NASA's Lucy Probe Snaps Its Closeup of a Weirdly Shaped Asteroid

By Alan Boyle April 21, 2025
Closeup of asteroid Donaldjohanson
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft made a successful flyby of the second asteroid on its must-see list over the weekend, and sent back imagery documenting the elongated object’s bizarre double-lobed shape. It turns out that asteroid Donaldjohanson — which was named after the anthropologist who discovered the fossils of a human ancestor called Lucy — is what’s known as a contact binary, with a couple of ridges in its narrow neck.
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Did the Moon's Water Come From the Solar Wind?

By Andy Tomaswick April 21, 2025
Where did the water we believe is on the Moon come from? Most scientists think they know the answer - from the solar wind. They believed the hydrogen atoms that make up the solar wind bombarded the lunar surface, which is made up primarily of silica. When that hydrogen hits the oxygen atoms in that silica, the oxygen is sometimes released and freed to bond with the incoming hydrogen, which in some cases creates water. But no one has ever attempted to replicate that process to prove its feasibility. A new paper by Li Hsia Yeo and their colleagues at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center describes the first experimental evidence of that reaction.
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Bacteria That Can Mimic Multi-Cellular Life

By Evan Gough April 21, 2025
Scientists are still trying to understand the origin of multicellular life. It emerged about 1.2 billion years ago (or even earlier, according to some debated evidence). The timing of multicellular life's appearance on Earth is not the only thing being debated; so are the mechanisms behind it. New research supports the idea that multicellular life began when single-celled bacteria started grouping together.
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Delivering Payloads to Mars with CHAMPS

By Matthew Williams April 20, 2025
A team of NASA scientists proposed a new initiative at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (2025 LPSC). Known as the Commercial Hall Propulsion for Mars Payload Services (CHAMPS), the
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Mars Has the Remnants of a Lopsided Magnetic Field

By Andy Tomaswick April 19, 2025
Scientists have known for a while that Mars currently lacks a magnetic field, and many blame that for its paltry atmosphere - with no protective shield around the planet, the solar wind was able to strip away much of the gaseous atmosphere over the course of billions of years. But, evidence has been mounting that Mars once had a magnetic field. Results from Insight, one of the Red Planet's landers, lend credence to that idea, but they also point to a strange feature - the magnetic field seemed to cover only the southern hemisphere, but not the north. A team from the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics thinks they might know why - in a recent paper, they described how a fully liquid core in Mars could create a lopsided magnetic field like the one seen in Insight’s data.
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Astronomers Watch a Black Hole Wake Up in Real Time

By Carolyn Collins Petersen April 19, 2025
A giant black hole awakens with brilliant bursts of optical and x-ray light. Courtesy ESA.
You never know when a central supermassive black hole is going to power up and start gobbling matter. Contrary to the popular view that these monsters are constantly devouring nearby stars and gas clouds, it turns out they spend part of their existence dormant and inactive. New observations from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft opened a window on the "turn on event" for one of these monsters in a distant galaxy.
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Searching for Life on Mars in the Snow and Ice

By Matthew Williams April 19, 2025
In a recent paper, a team of researchers indicated that photosynthetic bacteria could exist just beneath the snow and ice around Mars' mid-latitudes. If true, this could be the most easily accessible place to look for present-day life on Mars.
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