A weak spot in Earth's magnetic field over the South Atlantic Ocean has ballooned in size since 2014, satellite data reveals.

The region, known as the South Atlantic Anomaly, has grown by an area nearly half the size of continental Europe, sprouting a lobe in the direction of Africa where the field is weakening the fastest.

And the anomaly, linked to mysterious fluctuations near Earth's outer core, could pose a risk to satellites passing over the region, according to a study published in the November issue of the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors.

"The South Atlantic Anomaly is not just a single block," study lead author Chris Finlay, a professor of geomagnetism at the Technical University of Denmark, said in a statement. "It's changing differently towards Africa than it is near South America. There's something special happening in this region that is causing the field to weaken in a more intense way."

Researchers first detected the South Atlantic Anomaly in the 19th century. Inside its boundaries, the magnetic field that radiates away from Earth's interior dips down to an altitude of about 120 miles (200 kilometers) above the planet's surface, which is much lower than the field's average altitude of about 400 miles (650 km).

This poses a threat to satellites and other spacecraft. Earth's magnetic field shields the planet and objects in low Earth orbit from charged solar particles and incoming X-ray and ultraviolet radiation, so spacecraft traveling over the South Atlantic Anomaly are exposed to more of these impacts. This could lead to malfunctions or damage in hardware, and even blackouts, according to the statement.

Finlay and his colleagues think the South Atlantic Anomaly is growing and spreading eastward due to strange fluxes at the limit between Earth's mantle and outer core, the layers of the planet sandwiched between Earth's crust and inner core.

Earth's magnetic field is largely generated by Earth's outer core — an ocean of swirling, molten iron located roughly 1,900 miles (3,000 km) beneath the planet's surface. The liquid iron dynamo generates electrical currents, and their flow induces a magnetic field that spreads up into the mantle and extends through Earth's atmosphere, forming two giant rings that join near the poles.

Scientists previously found that in some areas beneath the South Atlantic Anomaly, the magnetism generated by the outer core is looping back into the core instead of coming out. These patterns, known as reverse flux patches, can migrate and expand, explaining the growth of the South Atlantic Anomaly over the past 11 years, Finlay said.

“We can see one of these areas moving westward over Africa, which contributes to the weakening of the South Atlantic Anomaly [the magnetic field] in this region," he added.

The scientists spotted the unusual shifts in data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA's) ongoing Swarm mission, which uses three identical satellites to measure magnetic signals originating from Earth's interior and oceans. The data also revealed changes in magnetic field dynamics above Canada and Siberia, where magnetism has appeared more intense than average since Swarm began its observations in 2013.

Since 2014, the magnetic field above Canada has weakened slightly, and the magnetic field above Siberia has strengthened, the new study shows. The strong region over Canada has shrunk by an area nearly the size of India, while the strong region over Siberia has grown by an area the size of Greenland. The researchers attributed these changes to a shift in Earth's northern magnetic pole in Siberia's direction over recent years, but more monitoring is needed to see how the dynamics evolve.

"It's really wonderful to see the big picture of our dynamic Earth," Anja Strømme, ESA's Swarm mission manager, said in the statement. "The satellites are all healthy and providing excellent data, so we can hopefully extend that record beyond 2030."

Scientists have identified 85 previously unknown lakes hidden beneath Antarctica's ice using a decade's worth of satellite data.

The newfound lakes are "active," meaning they periodically drain and refill, changing size and shape over months and years, the researchers said. This subglacial activity affects the stability of glaciers and their grinding movement over the Antarctic bedrock, which in turn could impact global sea levels, the team noted.

"It was fascinating to discover that the subglacial lake areas can change during different filling or draining cycles," study co-author Anna Hogg, a professor of Earth observation at the University of Leeds in the U.K., said in a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA). "This shows that Antarctic subglacial hydrology is much more dynamic than previously thought, so we must continue to monitor these lakes as they evolve in the future."

Before this latest discovery, 146 active subglacial lakes were already known in Antarctica. The new study brings the total number of active lakes to 231 and adds to scientists' understanding of when and how subglacial lakes drain and refill, study lead author Sally Wilson said in the statement.

"It is incredibly difficult to observe subglacial lake filling and draining events," said Wilson, who is a doctoral student in the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science at the University of Leeds. "Only 36 complete cycles, from the start of subglacial filling through to the end of draining, had been observed worldwide before our study. We observed 12 more complete fill-drain events, bringing the total to 48."

Subglacial lakes are pools of meltwater that form when geothermal heat from Earth's interior rises to the base of an ice sheet, or when enough frictional heat is generated by ice grinding on the bedrock. Subglacial lakes can sometimes periodically drain, creating a flow of water that lubricates the bottom of the ice sheet and helps it slide on the bedrock, accelerating the movement of ice toward the ocean.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data captured between 2010 and 2020 from ESA's Cryosat-2 satellite, which measures variations in the thickness of sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets worldwide. Cryosat-2 carries an instrument called a radar altimeter that can detect small changes in the height of ice features, including changes resulting from lakes draining and filling at the base of the ice.

The data revealed dozens of locations where the Antarctic Ice Sheet is sinking and rising slightly as a result of meltwater draining and refilling subglacial lakes beneath the surface. The observations also showed 25 clusters of lakes and five never-before-seen subglacial lake networks with interconnected drain-and-refill cycles, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Sept. 19 in the journal Nature Communications.

The results are important because they improve scientists' understanding of ice sheet dynamics and how these impact global sea levels, which could help researchers design more accurate climate and Earth models. "The numerical models we currently use to project the contribution of entire ice sheets to sea level rise do not include subglacial hydrology," Wilson said. "These new datasets of subglacial lake locations, extents, and timeseries of change, will be used to develop our understanding of the processes driving water flow beneath Antarctica."

Some subglacial lakes in Antarctica are stable, meaning they do not drain and refill. An example is Lake Vostok, which sits beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and holds more than enough water to fill the Grand Canyon, according to the statement. If Lake Vostok ever started emptying, it could affect the entire ice sheet and cause global sea levels to rise, the researchers noted.

"The more we understand about the complex processes affecting the Antarctic Ice Sheet, including the flow of meltwater at the base of the ice sheet, the more accurately we will be able to project the extent of future sea level rise," Martin Wearing, a digital twin Earth scientist and ESA's Polar Science Cluster coordinator, concluded in the statement.

Antarctica quiz: Test your knowledge on Earth's frozen continent

Despite being known as the Red Planet, Mars shows off its swirling yellows, oranges and browns in a new satellite photo from the European Space Agency (ESA). The Earth-toned surface also reveals an impact crater and four sneaky dust devils making their way across the region.

The Rothko-like image was taken by a high-resolution camera on ESA’s Mars Express orbiter and captures Arcadia Planitia, an area of Mars critical to research about the planet’s past and its potential to house humans in the future.

Arcadia Planitia

Northwest of the tallest volcanoes in the solar system, Arcadia Planitia is a region of intrigue. It's laden with solidified lava flows that are, at most, 3 billion years old. The area is also thought to host water ice close to the planet's surface, making it an area of interest when planning future missions to Mars, according to a statement from ESA.

Arcadia Planitia is home to visiting "dust devils," short-lived columns of wind akin to small tornadoes. Dust devils form when the Martian surface warms the air just above it, leading the air to rise and pulling dust with it. The new image shows four dust devils as they snake their way across the plains of the region. Easy to overlook, you can spot them as whitish puffs of dust near the center of the image, straddling the boundary between the darker brown and lighter red parts of the plain.

A large impact crater sits in the bottom right corner of the photo and measures 9 miles (15 kilometers) across, according to ESA. The formation of layered material around the crater is evidence that the ground encompassed notable amounts of water ice during impact, and lack of clear erosion of the crater dates it to relatively recently on the geological timeline.

Related: Perseverance rover spots peculiar 'spider egg' rock on Mars — and scientists have no idea how it got there

Is the picture out of focus?

If you noticed that the image is blurry, you're discerning an effect of the wind on Mars. Gusts of air pick up and carry tiny particles of debris from the planet's surface, which creates a minor visual haze.

The wind that causes the haze is also responsible for the reddish area at the top of the photo. The red region is covered in ridges called "yardangs," which are formed when wind erodes vulnerable rock and leaves the most resistant rock still standing.

Below the red section is purplish-brown terrain, which has a high concentration of silicates and a low concentration of iron, the statement notes. The difference in colors also stems from properties of the sand, like density and size, which affect how the grains accumulate and travel across Mars.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

Like a ship sailing through changing weather at sea, our solar system's journey around the center of the Milky Way takes it through varying galactic environments — and one of them may have had a lasting impact on Earth's climate, a new study suggests.

Observations from the European Space Agency's recently retired Gaia mission indicate that around 14 million years ago, our solar system passed through a dense, star-forming region in the direction of the constellation Orion. This region is part of a vast network of star clusters that spans nearly 9,000 light-years and is sculpted into a structure that astronomers have dubbed the Radcliffe Wave in honor of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Massachusetts, where the wave’s existence was confirmed.

When our solar system swirled through this structure millions of years ago, it may have received an increased flow of interstellar dust. The timing of this event aligns with Earth's transition from a warmer to a cooler climate, as reflected in the expansion of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. This raises the possibility that the encounter could have contributed to that climatic shift in concert with several other factors and ongoing processes, the new study posits.

Further research may be able to test this theory. If unusually high abundances of radioactive elements — which are expected from such substantial dust influx — are indeed ever spotted in our planet's geological record, it would strengthen the study's hypothesis, "because you would have a geological signature and an astronomical perspective that can explain it," study lead author Efrem Maconi, a doctoral student in astrophysics at the University of Vienna, told Live Science.

He and his colleagues described the findings in a paper published last month in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. However, spotting the crucial evidence in our planet's geological record — a 14-million-year-old spike in the abundance of a rare iron isotope called iron-60, which is commonly released by supernovas but extremely rare on Earth — will not be easy.

"Looking back in time is hard — no matter if you're doing it in space or Antarctica," Teddy Kareta, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona who was not involved with the new research, told Live Science. "This is a really exciting scenario they've hypothesized, but finding concrete evidence for it mattering for the Earth's climate, or even assessing the increase in dust flux that the solar system experienced, might take quite a bit of time and quite a bit of work from across the sciences."

"We are really talking about yesterday"

Even though the Radcliffe Wave resides in our galactic backyard, at just 400 light-years away, astronomers just noticed it in 2020 thanks to the Gaia telescope's ability to pinpoint the distances and velocities of known star-forming gas clouds, which allowed astronomers to create a 3D map of the solar neighborhood.

Related: 32 alien planets that really exist

Using Gaia's most recent data, Maconi and his colleagues simulated the journey of 56 young star clusters associated with the Radcliffe Wave, tracing both their current orbits in the Milky Way and their pre-birth trajectories, which were inferred from their natal molecular clouds. This allowed the researchers to essentially "go back in time and see where they were in the past in relation to the solar system," Maconi said.

The researchers found that our solar system was at its closest point to the Orion region around 14 million years ago, approaching within 65 light-years of at least two local, dust-heavy star clusters: NGC 1980 and NGC 1981. At the time, our solar system was largely as it is today; Earth and the other planets had been formed for more than 4 billion years. Yet, in cosmic terms, "we are really talking about yesterday," Maconi said.

The simulations suggest that our solar system spent roughly 1 million years within this dense region, coinciding with our planet's "Middle Miocene" transition from a warmer to a cooler climate. That points to the possibility that substantial interstellar dust could have blocked some of the sun's radiation, thereby accelerating the planet-wide cooling, the new study posits.

"It's a big claim to suggest galactic influences on the climate of the Earth," Kareta said. But "the agreement in timing between both events should certainly motivate astronomers and geologists alike to try to assess the likelihood of this scenario in more depth."

An extraordinary claim without extraordinary evidence — yet

There is "reasonable evidence to believe that Earth's voyage around the Milky Way influenced its geology," Chris Kirkland, a geologist at Curtin University in Australia who was not involved with the new study, told Live Science.

For instance, previous research led by Kirkland suggested frequent, high-energy impacts from meteorites during Earth's youth contributed to the production of continental crust on Earth. Kirkland declined to comment on the idea that extraterrestrial dust — as opposed to impacts — may have influenced Earth's climate, however.

In the new study, Maconi and his team noted that the extraterrestrial dust reaching Earth would need to spike by at least six orders of magnitude higher than present-day levels to fully account for planet-scale climate effects. More subtle, indirect influences were more likely at play, and these effects would have unfolded over hundreds of thousands of years, setting them apart from current, human-driven climate change, Maconi said.

Even these differences are difficult to decipher, however, primarily because the geological record for the telltale iron-60 isotope stops at around 10 million years ago. Moreover, iron-60 is unstable, with a half-life of about 2.6 million years, making it especially challenging to detect a signal from an event that occurred 14 million years ago.

"The challenges in peering far back into the history of the Earth's climate clearly limit our ability to assess the likelihood that the Radcliffe Wave had climatological effects at present," Kareta said, "but advances in instrumentation and analysis techniques will likely facilitate us doing better in the future."

There may be other places in our solar system that, unlike Earth's landscape-recycling geological processes, might preserve either the dust itself or the telltale spike of extraterrestrial radioactive elements, Kareta added. These could include deep craters on the moon, specifically near its poles, which receive no sunlight throughout the year and should, in principle, stay cold and stable over long timescales, he said.

"Solar-system-wide processes ought to have left solar-system-wide evidence," Kareta said.

Scientists have captured magnetic signatures from Earth's ocean tides in the finest detail yet.

These faint signals, which certain satellites can detect when flying at very low orbits, may hold clues about magma distribution beneath the seabed, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).

As seawater ripples over our planet's magnetic field, it generates weak electric currents that in turn produce magnetic signals detectable from space. In a new study, published Dec. 2, 2024 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, researchers deciphered these signals using data from ESA's ongoing Swarm mission, which comprises three satellites that measure Earth's magnetic field.

"These are among the smallest signals detected by the Swarm mission so far," study lead author Alexander Grayver, a geophysist and senior lecturer at the University of Cologne in Germany, said in the statement.

Earth's magnetic field results from a swirling sea of electrically charged molten iron in the planet's outer core. Heat currents and Earth's spin both fuel the movement of this liquid iron. The core's movement creates a giant, bipolar envelope that extends into space, shielding us from cosmic radiation and charged particles emitted by the sun.

Related: Listen to haunting sounds of Earth's magnetic field flipping 41,000 years ago in eerie new animation

Swarm launched in 2013 and has been collecting information about Earth's magnetic field ever since. But clear signals created by ocean tides are difficult to obtain, because they are so faint they hardly ever break through the widespread "noise" in space, according to the statement.

In the late 2010s, several factors aligned that enabled Swarm to record the magnetic signatures of ocean tides in unprecedented detail. One of these factors was a dramatic reduction in the sun's activity, and another was the closeness of Swarm satellites to Earth.

"The data are particularly good because they were gathered during a period of solar minimum, when there was less noise due to space weather," Grayver said.

The sun follows a roughly 11-year cycle that dictates the level of activity at its surface. At the solar maximum, the sun emits huge waves of electromagnetic radiation and charged particles that obscure measurements of magnetic signals from Earth. Activity dies down during the solar minimum, making it easier for satellites to pick up these signals.

ESA initially planned to end the Swarm mission in 2017, but its valuable results prompted the agency to extend it. Over the years, drag has pulled the satellites closer to Earth, enabling the instruments on board to pick up faint signals that they could not have detected in their original, higher orbits.

"This is one of the benefits of flying missions for longer than originally planned, Anja Strømme, ESA's Swarm mission manager, said in the statement. "You can tackle scientific questions that weren't originally envisaged."

The new study shows that satellites can peer through the depths of Earth's oceans and extract useful information, Strømme said.

Swarm could stay operational until 2030, when the next solar minimum is due. Scientists hope that this will provide another rare opportunity to detect hidden ocean signals.

China's space agency could be the first to bring samples from Mars to Earth, in a plan that would return Martian rocks and sediment in 2031.

In a paper published in the November issue of the journal National Science Review, researchers from the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory and collaborating institutions within China laid out a plan for Tianwen-3, a two-spacecraft Mars lander mission planned by the China National Space Administration. In a September update at a space exploration conference, Jizhong Liu, the chief designer of Tianwen-3, said the mission is on track to launch in 2028.

According to Space News, Tianwen-3 will include a lander, an ascent vehicle, an orbiter and a return module; it also may use a helicopter and a six-legged robot for gathering samples at a distance from the lander.

In the National Science Review paper, Zengqian Hou of the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory and Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences reported that there are 86 potential sites being considered for the Tianwen-3 landing spot. Most are clustered in Chryse Planitia, a smooth plain in Mars' northern equatorial region, and Utopia Planitia, the largest impact basin on Mars, where China landed a rover in 2021.

Related: Why can't we see the far side of the moon?

These sites are promising for the key aim of the Tianwen-3 mission, which is to look for signs of past life on Mars, Hou and his colleagues wrote. The sites were chosen because they offer relatively forgiving landing topography and because rocks and sediment there might still preserve traces of ancient Martian life.

A 2028 launch would bring Tianwen-3 back to Earth in 2031. (A one-way trip between Earth and Mars takes between seven and 11 months, depending on the alignment of the planets on a given date.) Samples would be analyzed in multiple ways, Hou and his team wrote. These methods would include mass spectrometry, to determine their elemental makeup, and isotopic analysis, to look at the ratio of different versions of elements that might indicate the past presence of living organisms.

