Tag: space

Astronomers say new interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS is ‘very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen’

The recently discovered interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS may be one of the oldest comets ever seen by humanity.

The object was already exciting to astronomers as only the third space object seen entering the solar system from beyond its limits, the other two being 1I/’Oumuamua seen in 2017 and 2I/Borisov detected in 2019.

However, new research has shown this potentially “water ice-rich” visitor could be even more extraordinary than initially believed. 3I/ATLAS could be around 3 billion years older than our 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and thus any comet ever before observed.

University of Oxford astronomer Matthew Hopkins is part of a team of scientists that think 3I/ATLAS, discovered on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope, is around 7 billion years old.

“All non-interstellar comets, such as Halley’s comet, formed at the same time as our solar system, so they are up to 4.5 billion years old,” Hopkins said in a statement. “But interstellar visitors have the potential to be far older, and of those known about so far, our statistical method suggests that 3I/ATLAS is very likely to be the oldest comet we have ever seen.”

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China’s Space “Dogfighters” and Kill Mesh: Practicing to Destroy U.S. Satellites and Ships at Sea

China is conducting increasingly sophisticated satellite maneuvers in orbit, essentially rehearsing attacks on U.S. space-based infrastructure critical for navigation, communication, and missile targeting. China’s expanding space capabilities also extend to what military officials call a “kill mesh”, a networked targeting system that connects multiple sensors, platforms, and weapons in a decentralized web where data flows in multiple directions and engagements can occur from several nodes simultaneously. Apart from disrupting U.S. satellites and space assets, this kill mesh can also be used to target U.S. ships at sea.

At the McAleese defense conference in March 2025, U.S. Space Force Vice Chief of Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein reported that five Chinese space objects, three Shiyan-24C experimental satellites and two Shijian-6 intelligence-gathering spacecraft, were observed executing synchronized, controlled maneuvers in low Earth orbit.

These exercises, described by Space Force as “dogfighting in space,” are not routine operations. “They are practicing tactics, techniques, and procedures to conduct on-orbit operations from one satellite to another,” Guetlein warned. In the general’s estimation, these satellites are training to disable or destroy American space assets.

Beyond physical attacks, China has also expanded its electronic warfare (EW) capabilities. Its arsenal includes jamming systems targeting GPS, radar, and multiple communications platforms. In 2015, China used GPS jamming to interfere with U.S. surveillance flights over the Spratly Islands, an early example of its willingness to disrupt American drone networks and space-based positioning systems.

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Lockheed Martin offers to rescue Mars mission from budget death

NASA’s beleaguered Mars Sample Return mission may get a reprieve from an unexpected source. Lockheed Martin has proposed a streamlined, lower-cost alternative that could slash the mission’s price tag by more than half.

Facing significant funding cuts across multiple programs, NASA’s ambitious international effort to retrieve Martian samples and return them to Earth is under threat. Already jeopardized by Russia’s withdrawal from the program following its invasion of Ukraine, the mission now faces potential cancellation due to shifting priorities within the current US administration.

Under new agency guidelines, NASA has been ordered to focus more on deep-space crewed missions to the Moon and Mars, along with other endeavors involving cutting-edge technology, while axing projects that have been marked by massive spending without a proportionate scientific return.

One prime candidate for the chop is the Mars Sample Return mission, which is a staggeringly ambitious international program involving many nations that is tasked with using multiple spacecraft to collect samples from the surface of Mars and then return them to Earth for in-depth laboratory analysis.

The mission’s first phase is already underway, with NASA’s Perseverance rover exploring the surface of Mars. As it traverses the dunes and dead river beds that last saw water two billion years ago, it’s been collecting drilling samples that have been sealed in special container tubes left behind on the ground like a paper trail in a cosmic game of Hares & Hounds.

The idea is that a second lander will eventually set down in the vicinity of the first and deploy a second rover that will follow the path blazed by the nuclear-powered Perseverance and collect the tubes. These will be stored in a special sealed container, which will be placed in a small rocket that will be fired into orbit around Mars where it will rendezvous with yet another spacecraft for return to Earth.

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NASA confirms that mysterious object shooting through the solar system is an ‘interstellar visitor’ — and it has a new name

NASA scientists have confirmed that a mysterious object shooting toward us through the solar system is an “interstellar object” — only the third of its kind ever seen. Experts have also given the cosmic interloper an official name, and revealed new information about its origins and trajectory.

