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When astronauts live on the Moon permanently, they're going to need a safe habitat, ideally made out of local construction material. A new paper suggests that lunar astronauts could cover a 17-meter crater with a dome made from a lunar regolith-based geopolymer. A 3D printer would extrude a paste made of lunar regolith that would be sintered together into the shape of the dome. This would provide protection from radiation and could even maintain a pressurized habitat.

An international team of astronomers have discovered an Earth-size exoplanet on a very tight orbit around its star. It completes an orbit in only 5 hours and 22 minutes. Unfortunately, the planet will either be torn to pieces or crash into its star in about 31 million years.

The Milky Way is surrounded by about 60 satellite galaxies. The famous ones are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. But according to a new simulation, the Milky Way could have 80 and even 100 satellite galaxies that we haven't detected so far. These galaxies will be hard to find. They've had most of their mass stripped by the gravity of the Milky Way's halo. But new telescopes like Vera Rubin should be able to spot them.

Sometimes in order to support an idea, you first have to discredit alternative, competing ideas that could take resources away from the one you care about. In the scientific community, one of the most devastating ways you can do that is by making the other methods appear to be too expensive to be feasible, or, better yep, prove they wouldn’t work at all due to some fundamental limitation. That is what a recent paper by Dr. Slava Turyshev, the world’s most prominent proponent of a Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) telescope mission, does. He examines how effective alternative telescope technologies would be at creating a 10x10 pixel map of an exoplanet about 32 light years away. Unsurprisingly, there’s only one that is able to do so without giant leaps and bounds in technology development - the SGL telescope.

Scientists have recreated the universe's first moments by smashing atomic nuclei together at near-light speeds, generating temperatures 1,000 times hotter than the Sun's core and briefly forming the same "soup" of fundamental particles that existed microseconds after the Big Bang. In this groundbreaking research, heavy particles act like tiny cosmic detectives, moving through this primordial matter and revealing how the chaotic early universe transformed into the structured reality we see today. By understanding how these massive particles behave under the most extreme conditions imaginable, researchers are essentially reading the universe's origin story written in the language of fundamental physics.

China is poised to make space exploration history again with its Tianwen-3 mission launching in 2028. With the audacious plan to drill two meters beneath Mars' radiation blasted surface it aims to collect samples that could harbor ancient microbial life, and bring them back to Earth for the first time in human history! The mission's most intriguing challenge isn't the technical feat of interplanetary sample return, it’s the quarantine protocols required once these potentially life containing samples arrive on Earth making this mission as much about protecting our planet as it is about exploring another.

A 14year study of Hong Kong's Earth Hour participation has revealed that it's not the millions of apartment windows or office buildings that steal our night sky, but rather a small handful of brightly lit skyscrapers and LED advertising boards that have an outsized impact on darkness above cities. When these decorative lights and digital screens go dark, the night sky becomes up to 50% darker, offering a hopeful new strategy for tackling light pollution without requiring massive citywide changes. Could this be he the change that dramatically improve night sky visibility for stargazers, wildlife, and anyone hoping to reconnect with the the night sky above our urban landscapes?

When Einstein's predicted ripples in spacetime pass through magnetic fields, they cause the current carrying wires to dance at the gravitational wave frequency, creating potentially detectable electrical signals. Researchers have discovered that the same powerful magnets used to hunt for dark matter could double as gravitational wave detectors. This means experiments already searching for the universe's most elusive particles could simultaneously capture collisions between black holes and neutron stars, getting two of physics' most ambitious experiments for the price of one, while potentially opening entirely new windows into the universe's most violent events.

There are tens of thousands of pieces of space debris hurling around the Earth right now. Since it can cost tens of millions of dollars to remove just a single piece of space debris, which are the ones that we should be most concerned with? A few years ago, 11 teams of experts came together to rank the 50 most concerning pieces of debris, the ones that they think would be the highest priority. Although they used different approaches, 20-40% of the objects ended up on several experts' lists.

Portrait of a galaxy cluster

A massive filament eruption carved a 250,000-mile-long "canyon of fire" into the sun — and sent a CME sailing into space.

In human beings, egg cells need to survive for about five decades, much longer than most other cell types – and they may achieve this unusually long lifespan by slowing down their natural cell processes

In human beings, egg cells need to survive for about five decades, much longer than most other cell types – and they may achieve this unusually long lifespan by slowing down their natural cell processes

The impact that carved out the moon's huge South Pole-Aitken basin may explain the puzzling differences between the lunar near and far sides.

An expedition in the Red Sea found several brine pools that appear to be fed by underwater volcanoes, which may be home to microbes and animals with unique adaptations

An expedition in the Red Sea found several brine pools that appear to be fed by underwater volcanoes, which may be home to microbes and animals with unique adaptations

Video: 00:00:40

View of Earth as seen by ESA project astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski inside the seven-windowed cupola, the International Space Station's "window to the world".

The European Space Agency-built Cupola is the favourite place of many astronauts on the International Space Station. It serves not only as a unique photo spot, but also for observing robotic activities of the Canadian Space Agency's robotic arm Canadarm2, arriving spacecraft and spacewalks.