If the Tianwen-3 mission remains on track, it will beat NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) in bringing Mars rocks back to Earth by nearly a decade. NASA announced in April that the planned Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, a joint effort between NASA and ESA, would be delayed until the 2030s. Under the current plan, the MSR lander would launch in 2035, and the sample-return mission wouldn't occur until 2040.

China's Chang'e-6 mission recently brought back the first-ever samples from the far side of the moon. An early analysis revealed the first evidence of volcanic activity on the lunar far side, suggesting volcanoes were erupting there as recently as 2.8 billion years ago.

The 2024 Summer Olympics started Friday (July 26) in Paris with the opening ceremony highlighting historic landmarks along the Seine River, which can be seen in a new satellite image from space. 

The European Space Agency (ESA) shared a high-resolution image of central Paris, where the Olympic games are being held from July 26 through Aug. 11, 2024. 

The image was taken by the space agency's Pléiades Neo mission — a constellation of two identical satellites called Pléiades-1A and Pléiades-1B — offering a detailed view of various Olympic venues. 

The ESA interactive image allows viewers to zoom in on notable locations throughout the city where different competitions will be held. This includes the Bercy Arena, which is located in Paris' 12th district (right-most landmark in the new satellite image) and easily recognized by its pyramid design. The Bercy Arena will host artistic gymnastics, trampoline and basketball games. 

The satellite view also captures Notre Dame (center of the image), which is covered in scaffolding as it undergoes restoration processes following a devastating fire five years ago. The cathedral was highlighted during the opening ceremony, during which the bells were rung for the first time since the fire. 

"The oval shape of the Stade de France stands out at the top of the image, with the Aquatics Centre to its left, one of the two permanent venues constructed for the Games," ESA officials said in the statement releasing the satellite image. "The Arc de Triomphe can be spotted easily near the center-left of the image, standing at the center of Place Charles de Gaulle, where 12 grand avenues converge to form a star."

 Perhaps most notable in the satellite image is the iconic Eiffel Tower, where two temporary arenas have been built to host a number of competitions, including beach volleyball. 

The interactive image shared by ESA allows viewers to click on more than a dozen circles to learn more about each location throughout the city. 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Originally posted on Space.com.

The warp in the Milky Way's spiral disk is precessing backward under the influence of the enormous mass of dark matter that forms an invisible halo around our galaxy, Chinese astronomers have discovered.

About one-third of all spiral galaxies have a distinct warp to their disk-shaped structure, like a vinyl record that has been bent. It's usually the result of a variety of factors; a collision with another galaxy in the past is believed to be the primary culprit in causing the Milky Way's warp in the first place, but further interactions with satellite galaxies and the intergalactic magnetic field, as well as the infall of vast clouds of gas, can also play their part. However, in the case of the Milky Way at least, the major player in maintaining the warp is the dark matter halo that surrounds the disk and exerts a torque on it.

This warp isn't fixed. Its alignment with the rest of the galaxy moves — specifically, it "precesses." Precession describes how the alignment of the warp changes with respect to the rotational axis of the galaxy, meaning that the peak, or node, of the warp precesses around the galaxy. It's a variation of the same phenomenon that causes spinning tops to wobble. 

Measuring the warp's rate of precession, however, has proven challenging in the past. Previous estimates have attempted to use the vertical motion of bright, but old, giant stars as tracers to calculate the rate of precession. However, such tracers are notoriously imprecise, and results based on them had suggested — counter to theory — that the disk is precessing prograde (in the same direction as the rotation of the rest of the galaxy) and not retrograde (backward with respect to the galaxy), as had been expected.

Related: The Milky Way may be surrounded by 'too many' mini galaxies, new discoveries reveal

Now, astronomers led by Yang Huang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have used another, more accurate tracer in the form of Cepheid variable stars to make the most accurate measure of the warp's precession yet, finding it to be moving retrograde after all.

Cepheid variables are pulsating massive stars. Their period of pulsation is linked to how intrinsically bright they are, and based on their luminosity, we can calculate exactly how far away they must be. This makes them great tracers for mapping the warp.

Huang's team achieved their results by way of what they call the "motion picture" method. Using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia astrometric spacecraft, which is measuring the positions, motions and properties, including the age, of more than a billion stars, Huang's team identified a sample of 2,613 Cepheids with a variety of ages.

"Age is key to measuring the precession rate of the disk warp," say the authors in their research paper. "We obtained a motion picture of the disk warp by mapping the three-dimensional distributions for Cepheid samples of different ages."

Each Cepheid retains information on its position in the warp when it was born, so by grouping the Cepheids into different age ranges and mapping them, Huang's team were able to show the shape and position of the warp at different points in time over the past 200 million years. By then running the individual maps together, like a motion picture, they were able to see the warp precessing. They found that it is precessing in retrograde fashion after all, at a rate of 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) per second for every kiloparsec (3,261 light-years) of space. Or, in more intuitive units, it is precessing backward around the galaxy by a rate of 0.12 degrees every million years.

What's more, the motion picture also shows that the precession rate decreases with distance from the galactic center, which in the long term will lead to greater warping of the disk. Models indicate that this decrease is the result of the dark matter halo that is exerting the torque being oblate, or flattened, in shape.

The shape of the dark matter halo is important because it acts as a data point that theorists can plug into models that attempt to predict what dark matter is made of (such as WIMPs or axions). It also gives clues about the formation history of the Milky Way galaxy and how it has been assembled through mergers with other, smaller galaxies and gas clouds, collisions and interactions that have helped shape the invisible dark matter halo.

The discovery of the precession rate of the warp is described in a paper published on June 27 in Nature Astronomy.

Originally posted on Space.com.

The "Eye of the Sahara" — also known as the "Eye of Africa" or the Richat structure — is a giant rock dome, carved with concentric rings, that looks like a giant bullseye when seen from above. The eye is visible from space and has been known to astronauts and scientists since the earliest crewed missions in the 1950s, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

Estimates of the Eye of the Sahara's dimensions range from 25 to 31 miles (40 to 50 kilometers) in diameter. The eye forms a near-perfect circle in the desert of Mauritania, which initially led scientists to think it was an impact structure from a meteor. However, subsequent research found the dome was shaped by tectonic uplift during the Cretaceous period (between 145 and 66 million years ago) and laid bare through erosion.

The Eye of the Sahara stands out like an oversized ammonite among an immense sea of sand known as the Erg Oudane, which stretches roughly 350 miles (560 km) east to Mali. Ergs are areas of desert that span at least 48 square miles (125 square kilometers) and feature wind-swept sands with little to no vegetation. The eye towers about 660 feet (200 meters) above the surrounding sands, which rise against its southern edge and occasionally obscure parts of the structure in photographs, according to ESA.  

Related: Mystery of enormous Saharan 'star dune' finally solved — and it wasn't what scientists were expecting

The center of the Eye of the Sahara is a round plateau of limestone and breccias — sedimentary rocks with large, broken fragments that are cemented together by a fine-grained matrix — according to a 2021 study. The rest of the eye slopes down from this plateau in a circular pattern of ridges and grooves that have been sculpted by wind and water over the eons. The ridges are mostly made of resistant quartzite, while the grooves consist of less-resistant sedimentary rocks that wear away more quickly. 

The reason why the eye is so round remains unclear, according to the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Erosion has exposed four types of igneous rock — gabbros, rhyolites, carbonatites and kimberlites — which are younger than the center of the eye, indicating that jets of molten rock rose and solidified at the surface. Several faults are also visible on the outer rings of the eye, suggesting that layers of rock shifted apart in the process. 

The Eye of the Sahara is a geological marvel, but it also holds archaeological significance, according to Geographical, a magazine published by the U.K.'s Royal Geographical Society. Excavations have unveiled 2-million-year-old Acheulean and pre-Acheulean tools that are associated with two species of ancient human ancestors: Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis. 

Proponents of the debunked myth of Atlantis — a "lost" island subcontinent idealized by some as an advanced, utopian society — claim the Eye of the Sahara is evidence of the city described by Plato in his "Timaeus" and "Critias" dialogues.

But "together, modern archaeology and geology provide an unambiguous verdict," Ken Feder, a professor emeritus of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University, previously told Live Science. "There was no great civilization called Atlantis."

There's no need to turn to mythology for answers when geology provides enough of its own.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

An asteroid that tore through the atmosphere over Germany in January was spinning faster than any other near-Earth object ever recorded, new research suggests.

The space rock, dubbed 2024 BX1, turned into a fireball and exploded over Berlin in the early hours of Jan. 21. Although small asteroids on collision courses with Earth are typically detected only when they crash into the atmosphere, scientists spotted this one roughly three hours before impact.

That's not the only way 2024 BX1 was unusual, according to a paper published to the preprint database arXiv on April 5. Researchers think the asteroid, which was traveling 31,000 mph (50,000 km/h), was rotating once every 2.6 seconds — the fastest spin ever seen for an asteroid. 

Previously, the record for the fastest-spinning asteroid belonged to a flying rock called 2020 HS7, which showed a rotation period of 2.99 seconds. That asteroid measured between 13 and 24 feet (4 to 8 meters) in diameter, which is slightly bigger than 2024 BX1 and may explain why the latter spun faster.

Asteroids spin for several reasons, such as being propelled back into space after a collision. Because they are more compact, smaller asteroids tend to spin faster than larger ones. "They have internal strength, so they can rotate faster," lead author Maxime Devogèle, a physicist at the University of Central Florida who works with the European Space Agency, told New Scientist.

Related: Researchers just found more than 1,000 new solar system objects hiding in plain sight

Devogèle and his colleagues studied the rotational speeds of three asteroids, including 2024 BX1, using images they took as the objects approached Earth. The other two asteroids, 2023 CX1 and 2024 EF, were described based on close calls with our planet recorded on Feb. 13, 2023, and March 4, 2024, respectively.

The researchers developed a new technique to visualize the asteroids' dizzying rotational speeds. The method involved adjusting the size of the aperture — the hole light passes through to enter a camera — to keep the starry background sharp and let the asteroid appear as a trail of light.

When photographing asteroids, scientists can usually tune the exposure time so that both the flying rock and the region of space behind it remain relatively crisp. But near-Earth objects like 2024 BX1 travel so fast that they require impossibly short exposure times to appear clear.

"Instead of tracking the asteroid motion, leading to stars appearing trailed on the images, we observed the asteroid using sidereal tracking and let the asteroid sweep through the field," the researchers wrote in the paper, which has not been peer-reviewed.

Thanks to a long exposure time, the resulting images show the asteroid 2024 BX1 trailing against the starry sky. Changes in brightness along the path highlight where the object rotated and suggest it had an elongated shape, according to the paper. The researchers measured the distance between these bright spots and found that it corresponded to a rotation time of 2.588 seconds, amounting to around 33,000 rotations per day.

"The advantage of this technique is that it allows [us] to extract the brightness of the object over time in single images," the researchers wrote. "We show that this technique works and is highly effective in detecting fast rotating asteroids."

Knowing the rotational speeds of asteroids flying close to Earth could be useful in mitigating the risk such objects pose to humans and infrastructure, they added. 

On Thursday (Dec. 5) the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a groundbreaking mission to make solar eclipses a daily occurence — in space, at least.

Known as Proba-3, the mission began by launching twin spacecraft into Earth orbit, where they will align with each other to create frequent, artificial eclipses in space. The unique mission will give researchers near-unlimited access to studying the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, for the first time.

The Proba-3 mission involves a pair of probes known as Coronagraph and Occulter. When in orbit, Occulter will be able to position itself between Coronagraph and the sun so that it perfectly blocks out just enough sunlight to simulate terrestrial eclipses. In doing so, Coronagraph's camera will be able to focus on the corona, which appears as a swirling sea of wispy plasma lines when it is viewed in isolation from the rest of the sun.

The twin probes successfully launched from India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 16:04 local time, according to ESA. The pair is currently attached together, and will remain so throughout the initial commissioning phase of the mission, ESA added.

Once commissioned, it will take the two spacecraft around 19.5 hours to complete a single, highly elliptical (or stretched) orbit around Earth, and they will be in eclipse formation for six continuous hours every rotation. While they are forming an eclipse, the two spacecraft will be around 470 feet (144 meters) apart, which means they must be perfectly aligned for the maneuver to work properly. If the two probes are not in sync, Occulter's shadow could block light from reaching Coronagraph's solar panel array, thereby jeopardizing the spacecraft's power.

Related: Could we turn the sun into a gigantic telescope?

During terrestrial eclipses, the sun's corona becomes more visible to us on Earth than at any other time, which allows us to see things that would normally be hidden to us. For example, during the recent "ring of fire" eclipse that occurred above Australia on April 20, 2023, scientists could clearly see a gigantic cloud of magnetized plasma, known as a coronal mass ejection, as it exploded out of the sun.

However, terrestrial eclipses last only a maximum of around five to 10 minutes and happen just once or twice a year. The new mission will, therefore, exponentially increase the amount of high-quality data that researchers can analyze. Being able to see the corona in this much detail for prolonged periods every day will allow researchers to study how solar storms explode from the sun and how solar wind is generated, as well as to measure the sun's overall energy output.

Russell Howard, an astrophysicist and mission scientist for NASA's Parker Solar Probe, praised the ingenuity of this "unique project" and added that having access to the new data "will be spectacular."

The mission's launch coincides with the explosive peak in the sun's 11-year solar cycle, known as solar maximum. According to NASA and NOAA, solar maximum is well underway, and solar activity should remain strong for at least the next year. This should allow Proba-3 to start making discoveries right away.

A newborn island that recently emerged from the Pacific Ocean after an underwater volcanic eruption is now visible from space, images from the European Space Agency (ESA) reveal. The satellite images show the new landmass sitting around 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) off the coast off Japan's Iwo Jima island. 

The submerged volcano began erupting on Oct. 21, with activity ramping up over the next 10 days. By Oct. 30, explosions were taking place every few minutes, according to a translated statement. The eruption threw large lumps of rock into the air, and shot a jet of gas and ash over 160 feet (50 meters) almost vertically above the water's surface.

Related: Scientists discover ancient, underwater volcano is still active — and covered in up to a million giant eggs

Since the volcano started erupting, "volcanic ash and rocks have piled up to form the new island, which is now also visible from space," a statement from the ESA said. The latest image was captured with the Landsat 9 satellite on Nov. 3. It shows Iwo Jima — which sits around 750 miles (1,200 km) south of Tokyo — before and after the latest eruption. 

Along with the new island, the volcano also produced a sea of floating pumice — an extremely porous type of rock that forms during explosive eruptions. New analysis of this pumice found its chemical composition differed from that of  ejecta from other volcanoes in this chain, according to a different translated statement. The pumice likely came from an eruption along the back-arc rift zone — the area behind a volcanic arc, the statement noted.

The latest eruption is in almost the exact same spot as one that took place in July 2022, suggesting magma activity is resuming at Iwo Jima. The eruption has now subsided,  Yuji Usui, an analyst with the Japan Meteorological Agency, told the AP. 

The new island was approximately 330 feet (100 m) wide and up to 66 feet (20 m) high, but it appears to be shrinking as the waves erode the "crumbly" rock, Usui said. Whether the new island will survive is unclear and depends on what it is made of: If it is lava, it could remain for longer. "We just have to see the development," he told the AP. 

The Gaia mission has revealed a "goldmine" of new information on cosmic objects as it continues to create the most comprehensive stellar catalog ever compiled.

The new release, known as Gaia's focused product release (FPR), contains over half a million new faint stars, more than 380 new gravitationally lensed quasars and the positions of over 150,000 solar system asteroids.

Containing data on 1.8 billion stars, the comprehensive map of the Milky Way galaxy and its cosmic backyard being created by Gaia will allow scientists to continue to dig deep into our cosmic history. The new release fills in some important gaps in that map as it forms.

According to Gaia's operators, the European Space Agency (ESA), the new data provides exciting and unexpected science and findings that go far beyond what the space telescope was initially designed to discover.

The new trove of research builds upon the third Data Release (DR3) from Gaia published in June 2022. Though comprehensive, DR3 contained gaps in the sky not yet mapped by the space telescope and overlooked some faint stars that didn't shine as bright as their surrounding stellar companions.

Particular examples of this are globular clusters, which are some of the oldest objects in the universe with densely clustered cores of bright stars that can overwhelm telescopes attempting to study them.

More than filling in unexplored regions in Gaia's cosmic map

Part of the new release from the star surveyor space telescope focused on the Milky Way's most massive globular star cluster, Omega Centauri, which contains around 10 million stars  —  making its core the most crowded region of space the telescope has studied thus far.

To patch these gaps, ESA astronomers focused Gaia on Omega Centauri, which, at just around 15,800 light-years away, is relatively close to Earth and can be used as a proxy for the study of other clusters of this type.

"In Omega Centauri, we discovered over half a million new stars Gaia hadn't seen before  —  from just one cluster!" research lead author and member of the Gaia collaboration Katja Weingrill said in a statement.

Instead of focusing on single stars within the cluster, something Gaia specializes in, the space telescope observed Omega Centauri with a special mode that allows Gaia to look at a wider patch of sky around the core of the globular cluster each time it came into view. Thus, the new observations also helped test this special mode and Gaia's instruments.

"We didn't expect to ever use it for science, which makes this result even more exciting," Weingrill added.

Though the new data has helped fill in some unexplored regions in Gaia's 3D map of the Milky Way, it is of interest to scientists in itself, helping better model the Omega Centauri globular cluster.

"Our data allowed us to detect stars that are too close together to be properly measured in Gaia's regular pipeline," research co-author and Gaia Collaboration member Alexey Mints added. "With the new data, we can study the cluster's structure, how the constituent stars are distributed, how they're moving, and more, creating a complete large-scale map of Omega Centauri. It's using Gaia to its full potential  —  we've deployed this amazing cosmic tool at maximum power."

