A new upgrade to the International Space Station's (ISS) quantum laboratory is enabling NASA to probe the behavior of atoms further than ever before, the space agency has announced.

Combining the ISS's newly upgraded "Cold Atom Laboratory" with the near zero-gravity of low Earth orbit, scientists are attempting to understand the properties of so-called "ultracold" atoms in an environment impossible to replicate on Earth. The aim of the mission is to study how clouds of atoms behave at temperatures close to absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) — the coldest possible temperature in the universe, where atoms lose all their energy of motion.

"At the coldest temperatures, matter behaves drastically different from anything we have experienced," Jason Williams, project scientist for the Cold Atom Lab at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built the facility, said in a statement. "The wavelike nature of matter dominates, and ultracold matter can behave in ways that are not only unexpected, but that also enable extremely precise measurements of time, gravity, and motion. The lab has lots of tools — especially with this latest upgrade — to let us probe the nature of the universe."

Rule-breaking particles

Atoms and their subatomic particles are quantum mechanical objects whose behavior is fundamentally different from that of the large-scale world. For example, the laws of quantum mechanics predict that particles can be in more than one place at the same time (quantum superposition); can be mysteriously linked with each other over great distances (quantum entanglement); and move through spacetime as waves as well as moving like fixed, solid objects.

But observing these behaviors is notoriously difficult. Firstly, atoms are so tiny that if an atom were the size of a golf ball, then a human teeing one off would stand roughly as tall as the distance from Earth to the moon. Secondly, it’s impossible to isolate measurements of these behaviors for atoms in "normal" environments (like on Earth), as the desired quantum behavior is disturbed by energy from heat and gravity.

To overcome these challenges, the ISS's Cold Atom Laboratory — which is the size of a mini-fridge — uses lasers to cool gases of rubidium and potassium to just above absolute zero. At these temperatures, atoms form a state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, in which many atoms behave like a single wave of quantum matter.

Not only does this setup allow scientists to observe quantum behaviors on a much larger scale than that of single atoms, but the reduced gravity enables the condensate matter waves to expand and evolve undisturbed for much longer periods than would be possible on Earth.

This is the fourth major upgrade to NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory since it arrived aboard the ISS in 2018. According to NASA, the significant improvements in this most recent upgrade include a redesigned magnetic trap to contain the cloud of atoms, improved atom sources, and better measurement capabilities.

Scientists launched these upgrades to the ISS in April 2026, and they have since been installed, switched on, and started making state-of-the-art measurements. As well as enabling novel tests of fundamental physics, measurements of these effects are critical in demonstrating future, space-based, highly precise quantum technologies related to positioning, navigation, timing, and gravity sensing. These technologies could one day enable astronauts to navigate on the moon without GPS and produce high-precision maps of Earth’s gravity.

"In the previous century, there was a quantum revolution that led to lasers, cellphones, and MRIs for medical imaging," Ethan Elliott, deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said in the statement. "We’re performing Quantum 2.0 – direct manipulation of large quantum states – and we hope for similar gains in quantum technology by advancing this science in orbit."

Most archaeologists study the things that past people left behind to recreate a picture of a bygone culture. Researchers are now applying those same archaeological techniques to more modern — and extreme — environments.

Justin Walsh, an archaeologist at Chapman University in California, is an innovator in the field of "space archaeology," or the study of human activity in the space environment, defined as 100 kilometers [62 miles] above Earth and beyond. Since the founding of the ISS Archaeological Project in 2015, Walsh has been studying how astronauts experience the International Space Station. Shawn Graham, a digital archaeologist at Carleton University in Canada, joined the project in 2023.

Now, Walsh and Graham are launching a new project — Archaeology Impossible — that looks at the things humans leave behind on Mount Everest. Live Science spoke with the duo about their ISS work and about why humans are obsessed with conquering extreme environments, like the highest spot on Earth.

Kristina Killgrove: You both started your careers in traditional archaeology but now you're doing something very different. Tell me about space archaeology.

Justin Walsh: My background is in Greek archaeology. But in 2008, I had a student in a cultural heritage seminar ask me a question: What about stuff in space? Is that heritage? And this question just completely blew my mind. I had never considered for a second that this idea could extend beyond Earth. But as soon as she asked the question, it was obvious. Yes, absolutely, there's stuff in space!

KK: So you're not using classic trowels and brushes to excavate artifacts?

JW: Space archaeology can use traditional archaeological tools and methods and techniques, but it also can require us to develop completely new methods and techniques.

KK: I assume you're not going up in a spaceship to record information at the International Space Station?

JW: It's now $75 million to pay Axiom Space for a seat to go to ISS for two weeks. There's no grant that's going to allow me to do that. So we had to come up with other ideas. I knew NASA was trying to develop a mission to Mars that's going to take three years, and they're going to put people in a tin can for that long. If you don't know the first thing about how that crew creates its own little society and culture and you can't support them effectively, how can you expect to have a successful mission? I wanted to try to show them what they were missing out on.

The inspiration for the ISS Archaeological Project was [UCLA anthropologist] Jason De León's Undocumented Migration Project, where he was using all kinds of creative ways of digging into the lived experience of migrants crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. One of them was giving disposable film cameras to the migrants in Mexico and retrieving them in the U.S. so that the migrants could take images of the obstacles they faced that he couldn't otherwise observe. And that was another light bulb moment for me.

Here we have, in the case of the ISS, tens of thousands of digital photographs that NASA has made public that show people doing things in the space station and show the places that they're occupying and the objects and the tools that they're using. And if we put the photos in order and track that change over time, it is possible to study the material culture of a space habitat over the very long term.

Shawn Graham: My background is in Roman archaeology, but I became a digital archaeologist. One of my previous projects was looking at human remains being bought and sold online with my colleague Damien Huffer [an osteoarchaeologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia]. We were looking at tens of thousands of images and trying to understand: What are the large-scale patterns? What are the changes over time? How do you map that?

Given my interests, Justin called me up and said, so we've got these photographs and we're trying to map change over time and to understand stratigraphy. Is there a way we can do that?

