"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
--1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work.

"Correction: It is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum. The 'Times' regrets the error."
NY Times, July 1969.

— New York Times

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SpaceX launches 1st 21 satellites for advanced new US military constellation

Space.com - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 10:29am
The "Tranche 1 Transport Layer" network will eventually consists of 126 satellites in low Earth orbit.
Categories: Astronomy

Immense stellar jet in Milky Way outskirts

ESO Top News - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 10:00am
Image: Immense stellar jet in Milky Way outskirts
Categories: Astronomy

NASA’s Webb Observes Immense Stellar Jet on Outskirts of Our Milky Way

NASA - Breaking News - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 10:00am
Explore Webb
  1. Science
  2. James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)
  3. NASA’s Webb Observes Immense…
  6 Min Read NASA’s Webb Observes Immense Stellar Jet on Outskirts of Our Milky Way Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet. Full image shown below. Credits: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

A blowtorch of seething gasses erupting from a volcanically growing monster star has been captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Stretching across 8 light-years, the length of the stellar eruption is approximately twice the distance between our Sun and the next nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri system. The size and strength of this particular stellar jet, located in a nebula known as Sharpless 2-284 (Sh2-284 for short), qualifies it as rare, say researchers.

Streaking across space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, the outflow resembles a double-bladed dueling lightsaber from the Star Wars films. The central protostar, weighing as much as ten of our Suns, is located 15,000 light-years away in the outer reaches of our galaxy.

The Webb discovery was serendipitous. “We didn’t really know there was a massive star with this kind of super-jet out there before the observation. Such a spectacular outflow of molecular hydrogen from a massive star is rare in other regions of our galaxy,” said lead author Yu Cheng of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Image A: Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Image) Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet.Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

This unique class of stellar fireworks are highly collimated jets of plasma shooting out from newly forming stars. Such jetted outflows are a star’s spectacular “birth announcement” to the universe. Some of the infalling gas building up around the central star is blasted along the star’s spin axis, likely under the influence of magnetic fields.

Today, while hundreds of protostellar jets have been observed, these are mainly from low-mass stars. These spindle-like jets offer clues into the nature of newly forming stars. The energetics, narrowness, and evolutionary time scales of protostellar jets all serve to constrain models of the environment and physical properties of the young star powering the outflow.

“I was really surprised at the order, symmetry, and size of the jet when we first looked at it,” said co-author Jonathan Tan of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Its detection offers evidence that protostellar jets must scale up with the mass of the star powering them. The more massive the stellar engine propelling the plasma, the larger the gusher’s size.

The jet’s detailed filamentary structure, captured by Webb’s crisp resolution in infrared light, is evidence the jet is plowing into interstellar dust and gas. This creates separate knots, bow shocks, and linear chains.

The tips of the jet, lying in opposite directions, encapsulate the history of the star’s formation. “Originally the material was close into the star, but over 100,000 years the tips were propagating out, and then the stuff behind is a younger outflow,” said Tan.

Outlier

At nearly twice the distance from the galactic center as our Sun, the host proto-cluster that’s home to the voracious jet is on the periphery of our Milky Way galaxy.

Within the cluster, a few hundred stars are still forming. Being in the galactic hinterlands means the stars are deficient in heavier elements beyond hydrogen and helium. This is measured as metallicity, which gradually increases over cosmic time as each passing stellar generation expels end products of nuclear fusion through winds and supernovae. The low metallicity of Sh2-284 is a reflection of its relatively pristine nature, making it a local analog for the environments in the early universe that were also deficient in heavier elements.

“Massive stars, like the one found inside this cluster, have very important influences on the evolution of galaxies. Our discovery is shedding light on the formation mechanism of massive stars in low metallicity environments, so we can use this massive star as a laboratory to study what was going on in earlier cosmic history,” said Cheng.

Unrolling Stellar Tapestry

Stellar jets, which are powered by the gravitational energy released as a star grows in mass, encode the formation history of the protostar.