In this regard, the new data release of the FPR is just a taster of what is to come in Gaia Data Release 4 (DR4), with the space telescope currently exploring a further eight regions of the Milky Way in a similar fashion to how it investigated Omega Centauri. As a result, by studying cosmic building blocks like Omega Centauri, DR4 could help reveal details about our galaxy, such as its true age, the precise location of its center and if it has collided with other galaxies throughout its history.

Gaia as a gravitational lens hunter

Even though it wasn't designed to study the universe on a wider scale, the FPR releases from Gaia show it could be uncovering things that are vital to understanding the cosmos as a whole, such as its evolution and its precise age.

One of the ways Gaia could have an impact on cosmology is by finding what astronomers call gravitational lenses, objects of great density like star clusters that can be used to amplify light from distant background sources like ancient galaxies. 

This works thanks to an effect predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which suggests that objects of mass "warp" the very fabric of spacetime; the greater the mass, the more extreme the warping is. When a warping object lies between Earth and a distant source, light from that distant source passes the intermediate object and is 'bent' on its way towards us. The amount of deflection depends on how close the light's path comes to the mass source. As a result, light from the same source arrives at Earth at different times and a single object can appear at multiple points in the same image.

This effect can amplify that distant source, allowing objects that would usually be too distant and faint to be seen. The James Webb Space Telescope is currently using this phenomenon to great effect to observe some of the universe's oldest galaxies. Gaia can assist in this by finding more gravitationally lensed objects  —  particularly quasars, the active hearts of galaxies powered by feeding black holes. Spotting lensed quasars isn't easy because the repeated images caused by gravitational lensing can often cluster together, making a single object appear smeared in images and leading to it being misidentified.

"Gaia is a real lens-seeker. Thanks to Gaia, we've found that some of the objects we see aren't simply stars, even though they look like them," research co-author and Gaia collaboration member Christine Ducourant said. "They're actually really distant lensed quasars  —  extremely bright, energetic galactic cores powered by black holes. 

"We now present 381 solid candidates for lensed quasars, including 50 that we deem highly likely: A goldmine for cosmologists and the largest set of candidates ever released at once."

These candidates were selected from a list of possible quasar candidates, some of which were included in DR3, with five of the lensed objects appearing to be rare formations called "Einstein crosses." These occur when light from a single object appears at multiple places in the same image from the shape of a cross. In 2021, Gaia spotted 12 of these Einstein crosses.

"The great thing about Gaia is that it looks everywhere, so we can find lenses without needing to know where to look," research co-author Gaia collaboration member Laurent Galluccio said. "With this data release, Gaia is the first mission to achieve an all-sky survey of gravitational lenses at high resolution."

This demonstrates how Gaia could team up with the ESA's dark matter and dark energy detective Euclid, launched in July 2023, to help investigate these mysterious aspects of the universe that comprise an estimated 95% of its content. The new releases from Gaia also show the space telescope also has utility much closer to home.

Tracking asteroids, red giants, and more with Gaia

Part of the new Gaia releases show details of 156,823 of the asteroids around Earth that were identified in DR3, better pinpointing their locations and constraining their orbits with 20 times more precision than previous observations.

The ESA space telescope did this by observing the space rocks for almost twice as long as it had previously. The ESA predicts that the forthcoming Gaia data dump DR4 will double the number of asteroids seen by the space telescope as well as increasing the number of solar system bodies observed by Gaia by including comets and even satellites around Earth.

The new Gaia releases also include observations of the dynamics of over 10,000 binary red giant stars, making this the largest collection of such stellar objects ever collated, and signals from gas and dust that drift between stars in the disk of the Milky Way.

"Although its key focus is as a star surveyor, Gaia is exploring everything from the rocky bodies of the solar system to multiply imaged quasars lying billions of light-years away, far beyond the edges of the Milky Way," ESA Gaia project scientist Timo Prusti said. "The mission is providing a truly unique insight into the Universe and the objects within it, and we're really making the most of its broad, all-sky perspective on the skies around us."

The FPR from Gaia takes the form of five papers published on Tuesday, Oct. 10.

Originally posted on Space.com.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) dark universe detective, the Euclid spacecraft, is on track after locating its guiding stars, which it lost as a result of cosmic misidentification.

The satellite can now begin investigating dark matter and dark energy, which are some of the greatest mysteries in cosmology. Dark matter accounts for 85% of the matter in the universe but is effectively invisible, and dark energy causes the cosmos to expand at an ever-increasing rate.

Euclid launched to investigate these cosmological mysteries, sometimes collectively known as the dark universe, on July 1 and took a four-week journey to Lagrange point 2, a gravitationally stable point in the Earth-sun system. Although Euclid reached its destination safely, its operators noticed a problem after the spacecraft took its first incredible images of the cosmos: Euclid's Fine Guidance Sensor was having trouble finding its guiding stars, which Euclid uses for navigation. 

The cause of this issue was cosmic rays  —  charged particles that the sun emits during periods of high solar activity. The cosmic rays were impacting the Fine Guidance Sensor, creating signals that Euclid was incorrectly identifying as stars. In addition, stray light from the sun and solar X-rays were interfering with the spacecraft. As a result, artifacts caused by this interference occasionally outnumbered the real stars being spotted by Euclid, meaning the spacecraft couldn't resolve the star patterns it needed to navigate. 

A striking example of the effect of this hiccup on Euclid's operations is an image of a distant star field that shows strange loops and lassos, reminiscent of a child's doodles (shown above). Although beautiful, these doodles aren't helpful in the search for the subtle patterns in distant galaxies and star clusters that could reveal clues about dark energy and dark matter.

Ironing out Euclid's teething troubles

These types of glitches are often experienced during the initial phase of a spacecraft's operations, known as the commissioning phase. Teams at ESA mission control have been working around the clock to better equip the craft for its space-based environment.

The mission team created a software patch that was first applied to an electric model of Euclid here on Earth before being tested on the real thing at Lagrange point 2, which is   around 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from home, ESA officials said in a statement. After being updated and undergoing 10 days of testing in orbit, the Fine Guidance Sensor is working as intended, and Euclid's guide stars have once again been located.

"Our industrial partners  —  Thales Alenia Space and Leonardo  —  went back to the drawing board and revised the way the Fine Guidance Sensor identifies stars," Micha Schmidt, Euclid spacecraft operations manager, said in the statement. "After a major effort and in record time, we were provided with new on-board software to be installed on the spacecraft. We carefully tested the software update step by step under real flight conditions, with realistic input from the Science Operations Centre for observation targets."

Euclid is now ready to restart its all-important performance verification phase,  which was interrupted in August ,  during which final testing will be performed.

"The performance verification phase that was interrupted in August has now fully restarted, and all the observations are carried out correctly," Giuseppe Racca, Euclid project manager, said in the statement. "This phase will last until late November, but we are confident that the mission performance will prove to be outstanding and the regular scientific survey observations can start thereafter."

This is the last step before Euclid can start investigating the dark universe. Euclid will do this by examining around a third of the sky over Earth and by looking back over 10 billion years of cosmic history, mapping 3D models of galaxies to see how the 13.8 billion-year-old universe has taken shape and what role dark matter has played in this evolution. Euclid will also look at large-scale galactic disturbance to see the influence of dark energy as it pushes galaxies apart faster and faster.

"Now comes the exciting phase of testing Euclid in science-like conditions, and we are looking forward to its first images showcasing how this mission will revolutionize our understanding of the dark universe," Carole Mundell, ESA's director of science, said in the statement.

Originally posted on Space.com.

Update: This article was updated on May 23, 2024, with new information and images about Euclid's first science observations.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope successfully blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 1, 2023 and shared its first scientific observations on May 23, 2024.  The groundbreaking space telescope will hunt for clues about two of the universe's greatest mysteries: dark matter and dark energy.

Despite making up an estimated 95% of the universe, dark matter and dark energy cannot be detected directly. Instead, scientists observe them in the gravitational warping effects seen in many galaxies across the universe.  Euclid's enormous field of view will significantly expand this search for warped space-time.

Here's everything you need to know about Euclid and its search for the universe's most mysterious components.

What is Euclid?

Named after the ancient Greek mathematician who's considered the "father of geometry," Euclid is a space telescope that is 14.7 feet (4.5 meters) tall and 10.2 feet (3.1 m) in diameter. The telescope is mounted with just two instruments: a near-infrared camera that will measure the distance and brightness of galaxies, and a visible-light camera that will study their shapes.

Taken on their own, Euclid's cameras are common among space telescopes. What makes Euclid groundbreaking is these instruments' field of view, with a third of the entire night sky and over a billion galaxies expected to be cataloged by the time the telescope has finished its planned six years of scanning. The telescope should be able to peer up to 10 billion years into the past — slightly less than the James Webb Space Telescope, which has looked back more than 13 billion years.

Related: 35 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images

First science observations

On May 23, 2024, ESA shared five images taken during Euclid's first 24 hours of science operations.

The stunning images include the most detailed-ever look at the Messier 78 star-forming region (above), located 1,300 light-years away within the constellation Orion. The vibrant image reveals more than 300,000 previously unknown objects in the region, including newborn stars, and mysterious "runaway" rogue planets ejected from their star systems.

The first crop of science observations also include detailed views of the massive spiral galaxy NGC 6744, the chaotic Dorado Group of colliding galaxies, and the gargantuan galaxy clusters Abell 2390 and Abell 2764. A map of Euclid's first 10 tagets, including its debut science images and five test images, can be seen below.

Euclid's debut images

On July 31, 2023, ESA shared the first images taken by Euclid to test the satellite's two main science instruments.

An image taken with Euclid's Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) revealed a dazzling starscape of billions of stars and galaxies. Before reaching the instrument's detector, light from the distant objects passed through a filter that splits the light of every star and galaxy according to wavelength, allowing astronomers to determine what each object is made of and, in turn, how far it is from Earth.

The researchers also tested Euclid's VISible instrument (VIS), to capture the cosmos in visible light (the same type of light that we can see with our unaided eyes). This dense starscape took Euclid 566 seconds to collect, according to ESA. Both test images are largely unprocessed, and only offer a hint at what Euclid will be capable of delivering when fully operational.

What will Euclid study?

Once Euclid's data has been collected, scientists will use it to create two maps of the universe. The first will detail the spread of dark matter across our universe by gravitational lensing, in which matter bends light from a distant source through curved paths in space-time, thus magnifying it.

The second will use so-called baryon acoustic oscillations, gigantic matter shock waves created when the universe was hot and now frozen in time, as cosmic tree rings to study the universe's accelerating growth and its suspected cause: dark energy.

What is dark matter?

Dark matter is a mysterious and somewhat contradictory type of matter. It makes up an overwhelming 85% of the universe's matter; yet, because it doesn't directly interact with light, it is completely invisible.

So how do we know dark matter is there? While dark matter itself is invisible, the gravitational interactions it has with its surroundings are not — making its presence apparent in its extreme gravitational warping of galaxies, or in how it accelerates stars to otherwise inexplicable speeds as they orbit galactic centers.

The composition of dark matter isn't known. Some theories suggest that hypothetical particles called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), each weighing 10 to 100 times the mass of a proton, could be ideal candidates to fill the theoretical gaps. Others have proposed that a minuscule particle less than a billionth the size of an electron — called an axion — could be the substance's primary candidate.

What is dark energy?

Aside from a similar name, dark energy has little to do with dark matter. Dark energy is the name given to the enigmatic phenomenon of the universe's accelerating, runaway expansion — something that shouldn't be happening given the quantity of our universe's matter and the subsequent strength of its gravity. The answer cosmologists have offered is that some mysterious force in the fabric of the universe must be pushing everything outward.

NASA has estimated that 68% of the universe is composed of dark energy; 27% is dark matter, and visible matter makes up just 5%.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has forced at least 1 million people to flee their homes, and has already seen thousands of Ukrainian civilians killed, could also have wide-reaching and prolonged ramifications for scores of industries and organizations, including many designed to be apolitical.

Global efforts that could suffer include international science collaborations, which focus predominantly on the pursuit of technological and scientific progress. They do this by harnessing knowledge from all corners of the globe: The intention is to create positive change through collaborative effort, and generally operate without political interference.

The unfolding crisis in Ukraine, however, has raised many questions about such partnerships. Should Russia continue to play a role in global projects? Will sanctions stretch to include scientific endeavors? And should international organizations focused on collaboration make a point of remaining politically agnostic?

Various scientific projects around the world — and a notable one beyond Earth's atmosphere — involve Russia, so let's take a look at how these collaborations have reacted to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

ITER

ITER is the world's largest fusion experiment. It involves 35 nations — including Russia, the United States and China — and since its inception, has focused on replicating the sun's fusion processes in a bid to create clean, almost limitless energy on Earth.

To date, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has not resulted in any notable changes to the organization's work. "To my knowledge, there have been no impacts so far," ITER spokesperson Laban Coblentz told Live Science.

ITER was launched as an international project during the Cold War. It has always been collaborative, not because its members are ideologically alike, but "because they share a common goal for a better future," Coblentz said. 

"Throughout ITER's history, political differences among its members — trade wars, border disputes and other disagreements — have never affected the collaborative spirit," Coblentz added. "It is a project of peace."

However, Coblentz was keen to highlight that though the project has not previously been disrupted by political strife, "the events of recent days are without precedent, so we don't know what the effect will be. It is too early to draw conclusions," he said.

He hopes all ITER members will remain "committed to collaboration" and will ultimately be able to focus on their potentially world-changing work.

The European Space Agency

The European Space Agency (ESA) was quick to condemn Russia in the wake of the Ukrainian invasion. In an official statement released Feb. 28, it highlighted the "tragic consequences of the war in Ukraine" and declared that it would give "absolute priority to taking proper decisions, not only for the sake of our workforce involved in the programmes, but in full respect of our European values."

Consequently, ESA stated it would be "fully implementing sanctions imposed on Russia by our Member States." As such, the agency admitted that the ExoMars program — a collaboration with Roscosmos (Russia's space agency) to look for signs of past life on Mars — will likely be delayed. "Sanctions and wider context make a launch in 2022 very unlikely," ESA said, adding that it will continue to monitor the situation "in close contact with its Member States."

The International Science Council

The International Science Council (ISC), a non-governmental organization dedicated to uniting scientific bodies with the aim of advancing science as a "global public good," also issued a swift rebuke following Russia's incursion into Ukrainian territory. 

An official statement notes the ISC's "deep dismay and concerns regarding the military offensives being carried out" and suggests "the conflict in Ukraine and its consequences will hamper the power of science to solve problems when we should be harnessing it."

However, the ISC's statement also confirmed that the council will not be cutting ties with Russia. "The isolation and exclusion of important scientific communities is detrimental to all," the ISC said, adding that "to work collaboratively on global challenges, and on cutting edge research such as Arctic and space research, is only equal to our capacity to maintain strong collaboration amidst geopolitical turmoil."

The ISC "is committed to advancing the equal participation and collaboration between scientists in all countries in its activities and the principle of the free and responsible practice of science."

CERN

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research — home to the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider — has yet to release an official statement regarding the conflict in Ukraine. A CERN spokesperson told Live Science they were "unfortunately not able to reply to questions regarding how Russia's invasion of Ukraine will impact international science/technology projects."

International Space Station

The International Space Station (ISS) has long been lauded for showcasing the value of collaboration and cross-border cooperation. Five space agencies participate in the orbiting space lab: NASA, Roscosmos, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. Since its construction began in 1998, the ISS has conducted scientific research and carried out a host of valuable, nation-agnostic experiments.

The ongoing crisis in Ukraine, however, has created ripples.

Taking to Twitter on March 3, Roscosmos declared that it had canceled joint scientific experiments due to be conducted on the ISS in collaboration with Germany — a statement that arrived just days after Russia signaled that it may not continue to help operate the ISS. This could result in the station having to be decommissioned before its scheduled end date of 2031.

The current crew of seven aboard the ISS consists of Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, Americans Kayla Barron, Mark T. Vande Hei, Raja Chari and Thomas Marshburn, and a solitary German, Matthias Maurer.

Speaking on Feb. 28, Kathy Lueders, Associate Administrator of the Space Operations Mission Directorate and NASA's most prominent official on human spaceflight, said: "We understand the global situation, but as a joint team, these teams are operating together." She added: "We are not getting any indications at a working level that our counterparts are not committed to ongoing operation of the International Space Station," according to Space.com. 

However, it's clear that, on Earth, there is tension, and the situation is changing daily.

On March 3, Dmitry Rogozin, Director General of Roscosmos, said that Russia will stop — for the time being at least — its space cooperation with the United States. He said Russia will no longer deliver rocket engines to the U.S., nor will it provide maintenance, and suggested America instead uses “broomsticks” to power themselves into space. 

However, Tony Bruno, CEO of United Launch Alliance, an American spacecraft launch service provider, has suggested that Russia’s actions may not have a significant immediate impact. "We like to be able to consult with them [Russia] in the event that the engine might do something unexpected," he said via his Twitter account. "But, we have been flying them for years and have developed considerable experience and expertise," he added.

The uncertainty around Russia's continued dedication to the ISS project encouraged billionaire Elon Musk to take to Twitter to suggest that, should Russia stop contributing, his company, SpaceX, will be capable of filling the void and can keep the ISS operational.

Musk was responding to a series of tweets posted by Rogozin in which the Russian asked “who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit into the United States or Europe,” before ominously adding “the ISS does not fly over Russia, so all the risks are yours.”