KK: What can you learn about humans in space from just photographs?

JW: From photos, we were able to map the distribution of population groups across the space station because, at that time in 2020, there had been about 250 people. We can easily find out information about them: their gender, their space agency affiliation, their nationality. The gender split at the time was 84% men, 16% women. And the U.S. had sent something like 35 women at that point.

On the U.S. side of the space station, we saw that women were underrepresented in the photographs of areas for science, eating, sleeping and exercise. There was one area where they were overrepresented: the cupola — the beautiful panoramic window looking out onto Earth. Women were 24% of the people in the published cupola photographs — 50% higher than you would expect based on the population.

So what this indicates is that NASA Public Affairs has at least an unconscious bias in selecting images of women in this aesthetically appealing location and not choosing the images of them in those other areas where they're working, living, and being human. That was interesting.

SG: Correct me if I'm wrong, Justin, but aren't the interior spaces of the station hyper-managed? But the actual archaeological investigations show that the astronauts aren't behaving the way the mission planners want them to.

JW: You're exactly right, Shawn. In one experiment, we had ISS crew members take a photo of each of six locations for 60 days. The clearest example is an area that's called the Maintenance Work Area. It's basically a workbench with a folding table and a blue aluminum panel with 40 pieces of Velcro on it. If you read the design protocol for this work station, NASA has delineated seven ranked priorities. Number one is the maintenance of equipment. Number two is science that doesn't need to be done in a specific kind of facility. And then there are others.

We actually found that, over 60 days, this location was never used for maintenance that we could see. It was used for science on four or five occasions. The rest of the time it was just a pegboard in your garage or your basement where you store things that don't have a better home elsewhere because there's a ton of Velcro there.

KK: You found that the ISS needs a junk drawer, basically?

JW: Yes, absolutely! That's a great way of putting it. The space agencies wouldn't have known that this wasn't being used in the way it was designed because, if you look at the historic photographs, there's always somebody doing science or maintenance there, but nobody takes a photograph of that space when nobody's working there. We did — and it showed a pattern.

KK: What do the ISS astronauts think about this?

JW: We got to debrief the crew that carried this out after they came home. They were just really interested in the idea that, by observing these spaces, we could improve future space habitats. And I can say that we actually have. The space station company Vast has told me that they have used our published research, and it has influenced the design of the interior of what's called Haven-1. That's really gratifying and exciting!

KK: That's awesome! I understand that you're both working on a new project that uses similar techniques but applied to Mount Everest. What do you want to learn about the mountain and the humans who attempt to climb it?

SG: If you look at photographs of Machu Picchu, there's this beautiful pristine view. But if you turned around the other way, you'd see the line of 200 tourists waiting for their two minutes on it. Climbing Everest is like that.

If we can pay attention to incidental details in people's photographs, we can map those over time and figure out how climbers construct a society there. By looking at all of these photographs and adapting the method from the ISS project, that gives us this opportunity to see how humans adapt in this impossible place where we have no business going.

KK: What kinds of artifacts or objects are you looking to document? What kinds of things do people deposit on Everest?

SG: There's oxygen tanks, there's human waste, food packaging, tents, prayer flags, poles, respirators.

JW: I've been reading a history of Everest and noting every time I see somebody encountering something that was left behind by somebody else who was exhausted or on the verge of death. But even in more orderly retreats, the early mountaineers made no effort whatsoever to bring things back. They're leaving mementos on the top of the mountain. You have all these different routes, different campsites, and different materials.

SG: Base camp has a couple of landmarks that appear in hundreds of photos. There's this boulder that has spray painted on it, "Everest Base Camp." It gets repainted periodically and there's always lots of different stuff around that boulder. I'm really interested in that boulder because it is a very clear point that we can keep an eye on and how that changes.

JW: There's an area with monuments to the deceased below and farther away from the mountain. It has also changed over time, of course, as memorials have been added and as people have died, but also as people have brought things to honor the dead.

KK: On the ISS, you found differences in the way nations were using their space. Mount Everest is also an extreme environment with international people coming and going. Do you think you're going to find cultural differences when you start looking at the photos?

SG: Any place I've ever traveled, Canadians are annoying because they always have a flag stuck on every piece of their clothing. So I would expect to see some knuckleheads doing that. [Graham is Canadian.]

JW: Nationalism has been a huge part of Everest expeditioning. Until the 1990s, it was all about which nation could do which route first, in the most extreme way. Nationalism is really significant in this environment, just as it is in space.

KK: Are you starting a new subfield of extreme or impossible archaeology? Are there other environments that you think would benefit from your approach?

JW: Some people have asked me about Antarctic research stations. Also oil rigs, submarines — places that humans go and carry out activities but archaeologists can't go. There's obviously a kind of macho-ness about the discipline of archaeology — we go to these distant places and live in crowded dig houses and ride around in falling-apart cars in 120-degree Fahrenheit [49 degrees Celsius] weather. But because of the ISS project, I volunteer as part of a nonprofit group called AstroAccess, which is actively working to open up space to people with disabilities. Everybody who goes to space is disabled by virtue of the space environment, which is also true of Everest —you are not at your full capacity when you're climbing.

So I'm really interested in how the perspectives of people with disabilities can open up new avenues of interacting with these environments and how we can open up the field of archaeology to people who have traditionally been excluded.

The other thing I would mention is we are developing a crowdsourcing project because we want folks who have been to Everest to submit their images so we can analyze them. Once we get that approved, we will be moving forward. So people should stay tuned!

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

See how much you know about human exploration into space with our spaceflight quiz!

An uncrewed Russian rocket carrying vital supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) experienced a significant "glitch" after launch, meaning the cargo vehicle will no longer dock autonomously with the station, NASA warns.

As a result, a cosmonaut (Russian astronaut) may have to use a "backup system" to dock the stricken vessel with the ISS remotely, all while orbiting Earth.

The spacecraft, dubbed Progress 94 (or Progress MS-33 in Russia), launched aboard a Soyuz rocket around 8 a.m. EDT (5 p.m. local time) Sunday (March 22) from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. Progress is a line of robotic freighters that Russia (and previously the Soviet Union) has used to ferry cargo into space since the 1970s.