News of the extrasolar entity, initially dubbed A11pl3Z, broke on Tuesday (July 1), when NASA and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) both listed it as a confirmed object. It was first discovered in data collected between June 25 and June 29 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), which automatically scans the night sky using telescopes in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa. Multiple telescopes across the world have subsequently spotted the object in observation data that date back to June 14.

The object is traveling toward the sun extremely fast, at around 152,000 mph (245,000 km/h), and observations suggest that it is set on an extremely flat and straight trajectory, unlike anything else in the solar system. This led many experts to speculate that it originated from beyond the sun’s gravitational influence and has enough momentum to shoot straight through our cosmic neighborhood without slowing down.

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Planetary Defenders Track Fast-Moving “Interstellar Object” Through Solar System

On Wednesday, the European Space Agency revealed that its Planetary Defenders are tracking a fast-moving “interstellar object” zipping through the solar system. While some might hope it’s an alien spacecraft—finally giving Paul Krugman a win—chances are it’s just another space rock. 

“Astronomers may have just discovered the third interstellar object passing through the Solar System!” ESA said, adding, “ESA’s Planetary Defenders are observing the object, provisionally known as A11pl3Z, right now using telescopes around the world.” 

It’s still unclear whether A11pl3Z is a rocky asteroid, an icy comet, or something else entirely. Its size and shape also remain unknown. NASA has confirmed it is actively tracking the object, while astronomers say more observations are needed to determine its origin. 

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“Shame & Name” Climate Activist Satellite Backed By Bezos Lost

A high-resolution Earth-observation satellite designed to monitor and map global methane emissions has been lost after a power failure.

The $88 million satellite, called MethaneSAT, owned by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and backed by Jeff Bezos, was lost ten days ago… 

On Friday, June 20, the MethaneSAT mission operations lost contact with MethaneSAT. After pursuing all options to restore communications, we learned this morning that the satellite has lost power, and that it is likely not recoverable. While this is difficult news, it is not the end of the overall MethaneSAT effort, or of our work to slash methane emissions.

MethaneSAT was launched in March 2024 and delivered data on methane emissions, focusing on the “name and shame” operations of global oil and gas assets worldwide. It was built on Blue Canyon Technologies’ X-Sat platform and carried a custom infrared spectrometer from Ball Aerospace, capable of detecting methane sources both large and small.  

Reuters reported that MethaneSAT’s last known position was over Svalbard, Norway, and the EDF has acknowledged it is unlikely to be recovered.

“We’re seeing this as a setback, not a failure,” Amy Middleton, senior vice president at EDF, told Reuters, adding, “We’ve made so much progress and so much has been learned that if we hadn’t taken this risk, we wouldn’t have any of these learnings.”

MethaneSAT stated, “To solve the climate challenge requires bold action and risk-taking and this satellite was at the leading edge of science, technology and advocacy.” 

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X-Ray Telescopes Reveal 23-Million-Light-Year Filament That May Help Solve “Missing Matter” Mystery

A potential solution to the decades-long “missing matter” problem has been uncovered as astronomers’ recent analysis of X-ray data identifies a filament of hot gas, 10 times the size of the Milky Way, filling the space between four galaxy clusters.

While the discovery does not completely answer the question of where all of the currently unaccounted for matter resides, the filament does appear to represent a significant chunk of it. Astronomers sourced the data used in the new research from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and JAXA’s Suzaku X-ray space telescopes.

Missing Matter

Current models of the universe have a major shortcoming: they can’t fully account for all the matter that should exist. While dark matter and dark energy—detectable only by their effects—compose most of the cosmos, visible matter accounts for just about 5%. Yet even among that 5%, nearly half of the expected matter remains missing.

One possible explanation is the existence of long, tenuous strings of gas called “filaments.” However, detecting these structures is notoriously difficult, as they are extremely faint and often obscured by brighter cosmic phenomena like galaxies and black holes. The breakthrough in the new research lies in the team’s successful identification and characterization of a hot gas filament connecting four galaxy clusters.

“For the first time, our results closely match what we see in our leading model of the cosmos – something that’s not happened before,” says lead researcher Konstantinos Migkas of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. “It seems that the simulations were right all along.”

Identifying the Missing Matter

The four galaxy clusters and the filament linking them are part of the Shapley Supercluster, one of the largest known structures in the universe, containing around 8,000 galaxies. Two clusters sit on each side of the filament, which stretches 23 million light-years diagonally away from Earth.