Currently, Russian spacecraft anchored to the ISS are used to alter the station’s trajectory and flightpath, which is necessary to ensure that it can continue to orbit the Earth effectively. Should Russia remove this capability, SpaceX’s “Dragon” capsules could, according to Musk, carry out this function.

SpaceX already has close ties with the ISS, regularly resupplying the station and delivering astronauts, and so this is a potential solution that will likely be assessed carefully.

Whether Musk's assistance will be required is, for the moment, still up in the air.

Originally published on Live Science.

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) captured a stunning new photo of the luminous green and red lights of an aurora hugging clouds swirling around Earth's night side. 

"Another aurora but this one is special as it is so bright," European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet wrote on Instagram and Twitter. "It is the full Moon lighting up the shadow side of Earth almost like daylight." Pesquet snapped the photo on Aug. 20.

It's not clear whether the lights were the northern lights, known as the aurora borealis, or their southern counterpart, the aurora australis, according to Business Insider. Auroras, named after the Roman goddess of dawn, can be seen clearly from the ground and from space, such as aboard the ISS, where many astronauts have snapped photos of the ghostly light shows.

Related: Northern lights: 8 dazzling facts about auroras

Auroras result from the interaction between the solar wind — a stream of charged particles from the sun — and Earth's magnetic field. The magnetic field accelerates the particles as they enter Earth's upper atmosphere, where they collide with atoms and molecules, according to NASA.

This collision causes atmospheric atoms and molecules to gain energy, which they then release as light. "When we see the glowing aurora, we are watching a billion individual collisions, lighting up the magnetic field lines of Earth," NASA says. Different ions in the atmosphere emit different colors of light; oxygen atoms emit green or red light, while nitrogen atoms emit orange or red light, Live Science previously reported.

Earth's magnetic field guides the solar particles toward the poles, which is where auroras are typically observed. But during major geomagnetic storms, auroras can be observed in areas outside the poles, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Geomagnetic storms happen when enormous amounts of plasma, or charged particles, escape the sun's atmosphere and hit our planet's magnetic field, Live Science previously reported.

Originally published on Live Science.

Much more liquid water may lie beneath the south pole of Mars than scientists had thought — or there may be something going on down there that they don't fully understand.

In 2018, researchers analyzing radar data gathered by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft announced they'd found evidence of a big subsurface lake in the Red Planet's south polar region. The lake appears to be about 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide, and it lies about 1 mile (1.6 km) beneath the dry, frigid surface, the scientists reported.

The same core research team soon followed up on the find, using the same Mars Express instrument — Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding, or MARSIS for short — to study the subsurface in a wide area around the apparent lake. This work turned up evidence for three more underground lakes, each of them about 6 miles (10 km) wide, the scientists reported in a study last year. 

Related: The search for life on Mars (a photo timeline)

Now, a different team has taken a very deep dive into the data. Arizona State University doctoral student Aditya Khuller and MARSIS co-principal investigator Jeffrey Plaut, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, analyzed 44,000 observations MARSIS made of the Martian south polar region over 15 years. (MARSIS was built by the Italian Space Agency and JPL.)

The duo found dozens of radar reflections similar to the four that have been interpreted as buried lakes, over a wide range of horizontal and vertical distances. But many of the newfound signals were spotted relatively close to the surface, in places seemingly too cold to support liquid water — even the briny stuff hypothesized to exist in the Martian underground.

"We’re not certain whether these signals are liquid water or not, but they appear to be much more widespread than what the original paper found," Plaut said in a statement. "Either liquid water is common beneath Mars’ south pole, or these signals are indicative of something else."

It's unclear what could keep so many relatively shallow lakes — if the newfound signals do indeed indicate lakes — from freezing over on frigid Mars. Volcanism is one possibility that researchers have raised, said Khuller, who conducted the new research while an intern at JPL.

"However, we haven’t really seen any strong evidence for recent volcanism at the south pole, so it seems unlikely that volcanic activity would allow subsurface liquid water to be present throughout this region," Khuller said in the same statement.

Neither Khuller nor Plaut can explain what exactly the newfound MARSIS reflections mean. But they hope their results, which were published online last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, will not remain mysterious for long.

"Our mapping gets us a few steps closer to understanding both the extent and the cause of these puzzling radar reflections," Plaut said.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.

A plasma wind tunnel completely vaporizes a model of a satellite in a video from the European Space Agency (ESA), demonstrating how the speed and heat of atmospheric reentry can obliterate even the bulkiest parts of space satellites. 

That utter destruction is a good thing. 

Here's why: Fast-moving space debris entering Earth's atmosphere could pose a serious hazard if that space junk survives the stresses of reentry. By testing satellites' heat thresholds, engineers can design spacecraft that are robust enough to do their job but that will also safely burn up in the atmosphere during their fall to Earth, ESA representatives said in a statement.

Related: Interstellar space travel: 7 futuristic spacecraft to explore the cosmos

After a satellite's mission is complete, its operators can remove the object from orbit by using its control system to lower the satellite's perigee, or the orbital point closest to Earth, in what is known as a controlled reentry. When the perigee is low enough, gravity then takes over and pulls the spacecraft down, according to ESA. This method causes the satellite to reenter the atmosphere at a steep angle, thereby ensuring that the debris will then strike an area that's relatively small. Satellite operators typically target the open ocean, to minimize the risk to people, according to ESA.

By comparison, uncontrolled reentries do not send the satellite to a designated landing area. But in order for an operator to send a satellite plummeting into Earth's atmosphere in an uncontrolled descent, federal satellite-regulating agencies require proof that the casualty risk from impacts is lower than 1 in 10,000, according to ESA. 

To achieve that degree of certainty, engineers must show that all the parts of the falling satellite will burn up before they get close to the ground — as seen in the meltiness of the satellite in footage filmed inside a test chamber belonging to the German Aerospace Center (DLR), in Cologne, Germany. Scientists there simulated atmospheric reentry conditions using gas heated by an electric arc to temperatures of more than 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit (6,700 degrees Celsius), according to the DLR's Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology. 

In the ESA video, a solar array drive mechanism (SADM) — the part of a satellite that directs the position of its solar panels, and one of the bulkiest portions of a typical satellite — enters the plasma wind chamber. Experiments to make the SADM more vulnerable to atmospheric destruction began a year earlier. In the first stage, researchers built software models of the SADM that tested the melting point of a new type of aluminum screw. 

Scientists then built a physical 3D model of the SADM using the new aluminum screws, putting it to the test inside the plasma chamber. The model encountered wind speeds of thousands of miles per hour, reproducing conditions comparable to atmospheric reentry, and the result was a vaporized SADM — just as the software models predicted, ESA representatives said. 

Satellite-melting experiments such as this are also part of an ESA program called CleanSat, in which the agency is investigating and testing new technologies so that future designs of low-orbiting satellites will follow a grim-sounding concept: "D4D," or "Design for Demise," according to ESA.

Originally published on Live Science.

We can probably all agree that sharing your unwashed underwear with another person isn't ideal. However, for astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS), performing a spacewalk requires that they share not only the spacesuits, but also a next-to-the-skin piece of clothing that's worn underneath the spacesuit and resembles long underwear, known as the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG). 

Access to a freshly laundered LCVG isn't an option on the ISS, but technicians with the European Space Agency (ESA) are taking steps to improve the antimicrobial properties in LCVG materials to keep these shared garments clean and fresh for longer, ESA representatives said in a statement.

In a new two-year project called Biocidal Advanced Coating Technology for Reducing Microbial Activity (Bacterma), ESA researchers are collaborating with the Vienna Textile Lab — a private biotechnology company in Austria that produces fabric dyes from bacteria. Compounds generated by these bacteria can also make textile fibers more resistant to certain types of microbes, according to the statement.

Related: 7 everyday things that happen strangely in space

Astronauts on the ISS keep their hands and bodies clean with no-rinse cleaning solutions and dry shampoo, but laundering clothes — including underwear — would require too much water and is simply not possible, according to NASA. Nor is there enough room on the ISS for astronauts to pack a fresh change of clothes for every day of their mission.

When it comes to dirty underwear, astronauts don't have the luxury of being squeamish, and may wear a pair more than once. American astronaut Don Pettit wrote that he changed his underwear once every three or four days when he was on the ISS, according to NASA. And when Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata tested bacteria-resistant underwear coverings in space in 2009, he wore one pair "for about a month," the San Francisco Times reported.

"Wakata reported no pungent-smelling effects after wearing the fabrics within a scheduled timeline," according to the Times.

When clothing becomes too soiled or smelly for an astronaut to wear any longer, it is either returned to Earth as trash or is packed up into a capsule, which is then ejected into space and burns up in Earth's atmosphere, NASA says.

LCVGs are only worn during spacewalks, but astronauts are working harder than usual when they wear this communal undergarment. An LCVG is very form-fitting, covering the limbs and torso, and it keeps astronauts cool during the extreme physical exertion of working in the vacuum of space (an adult diaper is worn underneath, in case the astronaut needs to relieve themselves during an hours-long spacewalk). Gas ventilation draws moist air away from extremities, while flexible tubes that are sewn into the garment circulate cooling water around the body and help to remove excess heat and maintain a comfortable core body temperature, according to the National Air and Space Museum.

ESA scientists were already investigating candidate materials for upgrading outer spacesuit layers, so this new initiative "is a useful complement, looking into small bacteria-killing molecules that may be useful for all kinds of spaceflight textiles — including spacesuit interiors," ESA material engineer Malgorzata Holynska said in the statement.

"It might sound counterintuitive to get rid of microbes using the products of microbes," Seda Özdemir-Fritz, a Bacterma project scientist with the Austrian Space Forum, said in the statement. "But all kinds of organisms use secondary metabolites to protect themselves from an extreme environmental conditions. The project will examine them as an innovative antimicrobial textile finish."

Scientists will test the performance of antimicrobial properties in the new textiles by exposing them to sweat, lunar dust and radiation, to simulate conditions that could accelerate aging and deterioration of the fabric in space, Holynska added.

Originally published on Live Science.

It's the dream of so many children to become an astronaut — to break free of gravity, float above the Earth and travel the cosmos. For many, this dream fades by adulthood. But for some, this elusive career will always be a goal.

So, what does it take to become an astronaut?

First, to be a candidate, you usually must be a citizen of a country that’s a member of a space agency. To sign up with NASA, for example, you must be a U.S. citizen. However, some private space companies may recruit astronauts without regard to their citizenship.

Related: Why is space a vacuum?

Many qualifications, such as education, are similar across space agencies. To apply to be an astronaut with the European Space Agency (ESA), for example, you need a master's degree or higher in the natural sciences, medicine, engineering, mathematics or computer science, or you need an experimental test pilot degree, which teaches graduates how to pilot aircraft that are being tested and how to manage research programs. NASA has the same requirements but also allows two years toward a doctorate in these subjects.

A degree isn't enough, though. To meet candidate requirements, applicants also need real-world experience — at least two years of relevant post-graduate experience in their field of study for NASA or three years for the ESA. NASA’s requirement can also be met with 1,000 pilot-in-command hours aboard a jet. Because English is the language used on the International Space Station, you must be fluent. (Fluency in other languages, such as Russian, is an asset but not a requirement, according to the ESA.)

Astronauts must also have a passing health record. For example, ESA requires medical certification for a Private Pilot License or higher with the initial application, although you do not need to hold the license itself. NASA candidates must be able to pass a long-duration flight astronaut physical. "Typically, as we near the end of the selection process, we put them through the same evaluation process that we would use for assigning a current astronaut to a mission, just to make sure that they would be eligible for a spaceflight assignment," said Anne Roemer, astronaut selection manager at NASA.

In the past, most physical disabilities would have disqualified a person from being an astronaut. But ESA has launched the Parastronaut Feasibility Project to recruit at least one astronaut with short stature, or under 4 feet, 3 inches (130 centimeters); a pronounced leg length difference; or lower limb deficiency, such as amputation at the knee. The agency will work with this astronaut to determine what alterations the space agency needs to make to existing protocols to send this person to space.

Mental health is just as important as physical health. Astronauts work long hours in high-stress situations. They are away from their friends and family for months at a time, and communication with those on Earth can be challenging.  For instance, on the International Space Station, email is available and astronauts can make video calls, but they can only receive audio on their end and calls have a few seconds of lag. For missions to Mars, communicating with family back home would likely be more difficult. Instead, astronauts are stuck in small, enclosed areas with no real way to get alone time.

Related: Where is the center of the universe?

"During the selection process, we will test, through psychometric testing and other tools, the mental stability of the person, particularly with respect to if there are any red flags that go up," such as psychiatric disorders, said Dagmar Boos, head of ESA's Competence and Policy Centre. This mental stability is important for both the individual astronauts and the safety of the team as a whole, Boos said.

Those are the minimum requirements, but it takes much more to be selected as an astronaut. More than 18,000 people applied to NASA's astronaut class of 2017, but only 12 were chosen. Candidates must be truly impressive to stand out from the crowd.

One quality that the selection team looks for is the ability to be both a leader and a follower. Experience working in extreme environments, like the North Pole or the desert, can further woo the judges, Boos said. She also looks for people who have had responsibility over the lives of others, such as by being part of a rescue team.

In addition to flying in space, astronauts have technical roles on Earth and are the faces of the spaceflight program, so they have to be able to work in a range of contexts. "We're looking for well-rounded people across the board," Roemer said. "That can include career accomplishments, hobbies and interests."

Finally, astronauts must be easy to work with. "The goal is eventually to go to Mars, which is a fairly long mission," Roemer said. "They're trying to assess, could I be locked in a tin can with this person and ensure that we have a successful mission?"

Originally published on Live Science.

The idea of threats to Earth from outer space sounds like science fiction, but at some level our planet has always been vulnerable to them — think of the giant asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. 

Fortunately, such occurrences are extremely rare; but other natural phenomena, such as solar storms, can strike from space much more frequently. These have little direct effect on living things, but they can wreak havoc on electronic systems we increasingly depend on, particularly satellite-based technologies. 

To make matters worse, the proliferation of human-made satellites has created a space hazard of its own, as the loads of orbiting debris have the potential to destroy other satellites.

Related: Debris from SpaceX rocket launch falls on farm in central Washington

In the U.S., tackling these threats is the responsibility of several organizations: Both NASA and the U.S. Space Force tracks space debris; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitor “space weather";  and NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office coordinates the search for potentially hazardous asteroids and other near-Earth objects (NEOs). 

In contrast, the European Space Agency (ESA) has pulled all these activities together under the umbrella of its Space Situational Awareness program. Set up in 2009, this program is divided into three segments covering space debris, space weather and NEOs.

The problem with space debris 

The satellites humans depend on for communication, navigation and environmental monitoring are under increasing threat from all the junk that’s in orbit with them. This junk includes derelict satellites and the rocket stages used to launch them, but if that was the extent of the problem there would be a manageable number of objects to keep track of. Unfortunately, those objects have a tendency to multiply, partly due to explosions caused by residual fuel and partly through collisions. The result? Thousands of smaller fragments pose at least as much risk as the original object, due to their high speed and the fact that they are all moving on slightly different orbits. (This is due to the additional random velocities imparted by the explosion.)

Working satellites are equipped with maneuvering thrusters, so they can be moved to a different orbit if a piece of space debris is known to be heading their way. But with tens of thousands of objects large enough to cause serious problems in orbit — ranging in size from 0.4 inches (one centimeter) to 80 feet (25 meters) or more — it’s no easy task to keep track of them all. 

Yet that’s exactly what the Space Surveillance and Tracking segment of ESA’s Space Situational Awareness program has to do. It employs a network of telescopes, radars and laser-ranging stations to detect and track objects, and then processes the resulting data at ESA mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. Mission control will then issue an alert if evasive action is deemed necessary.

This system works well at the moment, but that won’t always be the case, the BBC reported. The number of new satellites being launched is higher than it has ever been, according to the BBC, while the number of fragmentary objects is increasing due to ongoing collisions. The worry is that the amount of space debris could reach a tipping point beyond which there is a continuous cascade of self-generating collisions. Known as the Kessler syndrome, this would render certain orbits unusable if it continued unchecked. 

For this reason, the ESA is considering methods for the active removal of space debris. Its ClearSpace-1 mission, planned to launch in 2025, will be the first in the world to remove a piece of space debris from orbit, if all goes according to plan.

ClearSpace-1 will target a specific piece of space junk — a 220-lb. (100 kilograms) payload adapter called Vespa that the ESA used in 2013 to deploy a satellite. After rendezvousing with Vespa, ClearSpace-1 will grab hold of it with robotic arms, then fire its rocket to break out of orbit. The plan is that both ClearSpace-1 and Vespa will burn up on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

Although there are thousands of pieces of space junk, the most serious threat comes from the largest objects. At the International Astronautical Congress in October 2020, Darren McKnight of the Centauri corporation presented a list of the 50 “statistically most concerning” debris objects, which was also reported in the journal Acta Astronautica. These were ranked not just by size, but also by the persistence of their orbits and their likelihood of colliding with another object. More than 75% of the top 50 are spent launch stages that remain in orbit, while 80% originated in the last century, before space agencies started taking specific measures to limit orbital debris. The ESA has the dubious honor of having the top-ranked satellite on the list — the now-defunct environmental monitoring satellite Envisat, launched in 2002.

Related: Defunct US weather satellite breaks up in Earth orbit

When space weather turns deadly

As far as Earth is concerned, the main source of space weather is the sun, according to the ESA. Space weather events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have been occurring since time immemorial, but it’s only in the modern world that they’ve become a significant hazard. As long as people stayed at ground level and didn’t rely on electronic systems for navigation and communication, or on the electrical grid for power, they could remain blissfully unaware of solar activity. But in today’s world that’s no longer an option.