Progress 94 is carrying around 5,500 pounds (2,500 kilograms) of cargo — including food, water, fuel, oxygen, hardware, scientific equipment and medical supplies — and was scheduled to dock automatically with the ISS Tuesday (March 24) at around 9:30 a.m. EDT. However, this maneuver will no longer be as straightforward as expected.

Around 40 minutes after liftoff, NASA revealed that one of the Progress spacecraft's antennae did not deploy properly after separating from the Soyuz rocket. This antenna plays a key role in helping the robotic freighter dock with the airlock on Russia's Poisk module, meaning that docking can no longer be attempted without human involvement.

"Troubleshooting will continue and if the antenna cannot be deployed, Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov will manually pilot the spacecraft through a backup system for rendezvous and docking at the space station," NASA representatives wrote on X.

Kud-Sverchkov is part of the Expedition 73/74 crew — alongside fellow cosmonaut Sergey Mikayev and NASA astronaut Christopher Williams — and has been on board the ISS since Thanksgiving. The veteran cosmonaut, who previously spent six months living in space between October 2020 and March 2021, has served as both flight engineer and commander on ISS missions.

It is unclear exactly what the backup system is or how it is operated.

Despite the setback, "all other systems are operating as designed," and the docking attempt will continue as planned, either with the fixed antenna in place or with Kud-Sverchkov at the controls, NASA officials wrote.

You can watch the docking attempt via a NASA livestream that starts on Tuesday at around 8:45 a.m. EDT.

Repeated issues

This is not the first setback for the Progress 94 mission. The freighter was originally scheduled to launch in mid-December 2025. However, it was postponed after its launchpad, Site 31, sustained significant damage following the launch of the Expedition 73/74 crew.

It is unclear exactly what happened to Russia's only operational launchpad. Rumors initially hinted that a service platform fell into the "flame trench" below the pad after it was incorrectly secured in place before takeoff. However, Russia announced that the damage had been fully repaired earlier this month.

Nor is this the only recent mishap involving the ISS. The setback comes around two months after four astronauts (NASA's Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japan's Kimiya Yui and Russia's Oleg Platonov ) were sent home from the ISS prematurely after Fincke experienced an undisclosed medical emergency in space. This was the first medical evacuation in the station's 26-year history.

Before that, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunni Williams were stranded on the ISS for nine months between 2024 and 2025. Their initial two-week mission was extended after their faulty return capsule was sent back to Earth without them.

Elsewhere in low Earth orbit, China's Tiangong space station has also experienced its fair share of recent drama. In November last year, multiple Chinese astronauts were stranded in space for several weeks after their return capsule was hit by a piece of suspected space junk, triggering the launch of an uncrewed "lifeboat" rocket.

And more recently, NASA's Artemis II mission, which will send humans back to the moon for the first time since 1972, has been repeatedly delayed by multiple mechanical issues. NASA is now targeting a launch next month, after the rocket was rolled back out to the launchpad last week.

Four astronauts have landed back on Earth after being evacuated from the International Space Station (ISS) due to an unprecedented medical event.

NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov emerged from NASA's SpaceX Crew-11 Dragon spacecraft, which splashed down in darkness off the coast of California at 3:41 a.m. ET on Thursday (Jan. 15).

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told a news conference that all members of the crew are "safe and in good spirits."

The landing marks the completion of an unprecedented early return of the astronauts due to an undisclosed medical issue affecting one of the crew. This is the first time that an ISS mission has been cut short for health reasons, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

Crew-11 launched into space on Aug. 1, 2025, and was scheduled to remain aboard the ISS until another crew replaced them in mid-February. However, on Jan. 7, NASA postponed a spacewalk outside of the ISS because of a medical issue that arose with one of the astronauts, before announcing the early return of the whole crew the following day.

The Dragon capsule undocked from the ISS at 5.20 p.m. ET on Wednesday (Jan. 14), before heading back to Earth. After the capsule landed in the Pacific Ocean, it was loaded onto a SpaceX recovery ship. The astronauts were then assisted out of the capsule and placed on stretchers, which is standard practice for all returning astronauts, before being taken to routine medical checks.

All four crew members are now attending a local hospital. NASA has not named the astronaut who experienced the medical problem or provided any details on the medical issue, citing medical privacy. The agency previously confirmed that the issue only involved one individual.

"The crew member of concern is doing fine," Isaacman said. "We will share updates on their health as soon as it's appropriate to do so."

The crew was originally meant to be replaced at the ISS by Crew-12, which won't arrive there until next month. Such a disruption to staff rotation is unusual. However, there are other astronauts living on the ISS, including NASA's Christopher Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev.

NASA has postponed a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) and announced the early return of its crew due to a medical issue that arose on Wednesday (Jan. 7) with one of the astronauts on board, the agency said.

The spacewalk was planned for 8 a.m. ET on Thursday (Jan. 8) to finish preparing a power channel where a new solar array is set to be installed on the ISS. American astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman were scheduled to exit the space station for 6.5 hours in what would have been Cardman's first spacewalk. (Fincke has already performed nine spacewalks.)

NASA did not name the crew member experiencing the medical problem or share any further details about the emergency, but the agency has confirmed that the issue involves one individual whose condition is stable.

"These are the situations NASA and our partners train for and prepare to execute safely," a NASA spokesperson wrote in an email update on Thursday.

Nevertheless, the agency has confirmed it will bring Fincke, Cardman and two other astronauts, who are part of the current four-person crew aboard the ISS, home early from their stay at the orbital outpost. "Safely conducting our missions is our highest priority, and we are actively evaluating all options, including the possibility of an earlier end to Crew-11's mission," the spokesperson said.

Crew-11 arrived at the ISS on Aug. 2, 2025. Fincke and Cardman were joined by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov for a six-month mission, after which the astronauts were set to be replaced by Crew-12 as part of the space station's regular staffing rotation.