“Webb’s new images are telling us that the formation of massive stars in such environments could proceed via a relatively stable disk around the star that is expected in theoretical models of star formation known as core accretion,” said Tan. “Once we found a massive star launching these jets, we realized we could use the Webb observations to test theories of massive star formation. We developed new theoretical core accretion models that were fit to the data, to basically tell us what kind of star is in the center. These models imply that the star is about 10 times the mass of the Sun and is still growing and has been powering this outflow.”

For more than 30 years, astronomers have disagreed about how massive stars form. Some think a massive star requires a very chaotic process, called competitive accretion.

In the competitive accretion model, material falls in from many different directions so that the orientation of the disk changes over time. The outflow is launched perpendicularly, above and below the disk, and so would also appear to twist and turn in different directions.

“However, what we’ve seen here, because we’ve got the whole history – a tapestry of the story – is that the opposite sides of the jets are nearly 180 degrees apart from each other. That tells us that this central disk is held steady and validates a prediction of the core accretion theory,” said Tan.

Where there’s one massive star, there could be others in this outer frontier of the Milky Way. Other massive stars may not yet have reached the point of firing off Roman-candle-style outflows. Data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, also presented in this study, has found another dense stellar core that could be in an earlier stage of construction.

The paper has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

To learn more about Webb, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/webb

Related Information

View more: Webb images of other protostar outflows – HH 49/50, L483, HH 46/47, and HH 211

View more: Data visualization of protostar outflows – HH 49/50

Animation Video: “Exploring Star and Planet Formation”

Explore the jets emitted by young stars in multiple wavelengths: ViewSpace Interactive

Read more about Herbig-Haro objects

More Webb News

More Webb Images

Webb Science Themes

Webb Mission Page

Related For Kids

What is the Webb Telescope?

SpacePlace for Kids

En Español

Ciencia de la NASA

NASA en español 

Space Place para niños

Related Images & Videos Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Image)

Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars–the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet.

Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Compass Image)

This image of the stellar jet in Sh2-284, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), shows compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.

Immense Stellar Jet in Sh2-284

This video shows the relative size of two different protostellar jets imaged by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The first image shown is an extremely large protostellar jet located in Sh2-284, 15,000 light-years away from Earth. The outflows from the massive central prot…

Share Details Last Updated Sep 10, 2025 LocationNASA Goddard Space Flight Center Contact Media

Laura Betz
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
laura.e.betz@nasa.gov

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland

Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland

Related Terms Related Links and Documents Keep Exploring Related Topics James Webb Space Telescope

Space Telescope

Stars

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Universe

Categories: NASA

NASA’s Webb Observes Immense Stellar Jet on Outskirts of Our Milky Way

NASA News - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 10:00am
Explore Webb
  1. Science
  2. James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)
  3. NASA’s Webb Observes Immense…
  6 Min Read NASA’s Webb Observes Immense Stellar Jet on Outskirts of Our Milky Way Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet. Full image shown below. Credits: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

A blowtorch of seething gasses erupting from a volcanically growing monster star has been captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Stretching across 8 light-years, the length of the stellar eruption is approximately twice the distance between our Sun and the next nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri system. The size and strength of this particular stellar jet, located in a nebula known as Sharpless 2-284 (Sh2-284 for short), qualifies it as rare, say researchers.

Streaking across space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, the outflow resembles a double-bladed dueling lightsaber from the Star Wars films. The central protostar, weighing as much as ten of our Suns, is located 15,000 light-years away in the outer reaches of our galaxy.

The Webb discovery was serendipitous. “We didn’t really know there was a massive star with this kind of super-jet out there before the observation. Such a spectacular outflow of molecular hydrogen from a massive star is rare in other regions of our galaxy,” said lead author Yu Cheng of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Image A: Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Image) Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet.Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

This unique class of stellar fireworks are highly collimated jets of plasma shooting out from newly forming stars. Such jetted outflows are a star’s spectacular “birth announcement” to the universe. Some of the infalling gas building up around the central star is blasted along the star’s spin axis, likely under the influence of magnetic fields.