Adverse effects of space weather are particularly apparent in the space environment itself, where high-energy radiation can degrade a satellite’s solar panels and damage electronic systems, especially during severe solar storms. This has consequences for satellite TV and broadband services, as well as for ships and aircraft that rely on satellites for navigation. 

But high-energy solar radiation can also pose a hazard to people on Earth, such as airline crew members, whose health may be endangered if they spend a lot of time at high altitude, while severe solar storms can disrupt radio communications and the electrical power grid.

This means that someone has to keep an eye on the ever-changing vagaries of space weather, just as meteorologists do with ordinary weather. Space weather forecasters work in a similar way to their terrestrial counterparts, combining data from a variety of sources — both on the ground and in space — with computer models to work out what is likely to happen. However, unlike terrestrial forecasts aimed at the general public, space weather forecasts are targeted at the business sectors that are most likely to be affected. ESA’s Space Weather Network, for example, provides tailored services to a variety of industries, ranging from airlines and power distribution systems to spacecraft operators and auroral tourist agencies.

As with the ClearSpace-1 mission in the space debris domain, ESA’s space weather segment is planning a world first. Although numerous satellites operated by ESA, NASA and other agencies help to monitor space weather, these satellites all perform other tasks as well. In contrast, ESA’s Lagrange spacecraft will be the first to focus solely on space weather. To this end, it will be positioned “side-on” to the Earth-sun axis, at equal distances from both, to give it the best possible view of solar storms heading toward our planet.

Dodging nearby asteroids

Their name is slightly misleading because NEOs aren’t always near Earth — they may be hundreds of millions of miles away on the other side of the sun, according to Space.com. But they’re moving along orbits that cross Earth’s orbit, or come close to it, which raises the risk of a future collision. This doesn’t necessarily spell disaster, because many NEOs are so small they will burn up as they enter the atmosphere. Telescopes can typically detect those asteroids or comets that are large enough to inflict serious damage when they’re still a long way from impact. This is where the NEO segment of ESA’s Space Situational Awareness program comes in.

The NEO segment is made up of a number of components, including a Europe-wide network of observers — both professionals and volunteers — to determine the current position of NEOs. These observations then feed into a central analysis team that predicts future orbits, assesses the collision risk, and, if necessary, issues warnings to civil authorities if the predicted impact point lies inside Europe. On a more upbeat note, ESA is also investigating ways to deflect an incoming NEO before it hits Earth.

Astronomers were hit Thursday (Dec. 3) with a huge wave of data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory.

Those researchers can now explore the best-yet map of the Milky Way, with detailed information on the positions, distances and motion of 1.8 billion cosmic objects, to help us better understand our place in the universe. 

"Gaia data is like a tsunami rolling through astrophysics," said Martin Barstow, head of the physics and astronomy department at the University of Leicester, who is part of Gaia's data processing team. He was speaking at a virtual news conference held Thursday, at which another Gaia researcher, Giorgia Busso of the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, also told reporters that this data has produced "a revolution" in many fields of astrophysics, from the study of galactic dynamics like stellar evolution to the study of nearby objects like asteroids in the solar system.

Photos: Gaia spacecraft to map Milky Way galaxy

Gaia launched in December 2013 to map the galaxy in unprecedented detail. The $1 billion spacecraft orbits the Lagrange-2, or L2, point, a spot about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth, where the gravitational forces between our planet and the sun are balanced and the view of the sky is unobstructed. Gaia can measure about 100,000 stars each minute, or 850 million objects each day, and can scan the whole sky about once every two months. 

The latest trove of data improves upon the precision and scope of the two previous Gaia data sets, which were released in 2016 and 2018. For example, compared to the 2018 data, which included measurements for 1.7 billion objects, the 2020 data improves by a factor of two the accuracy of the data points for proper motion, or the apparent change in the position of a star as viewed from our solar system.

"It really gives us an insight into how the Milky Way lives," Nicholas Walton, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge who is part of Gaia's science team, said at the same science and news conference. "We're talking about billions of stars, which really gives us the ability to probe at a meaningful level the whole population of the Milky Way, similar to what you'd want to do with studying people." 

Walton said the cosmic census would be like having trackers on every person in the U.K. to map their location and monitor their health. "If everyone's got a tracker, we could tell you if they're sweating or not. It's a bit like that with the stars here: We can tell you which ones are sweating, which ones are active, which ones are dormant, which ones are going to die, which ones are going to explode."

Data from Gaia has already been used across a wide range of applications over the past four years. The mission has helped researchers find the corpse of a galaxy that the Milky Way cannibalized 10 billion years ago, spot 20 hypervelocity stars unexpectedly zooming toward the galactic center, and identify about 1,000 nearby stars where hypothetical extraterrestrials would be able to see signs of life on Earth. 

Closer to home, the spacecraft has allowed scientists to find previously unknown asteroids, and its precise data even allowed NASA to make a crucial, last-minute adjustment to the path of its New Horizons probe in 2018 to successfully swing past the icy rock Arrokoth, the most distant and primitive object in the solar system ever visited by a spacecraft.

So far, some 1,600 studies have been published based on Gaia data, Barstow said. More will surely result from the newly released material, now available on ESA's website, and by the time the briefing for scientists and reporters ended, Walton said he expected a lot of scientists were already poring over it: "I think a lot of astronomers would have left this broadcast to go work on the data."

Some of the new Gaia data has already been used to make discoveries. One group of researchers led by scientists at the Dresden University of Technology measured how our solar system is accelerating inside the Milky Way, using as reference points Gaia's 1.6 million newly observed quasars, which are so far away they appear fixed in space, like galactic lighthouses. 

The solar system was measured to be very slightly accelerating, as predicted by theorists, toward the galactic center. Busso said this barely perceptible acceleration only became observable in this newly released Gaia data because "the precision of the measurements increased hugely."

These super precise tests of the way masses are distributed and accelerated are essential for "probing the limits of fundamental physics," Gerry Gilmore, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and a Gaia scientist, said during the event. Such measurements might help scientists understand the nature of the dark matter that we know is lurking throughout the universe. 

"Even our own sun is moving so fast that our whole Milky Way would fly apart if it wasn't held together by the dark matter, and we've got no idea what the dark matter is," Gilmore said. "The hope is that by continuing experiments along the line that we're doing — and making them more precise, and doing them on different scales — we'll be able to see if there are different types of dark matter."

The third Gaia data set was set to be released in 2022, but the mission scientists decided to release preliminary data now so astronomers could use it sooner, with at least two more data sets to be released in the coming years. The spacecraft will operate until at least 2022, but its mission may be extended until 2025. 

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

The Rosetta spacecraft's rubber ducky comet has slowly changed color as it moved through space, from red to blueish and then red again.

According to a new paper published Feb. 5 in the journal Nature, the color change is a signal of a water cycle on the first comet ever visited by a human probe. As comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (Rosetta's comet's full name) crossed a boundary in its orbit around the sun, known as the frost line, ice began to turn to gas on its surface, sublimating away into space. When that happened, an outer layer of dirty ice on the comet's surface, full of reddish dust, blew away into the vacuum, revealing the bluer, cleaner ice underneath.

It's as if the comet had its own "seasons," the researchers wrote.

Related: Spectacular comet photos (Gallery)

The changes described here took place over a long time, between January 2015 and August 2016, the researchers wrote. That was the midpoint of Rosetta's time at the comet. The European Space Agency orbiter arrived on Aug. 6, 2014, and crashed into the comet itself on Sept. 30, 2016.

There were, in fact, two opposite cycles at work around the comet, the researchers wrote. Approaching the sun and crossing the frost line — about three times Earth's distance from the sun — exposed that more pristine, blue surface. But the coma, a hazy region around the solid nucleus made of dust and gas, got redder.

What caused that reddening? "Grains made of organic material and amorphous carbon in the coma" the researchers wrote.

In other words, all those microscopic grains of carbon-rich dust that melted off the comet's surface stopped reddening the surface and started reddening the coma.

Once the comet moved away from the sun again, its solid core reddened again as dust once again settled on the surface of the nucleus.

These changes, viewed over months from a color-sensitive camera that Rosetta trained on the comet, would not have been visible from Earth, the researchers said in a statement. Earth-based telescopes can't precisely distinguish a faraway comet's nucleus and coma. And comets often go through temporary changes that might confuse a telescope observing a comet in brief snapshots. Rosetta's two-year observation allowed for a more robust analysis of long-term trends.

Even though Rosetta's mission is over, the researchers wrote, there's still lots of data left to comb through, and more discoveries of this kind will likely be revealed.

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• Crash! 10 biggest impact craters on Earth
• 15 amazing images of stars

Originally published on Live Science.

This fall, Earth has about a 1-in-7,000 chance of getting an uninvited extraterrestrial visitor: asteroid 2006 QV89.

The space rock is expected to whiz by our planet on Sept. 9, 2019, according to European Space Agency's (ESA) list of space objects that could collide with Earth. That list was updated online June 6. Out of 10 objects on the list, 2006 QV89 ranked fourth.

Compared to the 6-mile-long (10 kilometers) asteroid that killed the nonavian dinosaurs about 66 million years ago, 2006 QV89 is pretty dinky, measuring just 130 feet (40 meters) in diameter, or about the length of two bowling alleys placed end to end. [Images: Russian Meteor Explosion]

The ESA is monitoring the asteroid's route, but the space rock is unlikely to careen into Earth. According to the ESA's modeling, 2006 QV89 will likely get as close as about 4.2 million miles (6.7 million km) to the planet. To put that in perspective, the moon is 238,900 miles (384,400 km) away.

That said, there is a 1-in-7,299 chance that 2006 QV89 will hit the planet, the ESA said.

As its name suggests, asteroid 2006 QV89 was discovered on Aug. 29, 2006; it was spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey, an organization based at an observatory near Tucson, Arizona. The asteroid is actually quite a frequent visitor to our planet. After its 2019 flyby, the object is expected to swoop by Earth in 2032, 2045 and 2062, the ESA reported.

NASA, which also tracks near-Earth objects, paired up with the ESA last month to live-tweet information about how the government and scientists should handle an actual asteroid strike. However, fans of the movie "Armageddon" should forget about blowing up big asteroids with bombs. A study that came out in March in the journal Icarus found that the larger the asteroid, the harder it will be to blow up.

• Doomsday: 9 Real Ways Earth Could End
• Black Marble Images: Earth at Night
• Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth

Originally published on Live Science.

What would happen if a giant asteroid slammed into Earth? The European Space Agency (ESA) anticipates a coming crash would send alarmed humans to social media.

To be prepared, the agency is launching its first-ever live social media dry run this coming week, highlighting the actions that scientists, space agencies and civil protection agencies might take in the event of a pending and major international asteroid impact.

This isn't the first such drill, however. Every two years, asteroid scientists join forces to simulate what they would do if an asteroid collided with the planet. Each participant is assigned a part, such as "national government," "space agency," "astronomer" and "civil protection officer,” the ESA reported in a statement.

It's always a mystery how the fake catastrophe will play out. To find out, the public is invited to watch updates from the drill live on the @esaoperations Twitter channel, which will run from this coming Monday to Friday (April 29 to May 3). [Doomsday: 9 Real Ways Earth Could End]

The exercise itself — part of the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference in Washington, D.C. — is put on by NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office and the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"The first step in protecting our planet is knowing what's out there," Rüdiger Jehn, ESA's head of Planetary Defence, said in the statement. "Only then, with enough warning, can we take the steps needed to prevent an asteroid strike altogether, or to minimize the damage it does on the ground."

It's not entirely out of this world that an asteroid might strike Earth. As of April 2019, scientists have catalogued about 20,000 asteroids that have an orbit close to our planet. Given that about 150 of these near-Earth asteroids are discovered every month, this number will only increase.

The ESA noted that new technologies are helping space agencies learn about asteroids. For example, the ESA's new Flyeye and Test-Bed Telescopes, which are set to be deployed soon, will help the ESA find, confirm and understand these ancient space rocks, the agency said.

In the meantime, you can join the ESA on Facebook for two livestream videos from the Planetary Defense Conference. The first will begin at 8 a.m. EDT (14:00 Central European Summer Time) on Sunday (April 28) with Jehn, and the second will begin the morning (midafternoon European time) on Thursday (May 2).

• Images: Russian Meteor Explosion
• Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth
• Crash! 10 Biggest Impact Craters on Earth

Originally published on Live Science.

A spent rocket stage that had been orbiting Earth since 2009 recently broke into bits, and an observatory in Spain captured footage of the new debris cloud as it traveled across a backdrop of stars.

The Deimos Sky Survey (DeSS), an astronomy complex in Madrid dedicated to detecting and evaluating the risk from near-Earth objects, spotted and recorded the unusual appearance of new space junk in the sky from March 26 to 28, the European Space Agency (ESA) said in a statement. Scientists used the observatory's "Antsy" optical sensor, "which is adapted for tracking objects in low-Earth orbit," according to the ESA.

In the footage, Antsy's "eye" follows the specks of debris as they move through space; the fragments of space junk therefore appear as fixed dots while stars resemble light trails, DeSS representatives said in a statement. [How Much Space Junk Hits Earth?]

About 40 to 60 pieces have been identified in the debris cloud, and many of them exceed 12 inches (30 centimeters) in diameter, the ESA reported.

Russian astronomers discovered the debris and informed their European colleagues about the sighting on March 26 at a meeting of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), according to DeSS. Experts determined that the cloud of space junk was formerly an Atlas V Centaur rocket, which launched on Sept. 9, 2009, bearing a U.S. communications satellite.

After the rocket's upper stage separated, the cylinder — measuring about 41 feet (12.5 meters) in length and weighing approximately 2 tons — settled into a stable orbit, where it could have remained "for centuries," DeSS reported.

But the discarded rocket disintegrated sometime between March 23 and 25, though the cause of its breakup is still unknown, according to the ESA.

"Leaving a trail of debris in its wake, this fragmentation event provides space debris experts with a rare opportunity to test their understanding of such hugely important processes," Tim Flohrer, ESA's senior space debris monitoring expert, said in the ESA statement.

However, even though space junk provides fascinating fodder for researchers, it also poses grave risks to humans in space and to missions that take place in low-Earth orbit. In fact, a recent scan of the ESA's Columbus module on the International Space Station (ISS) revealed hundreds of dings and craters from "marauding" space junk, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported in January.

And after India's April 1 anti-satellite missile test, NASA identified 400 new pieces of orbital debris, with 60 that were bigger than 4 inches (10 cm) in diameter, Live Science previously reported. Even relatively small objects traveling at high speeds can cause substantial damage to the ISS and threaten astronauts' safety, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a town hall following the test.

"It is not acceptable for us to allow people to create orbital debris fields that put at risk our people," Bridenstine said. "These activities are not sustainable or compatible with human spaceflight."

Options that space agencies have considered for removing space junk from orbit include nabbing debris with a tether and dragging it into the atmosphere to incinerate, and blasting it with lasers; for now, at least, these solutions exist only in simulations.

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Originally published on Live Science.

An image captured by a European Space Agency (ESA) orbiter recently showed what appears to be a very hairy, blue spider extending its "legs" across the Martian landscape.

But in reality, the so-called spider is a sprawling pattern left behind on a ridge by a frenzy of dust devils, when hundreds or even thousands of whirling tornadoes formed in the area, ESA representatives said yesterday (March 14) in a statement. [Seeing Things on Mars: A History of Martian Illusions]

The ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter captured the image on Feb. 8 in Mars' Terra Sabaea region, using the spacecraft's Color and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS). Blue tracks represent parts of the ridge that were scraped and scoured by the tornadoes' winds. Though the actual color of the material exposed by the tornadoes is dark red, it shows up as blue in the color-composite image; this technique enhances the contrast of surface features, according to the statement.

It is unknown why so many dust devils (or dust tornadoes) converged along the ridge, though the region's mountains may impact the flow of air masses and contribute to tornado formation, ESA representatives said.

The ExoMars orbiter, which launched in 2016, also captured a photo of NASA's InSight lander on March 2, as it pounded its burrowing "mole" instrument into the ground to sample Mars' interior. In the image, InSight appears as a small, white speck inside a darker circle of rock scorched by the lander's rockets during touchdown. Nearby are InSight's heat shield and parachute, which were ejected during its descent.

Other photos the ESA released yesterday feature stunningly well-preserved impact craters; layered deposits near Mars' south polar ice cap; and 3D views of craters, dunes and outcrops.

"All of the images we're sharing today represent some of the best from the last few months," Nicolas Thomas, CaSSIS principal investigator from the University of Bern in Switzerland, said in the statement. 

The "hairy spider" isn't the first eye-fooling photo of a Martian feature. In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft snapped an image of a mountain on Mars that bore an uncanny resemblance to a human face, and the Curiosity rover has captured images that seemingly showed a rat, a lizard and even a floating spoon — unsurprisingly, they all turned out to be oddly shaped rocks.

• Mars Insight Photos: A Timeline to Landing on the Red Planet
• Goliath Birdeater: Images of a Colossal Spider
• The Search for Life on Mars (Photo Timeline)

Originally published on Live Science.

Our Milky Way galaxy will survive in its current form a bit longer than some astronomers had thought, a new study suggests.

The monster collision between our Milky Way and fellow spiral galaxy Andromeda will occur about 4.5 billion years from now, according to the new research, which is based on observations made by Europe's Gaia spacecraft. Some prominent previous estimates had predicted the crash would happen significantly sooner, in about 3.9 billion years.