Crew-12's launch is scheduled for mid-February. It is unclear what returning Crew-11 home early would mean for the ISS, as such changes to the usual rotation are highly unusual, but there are other astronauts living on the space station at the moment — including NASA's Christopher Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev, who arrived at the orbiting lab aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft that destroyed its launching pad in November.

NASA has said it will announce a target return date in the coming days.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated following NASA’s confirmation that Crew-11 will return earlier than originally planned.

Moss spores have survived a prolonged trip to space, scientists reveal. The spores spent nine months on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS) before returning to our planet, and over 80% of the spores were still able to reproduce when they arrived back on Earth.

The discovery improves our understanding of how plant species survive in extreme conditions, the researchers wrote in their findings, published Thursday (Nov. 20) in the journal iScience.

Moss thrives in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, from the cold peaks of the Himalayas to the dry, scorched sands of Death Valley. Moss's resilience to adverse conditions makes it an ideal candidate for surviving in the harsh environment of outer space, where extreme temperature fluctuations, altered gravity, and high radiation exposure push life-forms to their limits.

Previous experiments have explored how plants might cope in space, but so far, they have focused on larger organisms such as bacteria or plant crops. Now, researchers have shown that samples of the moss Physcomitrium patens (P. Patens) can not only survive but thrive in space.

First, the researchers tested three cell types of P. patens from various stages in the moss's reproductive cycle. They found that sporophytes — cell structures that encase spores — showed the greatest stress tolerance when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light, freezing and heat.

Sporophyte samples were then placed outside of the ISS in a special exposure facility attached to Japan’s Kibo module, where the samples lived for around nine months in 2022. After this time, the samples were returned to Earth.

"Surprisingly, over 80% of the spores survived and many germinated normally," study lead author Tomomichi Fujita, a professor of plant biology at Hokkaido University in Japan, told Live Science in an email. From this study, Fujita and his team developed a model that suggests the moss spores could actually survive for up to 5,600 days in space, or around 15 years.

Back on Earth, the team found that most of the conditions — including the vacuum of space, microgravity and extreme temperature fluctuations — had a limited impact on the moss spores. However, samples that were exposed to light, particularly high-energy wavelengths of UV light, fared less well. Levels of pigments used by the moss for photosynthesis, such as chlorophyll a, were significantly reduced as a result of light damage, which affected later moss growth.

Even though some moss samples faced damage from the conditions of outer space, P. patens still fared much better than other plant species that have been previously tested under similar conditions. Fujita thinks the protective, spongy casing surrounding the spores may help defend against UV light and dehydration.

"This protective role may have evolved early in land plant history to help mosses colonize terrestrial habitats," he said.

While this may seem like an exercise in testing the limits of a single species, the "spores' success in space could offer a biological stepping stone for building ecosystems beyond our planet," Fujita said. In the future, he hopes to test other species and better understand how these resilient cells survive such stressful conditions.

Human stem cells get worn out and age much faster in space, a new study has found, which is a problem for anyone hoping to take a long trip through our solar system.

Scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to track changes to stem cells delivered by SpaceX resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS). Up in space, the stem cells lost some of their ability to generate new cells, became more susceptible to DNA damage and aged faster, according to a statement released by the researchers.

The study's findings, published Sep. 4 in the journal Cell Stem Cell, build on previous space health research that highlight the challenges of putting people in space for prolonged periods of time — something humanity would have to overcome if it wants to colonize other planets such as Mars.

"Space is the ultimate stress test for the human body," study co-author Catriona Jamieson, the director of the Sanford Stem Cell Institute and professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego, said in the statement. "These findings are critically important because they show that the stressors of space — like microgravity and cosmic galactic radiation — can accelerate the molecular aging of blood stem cells."

Related: 'Why would you even want to go?': Readers react to the hypothetical 400-year voyage to Alpha Centauri

The human body is not built for space. Up there, our species is subjected to completely different environmental strains. Two notable, harm-causing stressors are the near-complete weightlessness of microgravity and cosmic radiation — tiny, subatomic particles that zoom through space.

Previous studies have documented that humans experience a variety of adverse health effects in space. For example, a 2022 study found that astronauts suffer decades of bone loss from spending more than six months in orbit; and scientists have even suggested that colonizing Mars may require some DNA tweaking to ensure that our bodies cope with life away from our home planet.

In the new study, researchers looked at hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, or HSPCs. These cells regulate immune system health and cancer immune surveillance. Previous work has shown that exposure to microgravity can impact immune and metabolic changes, but not how time in space affects the molecular integrity and functional capacity of HSPCs, according to the study.

The team acquired human cells from the bone marrow of consenting individuals undergoing hip replacement procedures before growing the cells in a nanobioreactor, a type of vessel that can facilitate biological reactions. The researchers carried out their experiment on Earth and on four missions to the ISS.

Using AI-powered imaging tools to monitor cell activity, the scientists noticed that cell changes in the space samples were similar to those seen in normal cell aging on Earth, yet they occurred at an accelerated rate. For example, the cells were more active than normal and were losing their ability to rest and recover. The researchers also observed more activity in part of the "dark genome" — poorly understood regions of the genome linked to stress responses and aging, according to the study.

While the study's findings paint an ominous picture for long-duration space travel, they do come with a silver lining: Damage seen in the cells began to reverse when they were placed in a young, healthy tissue environment. This recovery suggests that it may be possible to rejuvenate aging cells, according to the statement.

The cell changes and accelerated aging documented in the new study could help researchers better protect astronauts spending time in space, as well as people aging under normal conditions on Earth.

"Understanding these changes not only informs how we protect astronauts during long-duration missions but also helps us model human aging and diseases like cancer here on Earth," Jamieson said. "This is essential knowledge as we enter a new era of commercial space travel and research in low earth orbit."

There's a secret, extra member of Crew-11 aboard the International Space Station right now: disease-causing bacteria.

Or, at least, such bacteria will be growing aboard the orbiting laboratory very soon. Scientists at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel, in partnership with U.S.-based space tech company SpaceTango, have developed a study that will examine how microgravity affects the growth of certain bacterial species that cause diseases in humans. To pull it off, researchers will grow different strains of bacteria under microgravity, freeze that bacteria at -80 degrees Celsius and then return the samples to Earth to see how they’ve grown differently than the same bacteria grown on the home planet.