Sławosz was launched to the International Space Station on the Dragon spacecraft as part of Axiom Mission 4 on 25 June 2025. The 20-day mission on board is known as Ignis.
During the Ignis mission, Sławosz conducted 13 experiments proposed by Polish companies and institutions and developed in collaboration with ESA, along with three additional ESA-led experiments. These covered a broad range of areas including human research, materials science, biology, biotechnology and technology demonstrations.  

The Ax-4 mission marks the second commercial human spaceflight for an ESA project astronaut. Ignis was sponsored by the Polish government and supported by ESA, the Polish Ministry of Economic Development and Technology (MRiT) and the Polish Space Agency (POLSA).   

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Curiosity Blog, Sols 4600-4601: Up and Over the Sand Covered Ramp NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Left Navigation Camera on July 13, 2025 — Sol 4598, or Martian day 4,598 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 15:24:10 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Written by Sharon Wilson Purdy, Planetary Geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Earth planning date: Monday, July 14, 2025

The Curiosity rover continues to navigate through the region of Mount Sharp characterized by the boxwork terrain.  After successfully completing a drive of about 34 meters over the weekend (about 112 feet), the rover parked near the edge of a smooth, sandy stretch at the base of a ridge that leads to the most prominent and complex network of boxwork structures seen so far.

Due to the lack of exposed bedrock in the immediate workspace, the science team opted to give some of the rover’s contact science instruments a break. With the dust removal tool (DRT) and APXS instruments stowed, the extra energy allowed the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) to take high resolution images of “Playa de la Gallina” to survey the uniform, smooth surface consisting of sand and pebble-sized material.

The ChemCam and Mastcam teams scheduled several observations in this two-sol plan that further investigated the rocks and structures in our immediate vicinity and surroundings. ChemCam LIBS was used to target “El Olivo” to determine the chemistry of the bumpy textured bedrock near the rover, which was also imaged by a Mastcam stereo mosaic. Additional Mastcam stereo mosaics include fractures at “El Corral” and linear troughs at “Chapare.” Further away, ChemCam’s Remote Micro Imager (RMI) will provide insight into an intriguing section of scoured features within the Mishe Mokwa butte.

The environmental working group continues to keep an eye in the sky and planned a supra-horizon movie and a dust-devil survey as part of their ongoing monitoring campaign of the atmospheric conditions in Gale Crater.

The 21-meter-long drive (about 69 feet) at the end of this plan will maneuver the rover past the sandy ramp to the top of the main boxwork region. From here, the science team will be able to explore this fascinating area of particularly large boxwork structures. Stay tuned as Curiosity continues to climb higher and delve deeper into the geologic history of Mars!

For more Curiosity blog posts, visit MSL Mission Updates

Learn more about Curiosity’s science instruments

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Curiosity Blog, Sols 4597-4599: Wide Open Spaces NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image, of the sweeping Mount Sharp vista into which the rover will drive the weekend of July 11-12, 2025, using its onboard Left Navigation Camera. Curiosity captured the image on July 11, 2025 — Sol 4596, or Martian day 4,596 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 12:01:55 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Written by Michelle Minitti, MAHLI Deputy Principal Investigator, Framework

Earth planning date: Friday, July 11, 2025

Imagine this vista as the view out your office window to start your workday. Your natural tendency would be to grab your camera and photograph as much of the view as possible. Curiosity was lucky enough to find herself in this situation today after a successful drive of about 61 meters (about 200 feet) on Wednesday, and the science team operating Curiosity wasted no time papering the scene with mosaics.
Between Mastcam and ChemCam, we planned 105 images across the scene. Those images will capture the structures underpinning the boxwork ridges we are driving toward, smaller-scale fractures in the near field that might be related to the boxwork ridges, and the back side of a ridge we recently studied in detail, “Volcán Peña Blanca.” Together, the images will help us understand the geologic history of the area that hosts the boxwork ridges, and what conditions existed in this part of Mount Sharp to support their formation.

We did not neglect the rocks directly in front of the rover as we gazed at our surroundings. Indeed, the bedrock near the rover was nearly uniformly packed with small (less than 1 centimeter, or 0.39 inches) rounded nodules, a characteristic we have not seen for awhile. MAHLI will image three different instances of the nodules while APXS and ChemCam will each analyze two different targets to understand the chemistry of the nodules and the bedrock hosting them.

REMS, RAD, and DAN will continue to monitor the Martian environment and subsurface throughout the weekend. Additionally, we planned multiple observations of dust devils, the amount of dust in the atmosphere, and clouds including a cloud movie timed to match the overflight of the CASSIS instrument. Our drive will take us to the foot of the smooth slope seen in the distance of the above image. That slope is the ramp we will take to the top of a big boxwork structure, where surely other delightful vistas await.

For more Curiosity blog posts, visit MSL Mission Updates

Learn more about Curiosity’s science instruments

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Jul 16, 2025

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