"This finding is crucial to our understanding of how galaxies evolve and interact," Gaia project scientist Timo Prusti, who was not involved in the study, said in a statement. [Images: Milky Way Galaxy's Crash with Andromeda]

Gaia launched in December of 2013 to help researchers create the best 3D map of the Milky Way ever constructed. The spacecraft has been precisely monitoring the positions and movements of huge numbers of stars and other cosmic objects; the mission team aims to track more than 1 billion stars by the time Gaia shuts its sharp eyes for good.

Most of the stars Gaia is eyeing are in the Milky Way, but some are in nearby galaxies. In the new study, the researchers tracked a number of stars in our galaxy, in Andromeda (also known as M31) and in the spiral Triangulum (or M33). These neighbor galaxies are within 2.5 million to 3 million light-years of the Milky Way and may be interacting with each other, study team members said.

"We needed to explore the galaxies' motions in 3D to uncover how they have grown and evolved and what creates and influences their features and behavior," lead author Roeland van der Marel, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in the same statement.

"We were able to do this using the second package of high-quality data released by Gaia," van der Marel added, referring to a haul released in April 2018.

This work allowed the team to determine the rotation rates of both M31 and M33 — something that had never been done before, the researchers said. Using the Gaia-derived findings and analyses of archival information, the study team mapped out how M31 and M33 have moved through space in the past and where they'll likely go over the next few billion years.

The team's models give a later-than-expected date for the Andromeda-Milky Way smashup and also suggest that it will be more of a sideswipe than a head-on collision. (Because the distances between stars are so great, the odds that our own solar system will be disrupted by the merger are very low. But the crash will definitely liven up the night sky for any creatures that are around on Earth 4.5 billion years from now.)

"Gaia was designed primarily for mapping stars within the Milky Way — but this new study shows that the satellite is exceeding expectations and can provide unique insights into the structure and dynamics of galaxies beyond the realm of our own," Prusti said. "The longer [that] Gaia watches the tiny movements of these galaxies across the sky, the more precise our measurements will become."

The new study was published this month in The Astrophysical Journal.

By the way, Andromeda won't be the next galaxy our Milky Way slams into: The Large Magellanic Cloud and Milky Way will merge about 2.5 billion years from now, a recent study suggested.

Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published on Space.com. 

An incredbile new map to the cosmos reveals the precise locations of more than 1.7 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy and some 14,000 objects orbiting our sun. The map takes only a few minutes to access — but it might take a lifetime to understand.

The stunning image was created with a treasure trove of data released today (April 25) from the European Space Agency (ESA). The data was collected by the ESA's Gaia space probe, a 3,000-lb. (1,390 kilograms) spacecraft packed with advanced optical instrumentation. Gaia was launched with an ambitious goal: to create the most detailed and accurate 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy ever constructed. Today's massive data release — which includes hundreds of pictures, videos and documents made open to the public — puts the mission well on its way to achieving that goal. [Stunning Photos of Our Milky Way Galaxy]

The massive star survey also includes fresh information on nearly 14,000 known objects within our own solar system and an interactive 3D map of the stars, which you can float through above.

Gaia launched in 2013 and took up a position roughly 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth a year later. As Gaia orbited our sun, it looked deep into the galaxy, collecting data on billions of distant stars. The mission's first data release came in 2016, providing detailed information on the precise positions of nearly 2 million stars. Today's release updates the map to include nearly 1.7 billion stars, including movement and distance measurements for nearly all of them.

That's a staggering amount of information — more than enough to fuel a lifetime of space research.

"This is the data we're going to be working on for the rest of my career," Jackie Faherty, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History, told NPR.

And yet, it's still only a drop in the cosmic bucket when it comes to understanding our home galaxy. The ESA estimates that there may be more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, so today's unfathomable data release represents less than 2 percent of the complete galactic landscape.

Gaia will continue its cosmic mapping mission until at least 2020, with more data releases likely to come in the meantime. Take a look at the complete Gaia archive here.

Originally published on Live Science.

Talk about timing! Photographers with the European Space Agency hoping to spot the International Space Station crossing the face of the sun got more than they bargained for in this sunny snapshot. 

In the photo, which was taken in 2013 but only released by ESA on Wednesday (Oct. 4), a bird crosses the sun at the same exact time as the space station. The entire photo session lasted just 1.2 seconds, making it a challenge for the astronomy club at ESA's European Space Astronomy Centre near Madrid, Spain. [In Photos: Spotting Satellites and Spaceships from Earth]

"It requires planning, patience and a measure of luck," ESA officials wrote in an image description. "The camera must be set up at the right time in the right place to capture the Space Station as it flies past at 28,800 km/h [17,900 mph]. At such speeds the photographer has only seconds to capture the transit, and if any clouds block the view, [they'd have] to wait for another opportunity weeks later."

While the skies were clear of clouds for this station-sun photo, at least one feathered flyer was in the viewing area. 

"The station flies around Earth at [a distance of] around 400 kilometers [about 250 miles], allowing the astronomy club to calculate that the bird was flying 86 meters [280 feet] from the camera lens," ESA officials wrote. "The difference in size and distance makes both the bird and the space station appear the same size."

When the space station crosses the face of the sun, it is known as solar transit. Such transits can also occur other planets or stars, or with Earth's moon, as in this case of this stunning view of the station crossing the nearly full Harvest Moon captured this week by photographer Alexander Krivenyshev.

Editor's note: If you have an amazing photo of the full moon or any other night-sky sight that you'd like to share with us and our news partners for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

A team of engineers and scientists may have just found a way for astronauts to enjoy fresh bread in space.

Currently, astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) rely on tortillas as their "bread" because they have a long "shelf life" and don't produce crumbs. But now, a team of engineers and scientists in Germany is developing an oven that works in microgravity, as well as space-grade dough that's suitable for baking bread in orbit, so that astronauts may one day be able to bake and enjoy fresh bread on the job.

Germany-based startup Bake In Space also plans to develop a made-in-space sourdough brand based on yeast cultivated at the International Space Station.

According to Sebastian Marcu, founder and CEO of Bake In Space, the idea came from his friend, spacecraft engineer Neil Jaschinski, who had been struggling to find a better solution to what he says was poor-quality bread in the Netherlands, where he works. 

"Bread is a big topic in Germany," Marcu told Space.com. "We have 3,200 variations of bread, with a bakery pretty much on every street corner. In the Netherlands, most Germans would complain about the quality of bread." [Space Food Evolution: How Astronaut Chow Has Changed (Photos)]

Jaschinski have overcome the lack of good bread by learning to bake his own at home. However, he and Marcu realized that their fellow German, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst — who is slated to command the ISS in the second half of 2018 — would have no choice but to survive his six months in space on NASA-approved tortillas. 

"I have heard from several former German astronauts that they really missed bread" while in space, Marcu said. "Everything on the space station has to have [a] long shelf-life. And fresh produce, freshly baked products — that's something they really miss."

Former German astronaut Gerhard Thiele has joined the project as well.

'We need to take care of the human beings that we are sending [to space], of their wellbeing, and food, as well as the environment, is an essential part of this," commented Thiele, who spent 11 days in space in 2000 aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-99

“To have something fresh, whether it is bread or whether it is vegetables, it would be wonderful.”

Bread has been a staple in human diet for thousands of years but replicating the art of bread making in orbital conditions presents multiple challenges. Microgravity, Marcu said, is only one of them.

"We have to comply with a whole set of safety regulations that we have on the space station," Marcu said. "We have to make sure that none of the surfaces [of the oven] becomes hotter than 45 degrees Celsius [113 degrees Fahrenheit]. This means that we cannot preheat the oven; we cannot open the oven in the middle of operation."

On Earth, bread needs to be baked at a temperature of about 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Once it’s done, the bakers remove it from the heated oven. But that would not be possible in space. Processes such as thermal convection, which helps to mix up air on Earth, don't work in space. If a bubble of air that hot were to escape from the oven in orbit, it could stay floating inside the station for quite a while, posing a serious health risk to the astronauts,Marcu said.

Marcu said the team has found a way to overcome this challenge.

"We basically put the baking product, the dough, inside the cold oven and start heating it up," he said. "Once it's almost done, we start cooling it down. But at that time, any product will start to get dry, and that's why we need to design the oven so that some water is added during the baking process." 

The oven also needs to be able to operate with only 270 watts of power — about one-tenth the power used by conventional ovens on Earth. Marcu said the team hopes to have a prototype ready by the end of this year. [The International Space Station: Inside and Out (Infographic)]

Mastering the process of baking is only one step toward making the space-grade bread. Crumbs could damage the station's equipment, or astronauts could accidently inhale them. Marcu said he hopes the combination of the new baking process and a carefully designed dough will solve the problem. 

There are further challenges when it comes to the dough, Marcu added. While the ultimate goal is to make bread in space from scratch, he said, the engineers will launch a premade bread product to the space station as a first step. But as with all space food, this bread product will have to have an extremely long shelf life and survive without a fridge or a freezer.

"At the moment, we are testing out different dough recipes, doing longevity storage tests, keeping them at ambient temperature and making sure that nothing grows inside that is not wanted that could contaminate the space station," Marcu said.

Separately, Bake In Space will send a yeast culture to the space station that the astronauts will use to create sourdough, which will be delivered back to Earth to establish a line of made-in-space bread. 

Sourdough is a traditional type of bread dough that people used before the industrialization of bread making. It uses naturally occurring yeast and bacteria that ferment the dough and provide it with its typical mildly sour taste. 

"Sourdough basically takes up the bacteria from its near vicinity and the person that has his hands in the bread, and that's how the special taste of the bread is developed," Marcu said. [Can You Keep Kosher or Halal in Space?]

"Wherever you are on Earth, sourdough has a unique taste, whether it's created in San Francisco or India," he added. "It will be interesting to see what the flavor will be when we cultivate it in space."

Marcu said the made-in-space bread could be one small way to improve the quality of life in space before space tourism and deep-space exploration fully take off. Although the diversity of space food has improved greatly, it can still be rather dull compared Earth-based fare. 

"On Earth, bread has always been a symbol of quality of life," Marcu said. "Bread always stands for friendship and well-being, and that's what drives our project. If we want to go further into space, we need to create quality of life, and that's why bread is really a stepping stone for human exploration of space."

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Tumbleweeds may be iconic symbols of the American West, but regions around the world have their own versions of the wind-blown plants — even Antarctica.

Antarctica's "tumbleweeds" look more like snowballs, but like their western namesake, they are created by the wind. Known as "yukimarimo," the wind-made snowballs were first discovered in 1995 by Japanese researchers who named the objects using the words "yuki," meaning "snow," and "marimo," meaning "moss balls." Yukimarimo develop when a rapid drop in temperatures causes a layer of frost to form on the snow. Winds pick up the frost's ice crystals and form them into balls that then tumble across the Antarctic landscape.

The European Space Agency (ESA) recently shared an image of this natural snowball phenomenon, when the yukimarimo appeared near the Concordia Research Station on the Antarctic Plateau. [Images: Life at Antarctica's Concordia Station]

A team of researchers currently working at the Concordia Research Station — a permanent, year-round, French-Italian outpost — just passed the six-month mark of their deployment, according to ESA officials. On May 3, the researchers experienced their last sunrise and will work through Antarctica's dark winter until the September equinox, the agency said.

The extreme conditions of darkness, harsh cold and isolation in Antarctica are a "unique testing ground" for what humans will endure on missions to the moon or Mars, according to ESA officials.

"Concordia offers ESA a place to conduct research on people living far away from civilization in extreme conditions — much like spaceflight," Jennifer Ngo-Anh, ESA's head of human research, said in a statement.

Original article on Live Science.

The enchanting blue and green lights of an aurora dance above the city lights of Northern Europe in a stunning new image taken by an astronaut in space.

In between mission tasks and scientific experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS), French astronaut Thomas Pesquet has captured some amazing images from the orbiting outpost. In a recently shared snapshot by Pesquet, the aurora borealis can be seen in the top right corner of the frame, with the sparkling lights of Northern Europe's cities in the foreground.

Auroras, also known as the northern or southern lights (northern lights occur in the Arctic Circle while southern lights occur in the Antarctic Circle), occur when particles from the sun interact with Earth's magnetic field. [Aurora Photos: See Breathtaking Views of the Northern Lights]

According to NASA scientists, the solar particles can cause electrical current changes in the magnetic field, sending energetic particles into the upper atmosphere. When these particles interact with the gases in the upper atmosphere, those gases become charged. When this gained energy is released, the aurora glows. That is, as the gases give up the energy, they release photons (light particles) of specific wavelengths, creating the rich blue and greenish hues.

This wasn't Pesquet's first sighting of the northern lights from the ISS. The astronaut first caught an auroral display on Jan. 18, 2017, and snapped a photo of the light show, reported Space.com.

"It is literally a visual representation of the Earth's magnetic field protecting all living beings from space radiation," Pesquet wrote of the aurora on Flickr.

Along with taking his stunning photography, Pesquet has performed about 50 scientific experiments aboard the ISS, according to the European Space Agency. Pesquet's mission "Proxima" — named for the sun's closest star and continuing a tradition of naming French astronauts' missions after stars or constellations — ended this week. Pesquet and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy returned to Earth today (June 2).

A three-person crew made up of cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer will operate the station until the arrival of three new crewmembers later this summer, according to NASA.

Original article on Live Science.

Meet "Steve," a strange, new aurora feature discovered by citizen scientists and verified by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm satellites.

Eric Donovan, a researcher at University of Calgary in Canada, first heard of "Steve" while talking to members of a Facebook group called the Alberta Aurora Chasers, who coordinate to track and photograph the northern lights in the Canadian sky (Alberta is a province in western Canada). While the colorful lights of an aurora normally ripple horizontally across the sky, Steve formed a distinctive purplish or greenish vertical streak.

To learn more about it, Donovan coordinated with the Facebook group to match sightings of the feature with data from the Swarm satellites, which measure Earth's magnetic field, and ground-based scientific cameras that monitor the sky. [Paragliding Through Aurora Borealis' Beauty (Video)]

"In 1997, we had just one all-sky imager in North America to observe the aurora borealis from the ground," Donovan said in an ESA statement. "Back then, we would be lucky if we got one photograph a night of the aurora taken from the ground that coincides with an observation from a satellite. Now, we have many more all-sky imagers and satellite missions like Swarm, so we get more than 100 [observations] a night."

Auroras are generated when charged particles ejected from the sun are drawn to Earth's north and south poles by the planet's magnetic field. There, they hit neutral particles in the upper atmosphere and let off splashes of color and light in the sky.

For some time, photographers had referred to features like Steve as "proton arcs," according to a 2016 article on Spaceweather.com (and a corresponding photo gallery), coming from protons hitting the atmosphere rather than the ordinary auroras' electrons. Vanexus Photography also shared a spectacular video of that feature forming in Porteau Cove Provincial Park near Vancouver, Canada in 2016 (the feature now called Steve appears at the beginning and end of the video).

In fact, protons hitting the atmosphere produce only diffuse visible light (as researchers discussed in the Spaceweather.com article), so Donovan said he knew the phenomenon must have another cause and insisted on a new name. The aurora photographers chose to go with "Steve," Donovan said in a recent talk at a Swarm science meeting in Canada.

Within a few weeks of searching, Donovan identified signs in the ground-based data that could match a Steve-like feature, and asked the Facebook group whether anyone had spotted it — sure enough, there were photos of Steve from that very location. And better yet, one of the Swarm satellites had flown through the feature.

"As the satellite flew straight through Steve, data from the electric field instrument showed very clear changes," Donovan said in the statement. "The temperature 300 kilometers [200 miles] above Earth's surface jumped by 3,000 degrees Celsius [5,500 degrees Fahrenheit], and the data revealed a 25-km-wide [16 miles] ribbon of gas flowing westwards at about 6 km/s [3.5 miles per second] compared to a speed of about 10 m/s [33 feet/s] either side of the ribbon."

The phenomenon called Steve had never been captured with those scientific tools before, even though it is "remarkably common," Donovan added. "It's thanks to ground-based observations, satellites, today's explosion of access to data and an army of citizen scientists joining forces to document it."

And going forward, data from Swarm and other scientific tools can begin to narrow down where this kind of aurora comes from. Crowdsourcing tools like Aurorasaurus use Twitter and submitted observations to track the aurora's appearance, and social networks of photographers, like Alberta Aurora Chasers, provide additional data that's crucial to tracking these features down more precisely than ever, Donovan said.

In the talk, Donovan concluded by pointing out that in 1997, scientists couldn't have pinpointed the newfound phenomenon at all. Fifteen years ago, it would have cost $200 or $300 million to track down something like Steve over the course of 10 years, he said. Now, with the help of citizen scientists and all the infrastructure that's available for observation, it was possible to close the loop in a matter of weeks, Donovan said.

"We really are in a truly new era," he added.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

In views from the International Space Station, a mysterious set of electrical discharges shine above a roiling thunderstorm in Earth's upper atmosphere. 

Andreas Mogensen, a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut who flew in 2015, took pictures over thunderstorms to try to see the strange atmospheric features, which are sometimes called red sprites, blue jets, pixies and elves. The work was recently published by Denmark's National Space Institute, and Mogensen's footage is spotlighted in an ESA video. 

"It is not every day that you get to capture a new weather phenomenon on film, so I am very pleased with the result — but even more so that researchers will be able to investigate these intriguing thunderstorms in more detail soon," Mogensen said in a statement.

Mogensen focused on cloud turrets, or pillars of cloud that extend into the upper atmosphere, to pinpoint the blue flashes. He documented 245 blue flashes during a 160-second video of a thunderstorm above the Bay of Bengal.