Today, while hundreds of protostellar jets have been observed, these are mainly from low-mass stars. These spindle-like jets offer clues into the nature of newly forming stars. The energetics, narrowness, and evolutionary time scales of protostellar jets all serve to constrain models of the environment and physical properties of the young star powering the outflow.

“I was really surprised at the order, symmetry, and size of the jet when we first looked at it,” said co-author Jonathan Tan of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Its detection offers evidence that protostellar jets must scale up with the mass of the star powering them. The more massive the stellar engine propelling the plasma, the larger the gusher’s size.

The jet’s detailed filamentary structure, captured by Webb’s crisp resolution in infrared light, is evidence the jet is plowing into interstellar dust and gas. This creates separate knots, bow shocks, and linear chains.

The tips of the jet, lying in opposite directions, encapsulate the history of the star’s formation. “Originally the material was close into the star, but over 100,000 years the tips were propagating out, and then the stuff behind is a younger outflow,” said Tan.

Outlier

At nearly twice the distance from the galactic center as our Sun, the host proto-cluster that’s home to the voracious jet is on the periphery of our Milky Way galaxy.

Within the cluster, a few hundred stars are still forming. Being in the galactic hinterlands means the stars are deficient in heavier elements beyond hydrogen and helium. This is measured as metallicity, which gradually increases over cosmic time as each passing stellar generation expels end products of nuclear fusion through winds and supernovae. The low metallicity of Sh2-284 is a reflection of its relatively pristine nature, making it a local analog for the environments in the early universe that were also deficient in heavier elements.

“Massive stars, like the one found inside this cluster, have very important influences on the evolution of galaxies. Our discovery is shedding light on the formation mechanism of massive stars in low metallicity environments, so we can use this massive star as a laboratory to study what was going on in earlier cosmic history,” said Cheng.

Unrolling Stellar Tapestry

Stellar jets, which are powered by the gravitational energy released as a star grows in mass, encode the formation history of the protostar.

“Webb’s new images are telling us that the formation of massive stars in such environments could proceed via a relatively stable disk around the star that is expected in theoretical models of star formation known as core accretion,” said Tan. “Once we found a massive star launching these jets, we realized we could use the Webb observations to test theories of massive star formation. We developed new theoretical core accretion models that were fit to the data, to basically tell us what kind of star is in the center. These models imply that the star is about 10 times the mass of the Sun and is still growing and has been powering this outflow.”

For more than 30 years, astronomers have disagreed about how massive stars form. Some think a massive star requires a very chaotic process, called competitive accretion.

In the competitive accretion model, material falls in from many different directions so that the orientation of the disk changes over time. The outflow is launched perpendicularly, above and below the disk, and so would also appear to twist and turn in different directions.

“However, what we’ve seen here, because we’ve got the whole history – a tapestry of the story – is that the opposite sides of the jets are nearly 180 degrees apart from each other. That tells us that this central disk is held steady and validates a prediction of the core accretion theory,” said Tan.

Where there’s one massive star, there could be others in this outer frontier of the Milky Way. Other massive stars may not yet have reached the point of firing off Roman-candle-style outflows. Data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, also presented in this study, has found another dense stellar core that could be in an earlier stage of construction.

The paper has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

To learn more about Webb, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/webb

Related Information

View more: Webb images of other protostar outflows – HH 49/50, L483, HH 46/47, and HH 211

View more: Data visualization of protostar outflows – HH 49/50

Animation Video: “Exploring Star and Planet Formation”

Explore the jets emitted by young stars in multiple wavelengths: ViewSpace Interactive

Read more about Herbig-Haro objects

More Webb News

More Webb Images

Webb Science Themes

Webb Mission Page

Related For Kids

What is the Webb Telescope?

SpacePlace for Kids

En Español

Ciencia de la NASA

NASA en español 

Space Place para niños

Related Images & Videos Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Image)

Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars–the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet.

Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Compass Image)

This image of the stellar jet in Sh2-284, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), shows compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.