XMM-Newton and Suzaku’s X-ray data were crucial to mapping the filament’s properties, supported by optical data from multiple sources. Each telescope contributed a unique perspective: Suzaku scanned a broad area of space, while XMM-Newton focused on identifying supermassive black holes within the filament and removing their interference from the data.

“Thanks to XMM-Newton we could identify and remove these cosmic contaminants, so we knew we were looking at the gas in the filament and nothing else,” adds co-author Florian Pacaud of the University of Bonn, Germany. “Our approach was really successful, and reveals that the filament is exactly as we’d expect from our best large-scale simulations of the Universe.”

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Musk Begins Decommissioning SpaceX Dragon Amid Fallout With Trump

Elon Musk announced on June 5 that SpaceX would begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft after President Donald Trump appeared to call for the termination of all of the government’s subsidies and contracts with him.

“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk wrote on X.

SpaceX Dragon crew and cargo capsules have been the backbone of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) spacefaring efforts for several years, operating the first cargo mission to the International Space Station in 2012, and launching its first crewed mission in 2020.

The company has taken up residence at Kennedy Space Center’s historic Launch Complex 39A, which is adding a launch tower for the behemoth Starship, and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 40 in Florida.

SpaceX has also been contracted to provide one of the lunar landers for NASA’s Artemis program to return human beings to the moon, and it was set to develop the spacecraft that would strategically deorbit the International Space Station by 2030.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, at this time, remains America’s only means of human spaceflight.

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Astronomers baffled by mystery object flashing signals at Earth every 44 minutes: ‘Like nothing we’ve ever seen’

The truth is out there.

Astronomers say they’re stunned by an unidentified object flashing strange signals from deep space.

The object, named ASKAP J1832-0911, was detected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and NASA’S Chandra X-ray observatory — the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope.

“It is unlike anything we have seen before,” Andy Wang, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, declared in a statement published this week.

ASKAP J1832-0911 emits pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes every 44 minutes, according to the experts, who documented their findings in Nature journal.

ASKAP J1832-0911 has been classified as a “long-period transient” or “LPT” — a cosmic body that emits radio pulses separated by a few minutes or a few hours.

Wang and his team theorize that the object could be a dead star, but they don’t know why it “switches on” and “switches off” at “long, regular and unusual intervals,” Space.com reports.

“ASKAP J1831-0911 could be a magnetar (the core of a dead star with powerful magnetic fields), or it could be a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetised white dwarf (a low-mass star at the end of its evolution),” Wang wrote.

“However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing,” he added. “This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution.”

Wang and his team hope to detect similar another using radio waves and the Chandra X-ray observatory, saying a subsequent discovery will help them learn more about the nature of such LPTs

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“We’ve Got a New Mystery on Our Hands”: Scientists Stumped by Unexplained Motion in Titan’s Atmosphere

Scientists have detected mysterious, gyroscopic motion within the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan that appears to be completely independent from its surface rotation.

Scientists from the University of Bristol made the discovery while analyzing sensor data from the NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission’s flyby of the Saturnian moon. The researchers say they cannot explain the mysterious motion, which seems connected to the moon’s seasons, each lasting several Earth years.

Titan has long fascinated scientists due to its similarities to Earth. Such features include its rocky surface, lakes and rivers of methane and ethane with ocean-like waves, and a thick, carbon-rich atmosphere (a rarity within the solar system).

The team behind the latest discovery says their findings join a growing body of research suggesting Titan is not just Earth-like in appearance, “but an alien world with climate systems all its own.”

Mysterious Gyroscopic Motion of the Atmosphere and Other Titan Mysteries

Launched as a joint venture between NASA and the ESA in 1997, the long-range Cassini-Huygens probe spent the final 13 years studying Saturn and its moons in the infrared spectrum. Although the spacecraft made its final transmission in 2017 before intentionally crashing into Saturn, scientists are still making regular discoveries by combing through the mission’s treasure trove of scientific data. Previously, scientists relied on the mission’s data to debate Titan’s past and present habitability and whether the moon could support life.

For the current study, the University of Bristol team focused on data measuring the symmetry of Titan’s atmospheric temperature field. A comparison between atmospheric and surface data showed that the atmosphere isn’t centered on the moon’s pole as was expected. Instead, the data revealed an atmospheric shift over time that appeared to be aligned with Titan’s seasonal cycle. The correlation was particularly pronounced since a year on Titan lasts nearly 30 Earth years.

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