Satellites orbiting Earth are poorly placed to look at these storms because their high viewing angle doesn't show the scale of the blue jets, especially for smaller discharges, ESA officials stated. The space station, by contrast, is in a low-Earth orbit and is a better platform for capturing these transient phenomena.

"The blue discharges and jets are examples of a little-understood part of our atmosphere," ESA officials said in the statement. "Electrical storms reach into the stratosphere and have implications for how our atmosphere protects us from radiation."

Researchers will be able to follow up on the work using the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor, an instrument suite slated to launch to the space station later this year. It will be installed outside the station's Columbus laboratory to look at thunderstorms and their "transient luminous events," ESA officials said.

The results were detailed in January in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

A band of molten iron is churning slowly deep inside Earth, much in the same way as a jet stream, a new study finds.

Scientists discovered the so-called molten jet stream while analyzing data from a trio of European satellites, called Swarm. The satellites launched in 2013 with the goal of studying Earth's magnetic field. In this case, Swarm's observations helped create a view akin to an X-ray of the planet, the researchers said.

"The European Space Agency's Swarm satellites are providing our sharpest X-ray image yet of the core," the study's lead researcher, Phil Livermore, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds in England, said in a statement. "We've not only seen this jet stream clearly for the first time, but we understand why it's there." [Photos: Hidden Ocean Locked Up Deep in Earth's Mantle]

Earth's core is buried under about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) of rock, so scientists study it indirectly by measuring the planet's magnetic field. For instance, changes in the magnetic field suggested that liquid iron in the outer core moves faster in the Northern Hemisphere, largely beneath Alaska and Siberia, the researchers said.

New Swarm data has helped clarify Earth's inner workings. For example, the changes in the magnetic field are actually being caused by the molten jet stream, which moves about 25 miles (40 km) per year, currently in a westward direction, the researchers found. 

That speed is three times faster than normal outer-core speeds, and hundreds of thousands of times faster than the rate at which Earth's tectonic plates move, they noted.

Swarm's data also allowed the researchers to pinpoint the jet stream's location: It flows along a boundary between two different regions in the core, the researchers found. This movement is likely caused when liquid in the core flows toward the boundary from both sides, and then is squeezed out sideways, they said. [Photo Timeline: How the Earth Formed]

"Of course, you need a force to move the liquid toward the boundary," said study co-author Rainer Hollerbach, a professor of theoretical fluid dynamics at the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds. "This could be provided by buoyancy, or perhaps more likely from changes in the magnetic field within the core."

This discovery is Swarm's first deep-Earth finding, and researchers hope that another is on the horizon. For now, the satellites are still circling the planet, measuring and untangling magnetic signals from the core, mantle, crust, oceans, ionosphere (an energetic part of the atmosphere about 50 miles, or 80 km, above the ground that has electrically charged particles) and magnetosphere (the magnetic field surrounding Earth), they said.

"Further surprises are likely," said study co-author Rune Floberghagen, the European Space Agency's Swarm mission manager. "The magnetic field is forever changing, and this could even make the jet stream switch direction."

The study was published online today (Dec. 19) in the journal Nature Geoscience. 

Original article on Live Science.

Behold! The European Space Agency's new Mars orbiter just sent back its first high-resolution images of the Red Planet, and the view is amazing.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) arrived at Mars on Oct. 19, when its companion spacecraft Schiaparelli crash-landed on the planet's surface. Since then, TGO has been circling Mars, testing out its machinery, and taking spectacularly sharp pictures of the landscape using its Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS). ESA stitched together the best of these photos in a cool new flyover video.

"The first images we received are absolutely spectacular ― and it was only meant to be a test," Nicolas Thomas, CaSSIS team leader at the University of Bern's Center of Space and Habitability, said in a statement. [Photos: Europe's ExoMars Missions to Mars in Pictures]

These first images allowed ESA to test the camera's color- and stereo-imaging capabilities, which would allow CaSSIS to build 3D maps of the Martian surface using measurements with sound waves.

Though the color-imaging equipment was functioning as planned, the first photos appear black and white. That's because the areas photographed are dusty ― volcanic without much color to be seen. "We will have to wait a little until something colorful passes under the spacecraft," Thomas said. 

TGO is currently orbiting Mars once every four days in a highly elliptical path. At its closest, the spacecraft flies within 155 miles (250 kilometers) of the ground. These close approaches are happening quickly before the orbiter raises its altitude to about 62,000 miles (100,000 km).

CaSSIS was up and running for two of these approaches during its testing phase and returned a total of 11 images. ESA then combined some of the new photos in the video above to simulate a flyover of Hebes Chasma, a 190-mile-long (310 km) canyon in the Martian surface.

"We saw Hebes Chasma at 2.8 meters per pixel," said Thomas. "That’s a bit like flying over Bern at 15,000 kilometers [9,300 miles] per hour and simultaneously getting sharp pictures of cars in Zürich."

After the botched landing of the Schiaparelli spacecraft in October, pressures have been high for the ExoMars team. "A lot of public attention has been on the failed landing of Schiaparelli, but TGO has been working really well, so we have been extremely busy in the past month," Thomas said.

"We were quite nervous but it looks as though almost everything functioned as we planned it. The resulting images are really sharp," Antoine Pommerol, a CaSSIS co-investigator at the Center of Space and Habitability in Bern, said in the same statement.

For the next few months, the team will continue to prepare CaSSIS for its prime mission. "The test was very successful but we have identified a couple of things that need to be improved in the onboard software and in the ground post-processing," Thomas said.

TGO will spend nine to 12 months "aerobraking," or slowing down to round out its elliptical orbit. Eventually, the orbiter will circle the planet at a constant altitude of about 250 miles (400 km). Its primary science mission is scheduled to begin by the end of 2017. Then TGO will begin studying gases in the Martian atmosphere. 

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

The remote and frosty landscape of Siberia looks like a tree's snow-covered roots or veins in a newly released photo taken from space.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Copernicus Sentinel-2A satellite captured the detailed topography of the snowy Putorana Plateau in central Siberia on March 2. The image highlights the region's stark and branching appearance, created by the area's flat-topped mountains and intricate lake and river systems.

Flat-topped mountains are formed by plume volcanism. In this geological process, a large amount of magma seeps through the Earth's surface, forming a miles-thick blanket over the area. As the blanket solidifies, cracks form that fill with water and erode over time. According to the ESA, this process created the Putorana Plateau's rivers and unique, elongated lakes, such as Lake Ayan, which can be seen in the upper-central part of the image. [Earth from Above: 101 Stunning Images from Orbit]

The plateau is part of the Putoransky State Nature Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. (UNESCO World Heritage Sites mark places of special cultural or physical significance.)

Putoransky is virtually untouched by humans, and at about 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of the Arctic Circle, the area is one of the few sites in the Arctic with complete ecosystems and abundant plant species.

The area serves as a major reindeer migration route, which is "an increasingly rare natural phenomenon," according to the European Space Agency. The animals can travel 3,000 miles (4,800 km) annually, but their numbers in the wild have diminished as climate change impacts their Arctic habitat, according to scientists.

Original article on Live Science.

Europe's ExoMars lander gauged out a crater 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) deep and nearly 8 feet (2.4 m) wide when it crashed into the Red Planet's surface last week, a new photo by a NASA Mars orbiter reveals.  

The lander, known as Schiaparelli, apparently deployed its parachute prematurely and didn't fire its thrusters nearly long enough to pull off a soft landing as planned on Oct. 19, European Space Agency (ESA) officials have said. 

The new image, which was captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on Tuesday (Oct. 25), shows the aftermath of Schiaparelli's violent impact. [In Photos: Europe's Schiaparelli Mars Landing Day]

First of all, there's the main crater, which the lander blasted out when it hit the surface at a speed of about 180 mph (300 km/h). The fuzzy dark smudges around the central crater are difficult to interpret at the moment, ESA officials said: These markings are asymmetrical, which suggests that the impactor was traveling at a low angle to the ground, but Schiaparelli should have been descending pretty much perpendicular to the surface when it hit.

"It is possible the hydrazine propellant tanks in the module exploded preferentially in one direction upon impact, throwing debris from the planet’s surface in the direction of the blast, but more analysis is needed to explore this idea further," ESA officials wrote in an update today (Oct. 27).

"An additional long, dark arc is seen to the upper right of the dark patch but is currently unexplained," they added. "It may also be linked to the impact and possible explosion."

About 0.9 miles (1.4 kilometers) south of this crater is a bright feature above a smaller gray disk, which are almost certainly Schiaparelli's 39-foot-wide (12 m) parachute and its attached rear heat shield, respectively, ESA officials said.

Another bright feature 0.9 miles (1.4 km) east of the Schiaparelli crater is probably the lander's front heat shield, they added.

"The mottled bright and dark appearance of this feature is interpreted as reflections from the multilayered thermal insulation that covers the inside of the front heatshield. Further imaging from different angles should be able to confirm this interpretation," ESA officials wrote in the update. "The dark features around the front heatshield are likely from surface dust disturbed during impact."

Schiaparelli launched in March 2016 along with the Trace Gas Orbiter. Together, the two spacecraft make up the ExoMars 2016 mission — the first part of the two-phase ExoMars program, which ESA leads with assistance from its chief partner, the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos.

The second phase of ExoMars aims to land a life-hunting rover on the Red Planet's surface in 2021. Schiaparelli's main goal was to test out the technologies needed to get this rover down safely, and the data gathered during the lander's Oct. 19 descent should be helpful in this regard, ESA officials have said.

The ExoMars team expects to wrap up its investigation into what exactly happened during Schiaparelli's descent by mid-November, ESA officials added.

TGO, for its part, aced a crucial orbit-insertion burn on Oct. 19 and is in good shape as it loops around Mars on a highly elliptical, four-day-long orbit, mission team members said. Early next year, the spacecraft will begin moving into its final science orbit, a circular path with an altitude of 250 miles (400 km).

TGO should reach that orbit by March 2018, at which point the spacecraft will begin hunting for buried water ice and sniffing the Martian atmosphere for methane and other gases that could be signs of life. This science mission will last for about two years. TGO will also serve as a communications relay for the ExoMars rover and other surface craft before ending operations in 2022.

MRO took the new photo with its supersharp High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The Schiaparelli crash site was first identified last week in images captured by MRO's lower-resolution CTX camera.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Europe's ExoMars lander apparently crashed on the Red Planet, and an orbiting NASA spacecraft has spotted its grave, European Space Agency (ESA) officials said.

The lander, named Schiaparelli, stopped communicating with mission control about 1 minute before its planned touchdown on Mars Wednesday morning (Oct. 19). Newly released photos of the landing site by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) seem to confirm what ExoMars team members had suspected — that Schiaparelli died a violent death.

The photos show a bright feature consistent with the lander's 39-foot-wide (12 meters) parachute, as well as a 50-by-130-foot (15 by 40 m) dark patch likely created by the lander's impact, ESA officials said. [In Photos: Europe's Schiaparelli Mars Landing Day]

"Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometers [1.2 to 2.5 miles], therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 km/h [186 mph]," ESA officials wrote in an update today (Oct. 21).  

"The relatively large size of the feature would then arise from disturbed surface material," they added. "It is also possible that the lander exploded on impact, as its thruster propellant tanks were likely still full. These preliminary interpretations will be refined following further analysis."

ExoMars team members think those tanks were still full because Schiaparelli's data indicate that the lander didn't fire its descent-slowing thrusters nearly as long as it was supposed to, ESA officials have said.

MRO took the photos with its relatively low-resolution CTX camera. The orbiter will image the crash site with its sharper High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera next week, ESA officials said.

The large, dark patch is about 3.4 miles (5.4 km) west of Schiaparelli's intended landing site within Mars' Meridiani Planum, a highland region just south of the Red Planet's equator. The impact site is well within the planned landing ellipse, which measures 62 miles long by 9 miles wide (100 by 15 km), ESA officials said. 

Schiaparelli launched this past March along with the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). Together, the two spacecraft form the first part of the two-phase ExoMars program, which is led by ESA with the Russian federal space agency, Roscosmos, as main partner.

Schiaparelli's main task was to help prove out the technologies required to get a life-hunting rover — ExoMars' second phase — on the ground safely in 2021. ESA officials have said that Schiaparelli's descent through the Martian atmosphere will be useful in this regard, even though the probe didn't stick its landing.

While Schiaparelli was barreling through the Martian air Wednesday morning, TGO was executing a 139-minute-long, make-or-break engine burn to get into orbit around the Red Planet. This latter maneuver went well, and TGO is now circling the planet every 4.2 days on a highly elliptical path, ESA officials said.

TGO is in good shape and will start calibrating its science instruments next month, they added. Early next year, the orbiter will begin shifting to its final science orbit — a circular path that lies about 250 miles (400 km) above the Martian surface. TGO should achieve this orbit in March 2018 and begin its official two-year science mission shortly thereafter.

The main goal of that mission is to help figure out the origin of methane and other low-abundance gases in the Red Planet's atmosphere. Methane is of particular interest to astrobiologists, because the gas is a potential sign of life (though it can also be produced by geological processes).

TGO will also serve as a communications relay for the ExoMars 2020 rover and NASA's operational surface craft, the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers (and, later, the American space agency's 2020 Mars rover), before ending its life in late 2022.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

After a suspenseful night waiting for a signal from the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander, the European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed today that the spacecraft went silent less than a minute before it was set to reach the Martian surface Wednesday (Oct. 19).

ESA mission managers said this morning (Oct. 20) that they need more time to understand what went wrong with Schiaparelli, and to figure out exactly where and in what condition the test lander ended up. But the ExoMars team was optimistic that the capsule had collected enough data during its descent to set the stage for the next phase of the mission: the planned 2020 launch of a life-hunting ExoMars rover.

"The test has yielded a huge amount of data," David Parker, ESA's director of human spaceflight and robotic exploration, said at a news conference early this morning. "It gives us a lot of confidence for the future. We need to understand what happened in the last few seconds before the planned landing, and that is likely to take some time." [In Photos: Europe's Schiaparelli Mars Landing Day]

Schiaparelli was scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet Wednesday at 10:48 a.m. EDT (1448 GMT). But the spacecraft's handlers could not confirm a successful landing, and were left waiting on a signal. Meanwhile, Schiaparelli's mother ship, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), successfully entered orbit around Mars.

Schiaparelli had been programmed to follow a demanding 6-minute landing sequence that would see the capsule come to a halt from about 13,000 mph (21,000 km/h).

The first phases of this sequence went according to plan, Andrea Accomazzo, head of ESA's solar and planetary missions, said at the news conference from ESA's operations center in Darmstadt, Germany.

The lander sailed through the upper layers of the Martian atmosphere as expected, and its supersonic parachute deployed on time — important indications that "the heat shield has worked flawlessly," Accomazzo said. But the ejection of the back heat shield and parachute occurred earlier than planned, he added.

"Following this phase, the lander has definitely not behaved exactly as we expected," Accomazzo said.

Schiaparelli was equipped with nine thrusters that were meant to bring the lander to a hover above the Martian surface so that the capsule could plop down from a height of about 6.5 feet (2 m). These thrusters, however, fired for only about 3 or 4 seconds — much shorter than mission managers had expected — and the spacecraft lost contact about 50 seconds before its planned landing, Accomazzo said. [The Best (and Worst) Mars Landings of All Time]

As to whether Schiaparelli is still in one piece, "It's very difficult to say a likelihood now," Accomazzo said.

"We are not in a position yet — but we will be — to determine the dynamic conditions with which the lander has touched the ground, and then we will know whether it could have survived structurally or not," Accomazzo said. "We are still processing the data from the descent. From the surface, we have no data at all."

He added that it might take some time for the team to locate the lander physically on the ground using imagery from an orbiter such as NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

To date, NASA is the only space program to have completed fully successful missions to Mars' surface. The ExoMars team had hopes that their mission would be the first to pull off such a feat for Europe and Russia. (ExoMars is a joint mission by ESA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.)

Though it had some science experiments on board, Schiaparelli was meant to survive for only a few days on Mars, and its main purpose was to test the landing system that's intended to place a rover on the Red Planet as part of the second phase of the mission, ExoMars 2020. TGO, meanwhile, was designed to analyze the Martian atmosphere for gases such as methane, which could be evidence of life; the orbiter is also meant to serve as a communication link between the 2020 rover and Earth. [How the ExoMars Missions Work (Infographic)

"The very good news is that TGO is very successfully inserted into the orbit," said Jan Wörner, director general of ESA. "That means that TGO is now ready for science and, at the same time, ready for data relay, which we need for the 2020 mission."

Wörner said that after another review of the 2020 mission next week, ESA officials will know exactly how much they will have to ask each of the agency's member states to contribute to complete the funding for ExoMars. (The total amount of extra funding needed is on the order of 300 million euros, or about $329 million.) He and other ESA officials expressed confidence that Schiaparelli's bumpy finish wouldn't derail the next phase of the mission.

"All the key pieces of hardware were activated and provided data," Parker said. "The experience feeds into the next mission exactly as planned."

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The suspense is killing us.

The Schiaparelli lander, part of the European-led ExoMars 2016 mission, was supposed to touch down on the Red Planet this morning (Oct. 19) at 10:48 a.m. EDT (1448 GMT), but the spacecraft's handler's still don't know whether or not the historic maneuver was successful. You can watch a live webcast of the ExoMars landing here, courtesy of the European Space Agency (ESA).