The bacterial strains involved are E. Coli, Salmonella bongori and Salmonella typhimurium, and they were launched toward the International Space Station (ISS) aboard NASA's Crew-11 mission that SpaceX successfully launched on Friday, Aug. 1. (Editor's note: The Crew-11 team docked to the ISS on Aug. 2 and is now adjusting to life in orbit).

Scientists have already studied how a lack of gravity affects the way bacteria grows, and research from NASA is already underway to study bacteria in space in general. But researchers behind the current ISS-and-bacteria mission specifically hope to bring home data that will help curb the spread of infectious disease, or at least help experts find ways to stop bacteria from developing antibiotic resistance — a major public health problem that means some disease-causing bacteria is no longer wiped out by drugs that've been developed to clear the bacteria from people’s bodies and get them healthy again

"We know that space conditions affect bacterial behavior, including how they grow, express genes, and acquire traits like antibiotic resistance or virulence," Ohad Gal-Mor, Head of the Infectious Diseases Research Laboratory at Sheba Medical Center, said in a statement.

Related: Unknown strain of bacteria found on China's Tiangong Space Station

"This experiment will allow us, for the first time, to systematically and molecularly map how the genetic expression profile of several pathogenic bacteria changes in space."

The health of astronauts and microgravity's effect on the human body has been top of mind as people explore space and the idea of what life off Earth looks like. Human genes sometimes express themselves differently in microgravity conditions, and scientists have linked such an environment to the expedited loss of muscle seen in astronauts, and even their likelihood of developing skin rashes.

If examined on their own, however, genetic changes in bacteria will hopefully give researchers more clues about how they act once inside a human, whether it's how fast they spread or their likelihood of getting around our treatments: both in space and here on Earth.

A NASA astronaut has captured an electrifying image of Earth from space, featuring a gigantic, jellyfish-shaped "sprite" of red lightning shooting upwards above a thunderstorm in North America. The rare phenomenon is still poorly understood, despite being studied for more than 30 years.

Nichole Ayers, the pilot of SpaceX's Crew-10 mission and member of International Space Station (ISS) expeditions 72 and 73, snapped the striking photo on Thursday (July 3) as the space station passed above a large thunderstorm hanging over parts of Mexico and the southern U.S., including California and Texas.

"Just. Wow. As we went over Mexico and the U.S. this morning, I caught this sprite," Ayers wrote on the social platform X. "Sprites are TLEs or Transient Luminous Events, that happen above the clouds and are triggered by intense electrical activity in the thunderstorms below," she added.

TLEs are a range of visual phenomena that occur in the upper atmosphere during thunderstorms, including upward-shooting blue jets and UFO-like rings of light, known as ELVES. However, the most common TLEs are sprites, like the one photographed by Ayers.

Sprites are sometimes referred to as jellyfish because they contain multiple branches of light that spread out like tentacles, while others call them "carrots" because they can be accompanied by fainter tendrils that trail behind them in the opposite direction like plant roots. They are often associated with large thunderstorms, including those produced by hurricanes.

Related: Electrifying time-lapse image captures 100 lightning bolts torching the sky

Sprites can range in size and shape, with the largest reaching up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface. They have a red color because they interact with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Sprites were first properly observed in the 1950s by airline passengers but were not photographed until 1989. The red jellyfish have also been spotted in the atmosphere of Jupiter, and they are thought to occur on Saturn and Venus, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

But despite years of research, researchers are still unsure why some lightning strikes cause sprites and others don't, according to FOX Weather.

TLEs from space

Sprites and other TLEs can be photographed from Earth's surface if the conditions are right. However, ISS astronauts are uniquely well-positioned to see TLEs and frequently see the flashes of lightning strikes at the same time, providing useful data to help researchers figure out how these phenomena work.

"We have a great view above the clouds, so scientists can use these types of pictures to better understand the formation, characteristics, and relationship of TLEs to thunderstorms," Ayers wrote.

One of the most recent examples of this was in March, when an unnamed ISS astronaut snapped faint red sprites glowing at the end of a "gigantic jet" of lightning shooting upward above New Orleans.

Another excellent example was an eerie red jellyfish that seemed to float independently in Earth's atmosphere, high above a flash of lightning in June 2024, Space.com previously reported.

An astrophotographer has captured a stunning shot of a powerful solar flare photobombing the International Space Station (ISS) as the human-inhabited spacecraft appeared to zoom across the surface of our home star.

Andrew McCarthy (aka Cosmic Background) snapped the incredible image on June 15 from a spot in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. He was initially planning to photograph a standard "transit" photo of the ISS passing directly between Earth and the sun. However, as McCarthy was setting up his camera, he noticed that one sunspot — dubbed AR4114 — had begun to "flare to life," he told Live Science.

Through a mix of skill and luck, McCarthy snapped the space station as it whizzed almost directly past the flaring sunspot, revealing superhot loops of glowing plasma, or solar prominences, moments before they were flung into space by a powerful explosion. Capturing both objects in a single frame makes this a "once-in-a-lifetime" photo, McCarthy wrote on the social platform X.

"Ever since I started chasing ISS [solar] transits, I've dreamed of catching one with an active flare," McCarthy told Live Science in an email. "When I saw the silhouette of the ISS flash through the frame, I knew it was something special."

Being separated from the sun by 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) shielded ISS astronauts from any potentially harmful radiation from the flare. This also makes the space station loom large in the photo. But in reality, the prominences were much larger, stretching up to five times wider than Earth's diameter. "Something about the small human elements against the scale and power of the sun feels like an inspiring scene," McCarthy added.

Related: 'Never been seen before': First images from new ISS solar telescope reveal subtle 'fluctuations' in sun's outer atmosphere

Solar flares are currently exploding from the sun more frequently than usual as the sun nears the end of the most active phase in its roughly 11-year sunspot cycle, known as solar maximum. During this period, magnetic instabilities make it much easier for chunks of plasma to break away from the solar surface.