Immense Stellar Jet in Sh2-284

This video shows the relative size of two different protostellar jets imaged by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The first image shown is an extremely large protostellar jet located in Sh2-284, 15,000 light-years away from Earth. The outflows from the massive central prot…

Share Details Last Updated Sep 10, 2025 LocationNASA Goddard Space Flight Center Contact Media

Laura Betz
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
laura.e.betz@nasa.gov

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland

Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland

Related Terms Related Links and Documents Keep Exploring Related Topics James Webb Space Telescope

Space Telescope

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Categories: NASA

What Would It Take to Say We Found Life? We Asked a NASA Expert: Episode 63

NASA - Breaking News - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 9:58am

4 min read

Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)

What Would It Take to Say We Found Life?

We call this the podium test. What would it take for you personally to confidently stand up in front of an international audience and make that claim? When you put it in that way, I think for a lot of scientists, the bar is really high.

So of course, there would be obvious things, you know, a very clear signature of technology or a skeleton or something like that. But we think that a lot of the evidence that we might encounter first will be much more subtle. For example, chemical signs of life that have to be detected above a background of abiotic chemistry. And really, what we see might depend a lot on where we look.

On Mars, for example, the long history of exploration there gives us a lot of context for what we might find. But we’re potentially talking about samples that are billions of years old in those cases, and on Earth, those kinds of samples, the evidence of life is often degraded and difficult to detect.

On the ocean worlds of our outer solar system, so places like Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, there’s the tantalizing possibility of extant life, meaning life that’s still alive. But potentially we’re talking about exceedingly small amounts of samples that would have to be analyzed with a relatively limited amount of instrumentation that can be carried from Earth billions of miles away.

And then for exoplanets, these are planets beyond our own solar system. Really, what we’re looking for there are very large magnitude signs of life that can be detectable through a telescope from many light-years away. So changes like the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere or changes in surface color.

So any one of those things, if they rose to the suspicion of being evidence of life, would be really heavily scrutinized in a very sort of specific and custom way to that particular observation. But I think there are also some general principles that we can follow. And the first is just: Are we sure we’re seeing what we think we’re seeing? Many of these environments are not very well known to us, and so we need to convince ourselves that we’re actually seeing a clear signal that represents what we think it represents.

Carl Sagan once said, “Life is the hypothesis of last resort,” meaning that we ought to work hard for such a claim to rule out alternative possibilities. So what are those possibilities? One is contamination. The spacecraft and the instruments that we use to look for evidence of life are built in an environment, Earth, that is full of life. And so we need to convince ourselves that what we’re seeing is not evidence of our own life, but evidence of indigenous life.

If that’s the case, we should ask, should life of the type we’re seeing live there? And finally, we need to ask, is there any other way than life to make that thing, any of the possible abiotic processes that we know and even the ones that we don’t know? And as you can imagine, that will be quite a challenge.

Once we have a piece of evidence in hand that we really do think represents evidence of life, now we can begin to develop hypotheses. For example, do we have separate independent lines of evidence that corroborate what we’ve seen and increase our confidence of life?

Ultimately, all of this has to be looked at hard by the entire scientific community, and in that sense, I think the really operative word in our question is we. What does it take to say we found evidence of life? Because really, the answer, I think, depends on the full scientific community scrutinizing and skepticizing this observation to finally say that we scientists, we as a community and we as humanity found life.

[END VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]

Full Episode List

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Share Details Last Updated Sep 10, 2025 Related Terms Explore More 13 min read The Earth Observer Editor’s Corner: July–September 2025

NOTE TO READERS: After more than three decades associated with or directly employed by NASA,…

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Categories: NASA

What Would It Take to Say We Found Life? We Asked a NASA Expert: Episode 63

NASA News - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 9:58am

4 min read

Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)

What Would It Take to Say We Found Life?

We call this the podium test. What would it take for you personally to confidently stand up in front of an international audience and make that claim? When you put it in that way, I think for a lot of scientists, the bar is really high.

So of course, there would be obvious things, you know, a very clear signature of technology or a skeleton or something like that. But we think that a lot of the evidence that we might encounter first will be much more subtle. For example, chemical signs of life that have to be detected above a background of abiotic chemistry. And really, what we see might depend a lot on where we look.