"Initial signals were received via the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) as Schiaparelli descended to the surface of Mars, but no signal of touchdown yet," ESA officials wrote in a blog post at 11:12 a.m. EDT (1512 GMT) today. "This is not unexpected due to the very faint nature of the signal received at GMRT. A clearer assessment of the situation will come when ESA's Mars Express will have relayed the recording of Schiaparelli's entry, descent and landing." [The Best (and Worst) Mars Landings of All Time]

But there is good news already: The Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), the other part of ExoMars 2016, slipped into orbit around the Red Planet as planned today after completing a crucial two-hour engine burn, ESA officials said.

Schiaparelli is a technology demonstrator whose main purpose is proving out the landing system that will place the life-hunting ExoMars 2020 rover on the Red Planet's surface a few years from now. TGO was designed to scan the Martian atmosphere for methane and other gases that could be signs of life.

ESA leads the two-phase ExoMars program, with the Russian space agency Roscosmos as chief partner.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

A European spacecraft destined to land on Mars detached from its mothership on Sunday (Oct. 16), setting the stage for a daring descent to the Red Planet's surface later this week.

The European Space Agency's Mars-bound Schiaparelli module separated from its carrier craft — the Trace Gas Orbiter — at about 10:42 a.m. EDT (1442 GMT) as both spacecraft were in the home stretch of their 308 million-mile trek (496 million kilometers) to Mars. If all goes well, the two probes (which make up the ESA-Russian ExoMars 2016 mission) will arrive at the Red Planet on Wednesday (Oct. 19), with Schiaparelli dropping down to the Martian surface as its mothership enters orbit around Mars.

"We can confirm good separation from the Schiaparelli module," ExoMars flight director Michel Denis said during a live ESA webcast from the agency's mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany. Flight controllers applauded as confirmation of the separation was received at the center. [Europe's ExoMars Missions in Pictures (Gallery)]

The Wednesday arrival of Schiaparelli and the Trace Gas Orbiter will kick into high gear the first phase of ESA and Russia's ambitious ExoMars project aimed at searching for signs that life ever existed on Mars. A second mission will launch the ExoMars rover and surface science station to Mars in 2020.

The Trace Gas Orbiter, or TGO as it's called, is built to seek out water-ice deposits on or just below the Martian surface, according to an ESA mission overview. It will also investigate the presence of methane in Mars' atmosphere to help scientists learn exactly how the gas — which can be created by geological and biological processes — may have formed. After entering orbit around Mars on Wednesday, TGO will begin a long series of aerobraking maneuvers that should last into 2017, after which its science mission will begin.

The Schiaparelli module, meanwhile, is primarily a demonstrator vehicle to test the entry, descent and landing technology needed to safely land on Mars. It is powered by internal batteries and is designed to last just a few days on the Martian surface, ESA officials have said. [How Europe's ExoMars Missions Work (Infographic)]

The lander will use a heat shield, a huge parachute and thrusters to land on Meridiani Planum, a vast region of Mars that is also home to NASA's Opportunity rover.

During its six-minute descent, a camera on Schiaparelli will snap up to 15 pictures of the trip down to Mars. The probe also contains set of science instruments to monitor the Martian atmosphere while it is active on the surface.

With Schiaparelli and TGO now making their separate approaches to Mars, all eyes are turning to the arrival and landing on Wednesday, Oct. 19.

ESA will webcast the arrival of TGO and Schiaparelli online Wednesday beginning with an ESA Social TV webcast at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT). ESA's primary ExoMars arrival program begins at 11:44 a.m. EDT (1544 GMT) and run through about 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT). A second part will resume at 2:25 p.m. EDT (1825 GMT) and last just under two hours.

ESA officials will also hold a follow up press conference on Thursday (Oct. 20) at 4 a.m. EDT (0800 GMT) to showcase images from the Schiaparelli module's descent camera.

You can follow all of the ExoMars 2016 arrival and landing events via the ESA's Livestream page. You can all see the events on Space.com here, courtesy of ESA.

Visit Space.com this week for complete coverage of the ExoMars 2016 orbital arrival and landing.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

With Hurricane Matthew battering the southeastern United States, a fleet of Earth-watching weather satellites is tracking the storm from space, revealing staggering views like this temperature map of the hurricane's eye as seen from above.

The European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite captured this thermal view of Hurricane Matthew as it was approaching the eastern coast of Florida at 11:13 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Oct. 6 (0313 on Friday GMT). At the time, Matthew was monstrous, measuring 248 miles (400 kilometers) across and located 124 miles (200 km) from Miami Beach. ESA officials released the image Friday afternoon. [You can see more photos of Hurricane Matthew in this gallery by our sister site Live Science.]

"Having already caused devastation in the Caribbean, Matthew is the most powerful hurricane to threaten the U.S. Atlantic coast in more than a decade – and it is thought that it could be the most catastrophic to hit Florida in more than a 100 years," ESA officials wrote in a description of the image. [Hurricane Matthew In 3D: Satellite Views (Video)]

The Sentinel-3A satellite data found that the temperature of the clouds at the top of Hurricane Matthew ranged from minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 80 degrees Celsius) at the top of the storm, just outside its eye — 7.4 miles (12 km) above sea level — to about 77 degrees F (25 degrees C) at the Atlantic Ocean's surface. The satellite used its sea and land temperature radiometer, an instrument that measures the energy radiating from the Earth in nine spectral bands, to make these observations.

As of 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT), Hurricane Matthew was a Category 2 storm with maximum wind speeds of 110 mph (175 km/h), according to an update from the National Hurricane Center. It was located about 40 miles (70 km) east of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, and 135 miles (215 km) south of Savannah, Georgia, and moving north at about 12 mph (19 km/h).

The Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite launched into space on Feb. 16 and is part of a fleet of ESA satellites designed to study Earth in extreme detail. A sister satellite to Sentinel-3A, called Sentinel-3B, is scheduled to launch in 2017.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

The final resting place of the European comet lander Philae is a mystery no more. After nearly two years of searching, the lander's shadowy grave on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko has been found in images from its mothership Rosetta.

The European Space Agency's Philae lander touched down on Comet 67P (as scientists call it) in Nov. 12, 2014, but its final location was uncertain due to the probe's rough, bouncy landing.  News of Philae's discovery comes just weeks before Rosetta — low on solar power as the comet moves away from the sun —  is set for a dramatic touchdown itself on 67P's surface to end the mission. In a statement today (Sept. 5), ESA officials expressed marvel that they found Philae at almost the last minute.

"With only a month left of the Rosetta mission, we are so happy to have finally imaged Philae, and to see it in such amazing detail," said Cecilia Tubiana of the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera team, in a statement. She was the first person to see the images when they were downlinked from Rosetta yesterday. [Philae's Rough Comet Landing Explained (Infographic)]

Philae's landing on Nov. 12, 2014 did not go as expected. After anchoring harpoons on the spacecraft failed to deploy, it made a triple touchdown before skidding to a stop in a shadowy zone.

The solar-powered lander was forced to rely on batteries to do its work. It sent just 60 hours of data from the surface, but made several findings in that short time – including detecting organics on 67P. Philae only made intermittent contact with Rosetta before the lander's mission was declared over this July, a year after Philae's last signal was detected.

The new pictures show why it was so hard for Rosetta to get in touch after Philae's landing. The lander is resting on its side in a crevice, with two legs plainly visible in high-resolution imagery.

Rosetta began its search shortly after Philae's landing. ESA officials said that radio ranging data showed a suggested search area of several tens of meters. Rosetta imaged several possible objects. The team eliminated all but one target after the imagery was analyzed, among other techniques.

However, a closer look had to wait until Rosetta shortened its orbit above the comet, towards the end of the mission. Confirmation finally came in images from Sept. 2, when Rosetta was just 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) above Philae on the surface.

A labelled picture from ESA not only reveals Philae's legs, but also some of its instruments and panels. Closer images will be possible when Rosetta descends towards the comet, ESA officials added.

"This wonderful news means that we now have the missing 'ground-truth' information needed to put Philae’s three days of science into proper context, now that we know where that ground actually is," said Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist, in the same statement.

Rosetta – which isn't designed to land on the comet – will nevertheless touch down on Sept. 30 in 67P's light gravity. During descent, ESA plans to look at zones such as open pits in the Ma'at region, which could reveal more about the comet's insides.

The orbiter's daring end is similar to NASA's NEAR Shoemaker descent on asteroid 433 Eros on Feb. 12, 2001. Like Rosetta, Shoemaker was not designed to land, but did so safely. While no images were sent after landing, the spacecraft continued sending data for two weeks after touching down.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Europe's Rosetta spacecraft has captured dramatic imagery of a comet outburst that may have been caused by a landslide on the icy body.

The outburst occurred Feb. 19 on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which Rosetta has been orbiting since August 2014. The spacecraft observed the eruption of gas and dust with nine of its 11 science instruments, from a distance of 21.7 miles (35 kilometers), European Space Agency (ESA) officials said.

"Over the last year, Rosetta has shown that, although activity can be prolonged, when it comes to outbursts, the timing is highly unpredictable, so catching an event like this was pure luck," Matt Taylor, ESA's Rosetta project scientist, said in a statement. [See amazing photos from Rosetta's comet mission]

"By happy coincidence, we were pointing the majority of instruments at the comet at this time, and having these simultaneous measurements provides us with the most complete set of data on an outburst ever collected," Taylor added.

The outburst began around 4:40 a.m. EST (0940 GMT) on Feb. 19, when Rosetta's wide-angle camera picked up a significant brightening of the coma — the fuzzy cloud around Comet 67P's nucleus.

The increased activity continued for at least the next 2 hours. During that stretch, the brightness of the ultraviolet light reflected by 67P's nucleus increased by a factor of six, and the amount of dust emitted by the comet spiked as well. Rosetta's dust counter detected nearly 200 particles over the course of a few hours on Feb. 19; the instrument recorded just three to 10 hits on other days in that month, ESA officials said.

In addition, the temperature of the gas around Rosetta rose by 54 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) during the outburst.

Rosetta's observations indicate that the eruption started on a steep slope in a region of the 2.5-mile-wide (4 kilometers) comet that is known as Atum, mission team members said.

The activity began when this slope emerged from shadow into sunlight, suggesting that thermal stresses may have caused a landslide that exposed previously buried water ice to space. This ice then immediately sublimated (transitioned to the gas phase), taking lots of dust with it as it rocketed away, according to this hypothesis, which researchers detail in a new paper published online today (Aug. 25) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"We’ll continue to analyze the data, not only to dig into the details of this particular event, but also to see if it can help us better understand the many other outbursts witnessed over the course of the mission," said Taylor, who is a co-author of the new study. "It’s great to see the instrument teams working together on the important question of how cometary outbursts are triggered."

The Rosetta mission was the first ever to orbit a comet, and the first to drop a lander on one of these icy bodies. (The Rosetta mothership carried a lander called Philae, which touched down in November 2014; Rosetta team members recently declared Philae dead.)

But Rosetta's pioneering work at Comet 67P is coming to an end: The orbiter will end its mission with a controlled, slow-motion crash onto the comet's surface on Sept. 30.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado — The European Space agency is pressing forward in its plans to set up a permanent human outpost on the moon.

This envisioned "moon village," a product of international collaboration between spacefaring nations, will be a base for science, business, mining and even tourism, Johann-Dietrich Wörner, director general of the European Space Agency (ESA), said here during the 32nd Space Symposium earlier this month.

The moon village would be open for use by ESA member states and other nations around the globe, Wörner said. ESA regards the moon as the next logical destination for humans beyond low Earth orbit, and utilizing Earth's nearest neighbor should pave the way for human missions to Mars, he added. [Home on the Moon: How to Build a Lunar Colony (Infographic)]

"I think we should go first to the moon and then further on," Wörner said on April 13, during a session at the symposium called "New Generation Space Leaders Panel: The Future of Human Spaceflight."

"I would not call Mars the ultimate goal. I am quite sure humans will go further," he added. 

It takes a moon village

Wörner said the term "moon village" was chosen advisedly, to help people understand the purpose of such an outpost.

"A village is something where different people are gathering with different capabilities, different opportunities, and then they build a community," Wörner said. "It’s not one village with some houses, a church."

The idea, he added, is to bring together a variety of different actors from the public and private sectors.

"But for me, it’s also a stepping-stone, a test bed ... to go further, for instance, to Mars and beyond," Wörner said.

NASA aims to get astronauts to the vicinity of Mars by the end of the 2030s. This ambitious effort will require broad international cooperation, space agency officials have said.

Earth’s moon as seen from the International Space Station. Photo taken by British astronaut Tim Peake. Credit: NASA/ESA

Renewed and sustained effort

Lunar exploration will likely get a big boost in the next decade, thanks to rising interest in the moon in Europe and other parts of the world.

That view is expressed in a new ESA brochure now in circulation. The brochure draws upon findings from a conference called "International Symposium on Moon 2020-2030: A New Era of Human and Robotic Exploration," which was held in December at ESA's European Space Research and Technology Center in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

"One driver of this renewed interest in the moon is to assess the economic feasibility of using lunar resources for sustaining human surface-exploration activities," the brochure states.

Data from recent moon-orbiting missions and new analyses of lunar material brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts"show that the moon is the closest place to Earth where we can find clues to the history of the solar system, including that of the early Earth and of the formation of the Earth-moon system," the brochure notes.

Additionally, insights into the environment in which life began on Earth nearly 4 billion years ago "could be preserved in previously unexplored areas, such as the poles, the highlands and the far side of the moon," the brochure explains.

Attendees of the recent moon-exploration meeting gave Wörner's moon village vision a positive reception, according to the brochure.

Leonard David is author of "Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet," to be published by National Geographic this October. The book is a companion to the National Geographic Channel six-part series coming in November. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Spacedotcom,Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Dozens of stars glimmer like jewels in a jaw-dropping new photo by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The new Hubble image depicts the star cluster Trumpler 14, a collection of about 2,000 young stars that lies 8,000 light-years from Earth, near the center of the Carina Nebula. You can zoom in on the glittering star cluster in this stunning video showcasing the new images.

"This region of space houses one of the highest concentrations of massive, luminous stars in the entire Milky Way — a spectacular family of young, bright, white-blue stars," European Space Agency (ESA) officials wrote in a escription of the photo, which was released today (Jan. 21). (Hubble is a joint mission involving NASA and ESA.) [Quiz: Take the Hubble Space Telescope Challenge]

"These stars are rapidly working their way through their vast supplies of hydrogen, and have only a few million years of life left before they meet a dramatic demise and explode as supernovae," ESA officials added in the statement.

The Trumpler 14 cluster is just 500,000 years old, ESA officials said, so many of its stars will live fast and die young. Earth's sun, by comparison, is still ticking along at the ripe old age of 4.6 billion years.

The brightest star in the new image is a supergiant called HD 93129Aa, which is about 80 times more massive, and 2.5 million times brighter, than the sun, ESA officials said. HD 93129Aa's surface temperature exceeds 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit (50,000 degrees Celsius), making the star one of the hottest of its type in the galaxy. (For comparison, the sun's surface temperature is about 10,000 degrees F, or 5,500 degrees C.)

HD 93129Aa is actually part of a binary system; it orbits a common center of mass along with its neighbor HD 93129Ab, ESA officials said.

The Hubble Space Telescope launched in April 1990, and astronauts fixed a flaw in its primary mirror during a spacewalk in December 1993. Ever since, the famous observatory has been capturing gorgeous images that have captivated the public and helped to reshape researchers' understanding of the cosmos.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Africa looked awash in splotches of dusty pink, vibrant green and a swirl of white clouds in an image snapped Tuesday (Aug. 4) by Europe's newest weather satellite, according to an announcement from the European Space Agency (ESA).

The satellite, called Meteosat Second Generation 4 (MSG-4), is a space newbie that was launched into orbit on July 15 from French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket.

To orient MSG-4 in its spacious new home, the ESA moved the satellite into geostationary orbit (meaning MSG-4 rotates with Earth, but stays in the same spot relative to the ground below). Agency scientists also activated the satellite's SEVIRI (Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager) scan mirror, which can take images in both infrared and visible wavelengths, according to a news release.

After ESA scientists spent 11 days configuring the satellite, they handed its controls over to the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) on July 26. [Earth from Above: 101 Stunning Images from Orbit]

EUMETSAT researchers immediately got to work, and had the satellite take its first picture Tuesday using its SEVIRI imager. "This first image is a pseudo-true-color composite combining two visible images in different wavelengths with a very-near-infrared image," EUMETSAT spokesperson Valerie Barthmann told Live Science in an email. "It shows the clouds in mainly white and greyish colors, vegetated land in green, and dry and desert and arid areas in red/brown."

Barthmann pointed to the strong convective clouds over the equatorial region as a particularly striking part of the photograph. Such clouds form due to some instability in the atmosphere. Another standout feature is "the cloud formation over the British Isles related to a large low-pressure area pushing a band of heavy precipitation in over southern Scandinavia and Central Europe," she said.

In addition to providing Earthlings with a gorgeous view of home, the images indicate the imaging instrument on board MSG-4 is functioning as expected, Barthmann said. The satellite is expected to become fully operational in another six months, researchers said.

During the next two months, EUMETSAT researchers will do a satellite checkout and assessment, followed by four months of imaging and product testing, such as calibration and validation, according to a EUMETSAT statement. After the testing period, MSG-4 will be ready to help scientists on Earth analyze the weather, the researchers said.

The MSG-4 is the final satellite in the MSG series of geostationary satellites, according to EUMETSAT. The spacecraft will provide information every 15 minutes needed for "nowcasting" of high-impact events, such as big dust outbreaks in the Sahara Desert and volcanic eruptions; it will also record valuable data such as land surface temperatures and cloud height, the organization said.

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