The flare in the new photo is believed to be a powerful M8.46-magnitude blast that triggered a radio blackout across parts of North America as solar radiation temporarily disrupted the sea of plasma within Earth's ionosphere — the region of the atmosphere more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) above our planet's surface, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Some of the plasma within the prominences also broke away from the sun entirely, forming a magnetized cloud of fast-moving particles known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), which glanced off Earth's magnetic field three days later.

McCarthy named the new photo "Kardashev Dreams" in honor of Nikolai Kardashev, a Soviet astronomer who famously proposed the Kardashev scale, which measures the technological advancement of a planetary civilization based on the amount of energy it can harness.

Photos like these are "a symbol of our first steps into a much larger universe," McCarthy said.

"Difficult" shot

Capturing the striking new photo was "much more difficult than I imagined," McCarthy said; to capture the best view of an ISS solar transit, you need to take the photo around midday, when the sun is directly overhead. And when you are taking the photo in the middle of a desert, as McCarthy did, this becomes very challenging, he added.

"Large telescopes, like the kind I need to use for these [photos], do NOT handle heat very well," McCarthy said. "Components flex and swell in the heat and currents of air of different temperatures swirl in the tube, making it nigh impossible to focus." Electrical components also start to overheat and shut down, he added.

To beat the heat, McCarthy strapped ice packs to the critical components of the camera to stop them from overheating and covered as much of the equipment in reflective foil as possible. "This kept the equipment barely working," he said.

Luckily, all the hard work paid off.

"This was the type of shot I've been chasing for so long, and I'm thrilled to add it to my portfolio," McCarthy said.

SpaceX's Starship has exploded once again — adding to a growing list of setbacks for the company's rocket.

The upper stage of the rocket, the largest ever built, was undergoing routine testing to prepare for its 10th test flight at SpaceX's South Texas Starbase site on Wednesday night (June 18) when it "suffered a catastrophic failure and exploded," local authorities wrote on Facebook.

The gigantic fireball adds to a string of recent headaches for the rocket's upper stages. The ship exploded mid-flight during two previous test flights in January and March, and fell to pieces during an earlier-than-planned reentry in May.

In a post on X, SpaceX has attributed the latest explosion to "a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase," yet the exact cause of the malfunction is unclear.

"A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for," SpaceX added in the post. "Our Starbase team is actively working to safe the test site and the immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials. There are no hazards to residents in surrounding communities, and we ask that individuals do not attempt to approach the area while safing [sic] operations continue."

Starship is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk's ambitions to transport spacecraft, crew members, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth and to the moon and Mars.

Related: 'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

Standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall and propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust from its 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets.

Designed primarily with affordable and efficient manufacturing in mind, the gargantuan rocket uses inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX claims can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket.

These early failures are unlikely to deter SpaceX from further developing the rocket. Musk announced in March that he expects the ship to carry Tesla's Optimus humanoid robots to Mars by the end of 2026, and the rocket is also set to carry some of the Starlab private space station into orbit once the International Space Station retires after 2030.

SpaceX has also won around $4 billion in NASA contracts to develop the Human Landing System (HLS). This is a lunar lander variant of the spacecraft, and has been selected by NASA to carry American astronauts to the moon aboard the 2027 Artemis III mission — the first time humans will have walked on the moon in more than 50 years.

The impact of yesterday's explosion on SpaceX's launch date for Starship’s 10th flight is unclear. Currently, the company is investigating what happened to cause Flight 9's failed reentry alongside the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

Left unchecked, the space around our planet could get so cluttered with debris that we might not be able to use some orbits anymore, according to the latest European Space Agency (ESA) report on the space environment.

The report, published April 1, states that although new standards to curb space debris are becoming more widely adopted, they aren't enough to keep the debris currently in orbit from colliding with itself — creating dangerous debris clouds in a runaway process known as "Kessler syndrome."

"Even if we created no new space debris, it would not be enough to prevent a runaway series of collisions and fragmentations," ESA said in a statement. "The actual number of space debris objects larger than 1 cm in size – large enough to be capable of causing catastrophic damage – is estimated to be over 1.2 million, with over 50,000 objects of those larger than 10 cm."

Impact by a 1 cm diameter object (about the size of a pea) could disable important satellite systems, according to ESA, while anything bigger could potentially puncture the International Space Station (ISS). "Anything larger than 10 cm could shatter a satellite or spacecraft into pieces," the agency's statement said, after a tiny fragment only a few thousandths of a millimeter across left a 7 mm chip in the ISS’s glass windows in 2016.

Related: Space junk: How broken satellites are creating a garbage crisis in the sky

The ESA report also discussed how recent changes in space traffic are making the existing debris problem worse, suggesting three major factors — traffic volume, spacecraft type and the number of commercial operators — that should be considered when planning sustainable space operations.

The number of launches taking place is higher now than it has ever been, and many of the spacecraft being launched are smaller systems deployed as large constellations of spacecraft. In other words, there is a lot more potential debris being added to orbit — at a time when there's already too much junk orbiting Earth as it is.

Space debris doesn’t stick around forever — some of it burns up in our atmosphere, and some of it crashes back down to Earth. However, the debris currently leaving orbit isn't enough to match the debris being added, even though "intact satellites or rocket bodies are now re-entering the Earth atmosphere on average more than three times a day," according to ESA.

Space debris makes more of itself by breaking apart into increasingly smaller pieces with every collision. There isn't much in space to slow down fragments hurtling around our planet — they mostly keep going until they collide with something, or until their orbit decays (gets closer to Earth due to energy loss) enough for the atmosphere to burn them up.

It’s a vicious cycle: the more debris there is, the more chances there are for a collision to occur, and the more collisions there are, the more debris is created.

To reduce new debris, the ESA is now recommending spacecraft be designed to burn up within five years of the end of their life, five times shorter than the previous recommendation of 25 years. For the debris already circling the planet, the ESA says active removal is the next step — before the problem escalates out of control. ESA's ClearSpace-1 mission, planned to launch in 2028, will be the first mission to attempt to capture and remove a defunct satellite from orbit, demonstrating active debris removal for the first time.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit captured breathtaking video of a rare atmospheric phenomenon from his perch high above Earth on the International Space Station.