On Mars, for example, the long history of exploration there gives us a lot of context for what we might find. But we’re potentially talking about samples that are billions of years old in those cases, and on Earth, those kinds of samples, the evidence of life is often degraded and difficult to detect.

On the ocean worlds of our outer solar system, so places like Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, there’s the tantalizing possibility of extant life, meaning life that’s still alive. But potentially we’re talking about exceedingly small amounts of samples that would have to be analyzed with a relatively limited amount of instrumentation that can be carried from Earth billions of miles away.

And then for exoplanets, these are planets beyond our own solar system. Really, what we’re looking for there are very large magnitude signs of life that can be detectable through a telescope from many light-years away. So changes like the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere or changes in surface color.

So any one of those things, if they rose to the suspicion of being evidence of life, would be really heavily scrutinized in a very sort of specific and custom way to that particular observation. But I think there are also some general principles that we can follow. And the first is just: Are we sure we’re seeing what we think we’re seeing? Many of these environments are not very well known to us, and so we need to convince ourselves that we’re actually seeing a clear signal that represents what we think it represents.

Carl Sagan once said, “Life is the hypothesis of last resort,” meaning that we ought to work hard for such a claim to rule out alternative possibilities. So what are those possibilities? One is contamination. The spacecraft and the instruments that we use to look for evidence of life are built in an environment, Earth, that is full of life. And so we need to convince ourselves that what we’re seeing is not evidence of our own life, but evidence of indigenous life.

If that’s the case, we should ask, should life of the type we’re seeing live there? And finally, we need to ask, is there any other way than life to make that thing, any of the possible abiotic processes that we know and even the ones that we don’t know? And as you can imagine, that will be quite a challenge.

Once we have a piece of evidence in hand that we really do think represents evidence of life, now we can begin to develop hypotheses. For example, do we have separate independent lines of evidence that corroborate what we’ve seen and increase our confidence of life?

Ultimately, all of this has to be looked at hard by the entire scientific community, and in that sense, I think the really operative word in our question is we. What does it take to say we found evidence of life? Because really, the answer, I think, depends on the full scientific community scrutinizing and skepticizing this observation to finally say that we scientists, we as a community and we as humanity found life.

[END VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]

Full Episode List

Full YouTube Playlist

Share Details Last Updated Sep 10, 2025 Related Terms Explore More 21 min read Summary of the 11th ABoVE Science Team Meeting

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NASA to Share Details of New Perseverance Mars Rover Finding

NASA News - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 9:11am
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took this selfie on September 10, 2021, the 198th Martian day, or sol of its mission.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA will host a news conference at 11 a.m. EDT Wednesday, to discuss the analysis of a rock sampled by the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover last year, which is the subject of a forthcoming science paper. The agency previously announced this event as a teleconference. 

Watch the news conference on NASA’s YouTube channel and the agency’s website. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.

Participants include:

  • Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy
  • NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya
  • Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington
  • Lindsay Hays, senior scientist for Mars Exploration, Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters
  • Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California
  • Joel Hurowitz, planetary scientist, Stony Brook University, New York

To ask questions by phone, members of the media must RSVP no later than one hour before the start of the event to: rexana.v.vizza@jpl.nasa.gov. Media who registered for the earlier teleconference-only version of this event do not need to re-register. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online.

The sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” was collected in July 2024 from a set of rocky outcrops on the edges of Neretva Vallis, a river valley carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.

Since landing in the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater in February 2021, Perseverance has collected 30 samples. The rover still has six empty sample tubes to fill, and it continues to collect detailed information about geologic targets that it hasn’t sampled by using its abrasion tool. Among the rover’s science instruments is a weather station that provides environmental information for future human missions, as well as swatches of spacesuit material so that NASA can study how it fares on Mars.

Managed for NASA by Caltech, JPL built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.

