According to LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson, who's based at the Houston company Intuitive Machines, the newly formed impact crater is about 60 feet (18 meters) wide and appears to be less than 10 feet (3 m) deep.

"The distinctive V-shaped ejecta pattern on the south side of the crater is consistent with natural impactors hitting the moon at low angles relative to the surface," said Robinson.

The sixth (and final) image in LROC's sequence of the new crater, he added, was acquired with the largest slew angle (68 degrees), presenting a view similar to what an Artemis astronaut would see looking out his or her Orion spacecraft window toward the lunar horizon.

Telling tilts

To capture imagery of the impact site, LRO operators tilted the spacecraft so its cameras would point toward the target region each time the spacecraft passed about 60 miles (97 km) above the moon. In doing so, researchers could see the crater under multiple lighting conditions that revealed impact features.

According to NASA, the LRO imagery shows bright and dark rays stretching out from the crater.

"The darker streaks are made of surface dust and rocks altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. This weathered material was excavated by the collision," with the brighter streaks near the crater rim formed by "fresh material excavated from deeper underground," NASA officials said in an Aug. 18 statement.

Image of the Falcon 9 impact site, taken by South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter. (Image credit: KARI)Korea's lunar orbiter

The site of the Aug. 5 crash was imaged earlier by the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, also known as Danuri. That mission team used Danuri's high-resolution Lunar Terrain Imager to spot the new crater. After capturing images of the impact zone, the Danuri mission sent updated crater coordinates to the LRO team to help refine their follow-up imaging sequence, NASA officials said.

Wandering through space for over a year and a half, the leftover Falcon 9 upper stage had sent two robotic landers — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Resilience, built by the Japanese company ispace — toward the moon back on Jan. 15, 2025. Blue Ghost succeeded in its lunar touchdown, but Resilience crashed during its attempt.

A mysterious incident over the southern Indian Ocean forced a U.S. Air Force aircraft to turn around due to an unnamed hazard in space.

According to several New Zealand-based news outlets, a U.S. Air Force (USAF) C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft left Christchurch Airport on New Zealand's South Island on Tuesday (Aug. 18) bound for McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Aircraft trackers using flight radar software noticed the C-17 turn around over the ocean some two hours into its flight.

According to a statement from New Zealand's Civil Aviation Authority given to the country's Stuff news outlet, the C-17 turned around after the Russian Air Traffic Management Corporation issued a notice advising of "space activity, potentially hazardous to aviation en route to Antarctica." It still remains unknown what that activity might have entailed, and the USAF has yet to issue a statement.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) on Aug. 10 for a large region of airspace over Australia and the Indian Ocean known as the Melbourne Flight Information Region, or YMMM. The notice states that, beginning on Aug. 14, "Russian aerospace activities will take place" and that there is "possible debris" in several areas throughout the massive YMMM airspace.

It's possible that the notice that caused the C-17 to turn around was related to this NOTAM, which was still active as of Tuesday.

A NOTAM issued by the FAA on Aug. 14 stating there was "possible debris" due to "Russian aerospace activities" throughout a large region of airspace covering Australia and the Indian Ocean. (Image credit: FAA)

There is precedent that might give some clues as to what that aerospace activity might have been.

In the last few years, pieces of falling space debris reentering Earth's atmosphere have caused several airspace closures. In November 2022, for example, the core stage of a Chinese Long March 5B rocket fell to Earth in an uncontrolled reentry over Spain, prompting multiple airspace closures out of caution.

In January 2025, SpaceX's Starship exploded on its seventh test flight, raining fiery debris over the Atlantic Ocean near the Turks and Caicos islands. The FAA activated a "Debris Response Area" near the falling debris, causing some aircraft to have to divert to secondary airports due to low fuel.

A U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster set to leave Antarctica for New Zealand from McMurdo Station, Antarctica on Nov. 12, 2016. (Image credit: MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images)

That same month, a study published in the journal Scientific Reports found there is a 26% chance of "an uncontrolled space debris reentry in busy airspaces" due to the sharp increase in space traffic in recent years. But experts say much more data is needed to determine how to mitigate risks and how to respond in the event of such debris incidents.

Of course, there remains the chance that Russia's notice to air crews wasn't caused by falling space debris at all. Governments regularly issue similar notices when they are testing weapons that fly to high altitudes, such as ballistic missiles.

Typically, however, such tests are planned far in advance, meaning any notices would have been issued long before the USAF's C-17 took to the air.