While the International Space Station (ISS) was orbiting above South America, Pettit recorded what are known as Transient Luminous Events, or TLEs. These are bright, colorful flashes of light faster than lightning and are sometimes referred to as "sprites."

Pettit was able to view the sprites from directly above, looking down at what is known as the nadir, the point directly below a particular location. "OK, this is kind of out there and caters to your inner Uber-Geek," Pettit posted to X (formerly Twitter along with the video. "Nadir view of Transient Luminous Events (TLE ) or upper atmospheric lightning."

The video captures around six seconds of sprites over the Amazon basin. And it's not the first time these phenomena have been caught on camera from the ISS.

In 2024, NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick caught a glimpse at one of the most elusive atmospheric phenomena known as red sprites. These occur during particularly powerful thunderstorms and travel upwards into the atmosphere, as opposed to normal lightning which travels downward to the surface of Earth.

Sprites like the ones Pettit captured on video occur much higher than regular lightning. Their name is an acronym, short for stratospheric perturbations resulting from intense thunderstorm electrification.

Sprites are created when electrical discharges created by lightning shoot upward, creating bursts of plasma in the ionosphere, found around 50 miles (80 km) above Earth's surface. They were not captured on camera until 1989.

Originally posted on Space.com.

On Tuesday (March 18) NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore splashed down into the Gulf of Mexico inside a SpaceX crew capsule, ending a more than nine-month stay in space that was originally slated to last just a few weeks. When their capsule was finally opened, the astronauts were carried out of the spacecraft and loaded onto stretchers.

The astronauts were not sick or injured; the reason for this procedure has nothing to do with Williams and Wilmore's specific mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS), but is simply a matter of protocol that all astronauts must follow, experts told Live Science.

When astronauts return to Earth from space, they can't immediately walk upon landing. This is due to temporary changes to the body that occur in space — a fact that NASA addresses with strict safety procedures.

"A lot of them don't want to be brought out on a stretcher, but they're told they have to be," John DeWitt, director of applied sports science at Rice University in Texas and a former senior scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center, where he developed methods to improve astronaut health during spaceflight, told Live Science.

"Space motion sickness"

Just like someone might experience motion sickness on a roller coaster or while riding in a boat on choppy waters, astronauts can experience dizziness and nausea when they return to Earth. Primarily for this reason, astronauts are typically rolled out on a stretcher after their landing as a precautionary measure, DeWitt said.

The temporary sensation occurs because our bodies are designed to take advantage of the constant force pulling us down here on Earth — gravity. However, orbital space habitats such as the ISS are in perpetual freefall toward our planet, which creates a feeling of weightlessness for the astronauts inside and prompts their bodies to adapt to the altered environment.

Related: Boeing Starliner astronauts spent nearly 300 days stuck in space — is that a new record?

One significant change occurs in the sensory vestibular system within the inner ear that's crucial for maintaining balance, DeWitt said. In space, this system becomes accustomed to ignoring certain sensory inputs as the brain adjusts to weightlessness. So when astronauts return to Earth and gravity is reintroduced, they begin readjusting once again, which can temporarily cause "space motion sickness," DeWitt said.

Another change astronauts experience, especially those who spend long durations in space, is gradual muscle and bone loss. While walking here on Earth is usually sufficient to keep our muscles strong due to gravity, astronauts in space don't need to use their muscles as much. This lack of activity causes the muscles to weaken and shrink over time, leading to a condition known as muscle atrophy.

"We feel strong and ready"

To counteract these and other spaceflight-related effects, astronauts who spend extended periods in space — including Williams Wilmore — follow a thorough daily exercise regimen using a suite of equipment on board the station.

"Been working out for the past nine months," Williams told Live Science via an email to DeWitt. "We feel strong and ready to tackle Earth's gravity."

Williams and Wilmore are part of the Crew-9 mission alongside NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who all returned to Earth aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on March 18. Their return marked the end of an unexpected nine-month stay for Williams and Wilmore, after the Boeing Starliner capsule they launched on encountered several issues during its journey to the ISS, including thruster malfunctions and leaking propulsion, which led NASA to bring the spacecraft back to Earth empty.

Despite the setbacks, "They're in good spirits and feel very confident that there's not going to be any major issues because of being on the space station so long from a physiological perspective," DeWitt said. "They're getting exactly what they would have gotten had their trip been planned to be nine months."

The effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body are an active area of research. Currently, Russian Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov holds the record for the longest consecutive time in space having spent 437 days — just over 14 months — aboard the now-defunct Mir space station in 1994 and 1995.

Editor's note: This article was updated on March 18 after the astronauts successfully returned to Earth.

A pair of NASA astronauts stuck aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for more than nine months will return to Earth on Tuesday (March 18) at the earliest, NASA has said.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will depart the space station aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule on Tuesday morning and splash down near Florida by the evening, if the weather permits.

Wilmore and Williams arrived at the ISS in June as part of Boeing's first Starliner Crew Test Flight. But a number of issues with Boeing's spacecraft — including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters — led to the mission being abandoned and the duo's time in space extended from eight days to nearly 300.

Their return, part of NASA's scheduled rotation between the ISS's Crew-9 and Crew-10 missions, was originally scheduled for Wednesday (March 19), but has been bumped forward to 5:57 pm ET on Tuesday (March 18) due to favorable weather conditions, according to NASA.

"The updated return target continues to allow the space station crew members time to complete handover duties while providing operational flexibility ahead of less favorable weather conditions expected for later in the week," NASA wrote in an announcement on Sunday (March 16).

Related: NASA offers SpaceX $843 million to destroy the International Space Station

If everything goes according to plan, Wilmore and Williams will ride home on the Crew-9 Dragon capsule, called "Freedom", alongside fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — half of the usual Crew-9 crew to allow space for the Starliner duo.