To learn more about Perseverance visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance

-end-

Bethany Stevens / Karen Fox
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
bethany.c.stevens@nasa.gov / karen.c.fox@nasa.gov

DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Share Details Last Updated Sep 10, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms

Categories: NASA

Autism Has No Single Cause, Research Shows

Scientific American.com - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 8:00am

Scientists will not find a simple answer to how autism arises, despite Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s promise to announce its causes sometime this month. Here’s what makes the condition so staggeringly complex

Categories: Astronomy

Working on a 39-foot telescope dish | Space photo of the day for Sept. 10, 2025

Space.com - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 8:00am
Chile is a hotspot for telescopes peering up into deep space to study structures like stars, black holes, dark matter and galaxies.
Categories: Astronomy

Catch the Final Total Lunar Eclipse of 2025 Sunday Night

Universe Today - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 7:31am

Live in the eastern hemisphere? If skies are clear, you have a chance to see a remarkable sight this Sunday night into Monday morning: the ‘Blood Moon’ of a total lunar eclipse. The eclipse favors the Indian Ocean region in its entirety. Europe sees the eclipse already underway at Moonrise, while Australia catches it in progress at Moonset. Only the Americas sit this one out in person... though you can still catch it live online.

Categories: Astronomy

BlueDOGs Might Evolve From Little Red Dots

Universe Today - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 7:31am

One of the most difficult parts of astronomy is understanding how time affects it. The farther away you look in the universe, the farther back you look in time. One way this complicates things is how objects might change over time. For example, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy in the early universe might appear one way to our modern telescopes, but the same supermassive black hole might appear completely differently a few billion years later. Understanding the connection between the two objects would be difficult to say the least, but a new paper from researchers at the University of Science and Technology in South Korea describes one potential parallel, between the recently discovered “Little Red Dots” of the early universe and “BlueDOGs” of the slightly later universe.

Categories: Astronomy

Atlantic Hurricane Season Has Gone Quiet. Here’s Why

Scientific American.com - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 7:00am

Hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin is historically at its peak on September 10—but not this year

Categories: Astronomy

What Is Alpha-Gal Syndrome? Symptoms, Causes and Way to Get Tested

Scientific American.com - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 6:00am

A single tick bite can trigger a bizarre meat allergy—here’s how alpha-gal syndrome is reshaping people’s diets.

Categories: Astronomy

The weird ringed dwarf planet Quaoar may have an extra moon, astronomers discover

Space.com - Wed, 09/10/2025 - 6:00am
"The profile of the occultation was most consistent with it being a new satellite — a new moon — going around Quaoar."
Categories: Astronomy

Iridescent mammals are much more common than we thought

New Scientist Space - Space Headlines - Tue, 09/09/2025 - 8:01pm
It has long been claimed that only one mammal – the golden mole – has fur that shimmers with rainbow colours, but it now turns out that at least a dozen more mammals have iridescent fur too
Categories: Astronomy

Iridescent mammals are much more common than we thought

New Scientist Space - Cosmology - Tue, 09/09/2025 - 8:01pm
It has long been claimed that only one mammal – the golden mole – has fur that shimmers with rainbow colours, but it now turns out that at least a dozen more mammals have iridescent fur too
Categories: Astronomy

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APOD - Tue, 09/09/2025 - 8:00pm

How soon do jets form when a supernova gives birth to a neutron star?


Categories: Astronomy, NASA

SpaceX targets Sept. 23 for launch of NASA's IMAP mission to map the boundaries of our solar system

Space.com - Tue, 09/09/2025 - 6:00pm
IMAP data "will help us better understand the fundamental physics of the heliosphere."
Categories: Astronomy

Astronomers discover repeating gamma-ray burst 'unlike anything we have ever witnessed before' (video)

Space.com - Tue, 09/09/2025 - 5:00pm
"If this is a massive star, it is a collapse unlike anything we have ever witnessed before."
Categories: Astronomy

Astronomers Use a Double-Lensing Technique to Study a Supermassive Black Hole

Universe Today - Tue, 09/09/2025 - 3:29pm

An international team of astronomers led by Matus Rybak (Leiden University, Netherlands) has proven, thanks to accidental double zoom, that millimetre radiation is generated close to the core of a supermassive black hole. Their findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Categories: Astronomy