The Starliner astronauts' 300 consecutive days in space is nowhere near the current record of 437 days set by Russian Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995, but it's still a long, and completely unexpected extension of the astronauts' shift aboard the ISS.

And it's also one that can have deleterious effects on the human body, causing the heart, bones and muscles to shrink over time under low gravity. These are well known side effects of long-term spaceflight that all astronauts must face, and not related to the extension of Wilmore and Williams' mission. To mitigate them, the astronauts have been doing two hours of resistance and endurance training every day.

"Mission managers will continue monitoring weather conditions in the area, as Dragon's undocking depends on various factors, including spacecraft readiness, recovery team readiness, weather, sea states, and other factors," NASA wrote in its update. "NASA and SpaceX will confirm the specific splashdown location closer to the Crew-9 return."

For those who want to watch Wilmore and Williams on their return, NASA will stream the event beginning on Monday (March 17) at 10:45 p.m. ET as the hatches close between Freedom and the ISS. The stream will then resume two hours later for undocking, which is expected at 1:05 a.m. ET. Live coverage will resume in the evening when the astronauts begin to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, currently scheduled for 5:11 p.m. ET.

NASA has launched its Crew-10 mission, bringing relief to the U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — who’ve been stuck aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for the last nine months — and finally allowing them to return to Earth.

The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:04 p.m. EDT on Friday (March 14), as part of a routine ISS staff rotation.

Riding aboard its top-mounted Dragon capsule are four astronauts: NASA’s Nichole Ayers and Anne McClain, Roscosmos astronaut Kirill Peskov and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Takuya Onishi. If everything goes to plan, the capsule will dock at the ISS at 11:30 p.m. EDT Saturday (March 15).

Wilmore and Williams arrived at the ISS as part of Boeing's first Starliner Crew Test Flight. Starliner blasted off on its inaugural crewed test flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5, 2024. But not long after entering orbit, a number of issues cropped up — including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters.

Related: NASA offers SpaceX $843 million to destroy the International Space Station

This caused the mission, originally slated to last as few as eight days, to drag on for more than two months before NASA announced its abandonment on Aug. 24. The Starliner capsule undocked from the ISS on Sep. 6, returning to Earth without a crew.

While awaiting the Crew-10 rotation, Wilmore and Williams have been performing a number of maintenance tasks and participating in scientific projects.

Their stay has been largely safe but not entirely without incident. On June 27, a defunct Russian satellite broke apart in orbit, sending debris toward the ISS and forcing Williams and Wilmore, along with the other seven astronauts on board, to take cover inside their respective space capsules.

Following a handover ceremony from Crew 9 to Crew 10, Wilmore and Williams, along with the NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos's Aleksandr Gorbunov, will return home aboard the docked Crew-9 capsule on March 19. The Starliner astronauts’ total time in space will amount to nearly 300 consecutive days — nowhere near the current record of 437 days set by Russian Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995, but still a long haul.

Tonight’s launch is the third attempt to launch the Crew-10 mission, the first on Wednesday (March 12) being scrubbed after a hydraulic system issue and the next on Thursday (March 13) being grounded by high winds and precipitation across the rocket’s flight path, according to NASA.

"We came up prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short," Wilmore said during a news conference beamed back from the ISS on March 4. "That's what we do in human spaceflight. That's what your nation's human spaceflight program's all about — planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that."

Boeing's Starliner astronauts are in the final stretch of their unexpectedly long stint in Earth orbit — and they're setting the record straight on all the "stranded astronauts" talk.

NASA's Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore launched to the International Space Station (ISS) last June on the first crewed test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. The duo expected their orbital stay to last about 10 days, but Starliner experienced thruster malfunctions during its approach and docking maneuvers. This led to an extensive investigation by NASA and Boeing back on the ground, while the space agency decided how to proceed.

Ultimately, Starliner returned to Earth uncrewed and, after some astronaut assignment shuffling, Williams and Wilmore were added to the downward leg of SpaceX's Crew-9 mission, which arrived at the ISS in late September. Absorbing Williams and Wilmore into Crew-9 meant extending their time in space through the arrival of Crew-10, at the end of Crew-9's six-month rotation.

Since then, headlines lamenting the woes of the "stranded astronauts" have ebbed in and out of media cycles. All the while, Williams and Wilmore have continued performing their regular duties aboard the ISS — including Williams breaking the record for most cumulative spacewalking time by a woman.

Related: NASA moves up return date for Boeing Starliner astronauts after swapping SpaceX Dragon spacecraft

The pair's situation gained even more attention recently, after President Donald Trump blamed the Biden administration for "virtually abandon[ing[" the two astronauts and publicly called on SpaceX CEO and close Trump advisor Elon Musk to come to their rescue.

In December, NASA announced a delay to the launch of Crew-10 to no earlier than "late March," due to the need to complete work on a new Dragon spacecraft being built for the mission. This delay further pushed back the return of Williams and Wilmore, who will fly home with the two astronauts who launched on the Crew-9 Dragon, NASA's Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

More delays in the manufacture of Crew-10's new Dragon have now prompted NASA to swap that mission's spacecraft for one that can be made ready sooner. The announcement came two weeks after the social media exchange between President Trump and Musk, who echoed the President's misleading "stranded astronauts" rhetoric. And Williams and Wilmore hope that rhetoric will change.

In a recent conversation with CNN's Anderson Cooper, the two explained that sometimes mission extensions (even ones that push a space stay from 10 days to 10 months) are just part of the job.

"We come prepared, we come committed. That is what your human spaceflight program is: It prepares for any and all contingencies that we can conceive of, and we prepare for those," Wilmore told Cooper. "We don't feel abandoned. We don't feel stuck. We don't feel stranded."

In fact, Wilmore pointed out, all the astronauts aboard the ISS are capable of returning to Earth immediately, in the event of an emergency. "We would never expect to come back, just special for us or anyone, unless it was a medical issue or something really, really out of the [normal] circumstances," he said.

"Help us change the rhetoric," Wilmore asked Cooper. "Let's change it to 'prepared and committed.'"

Both astronauts have lived aboard the ISS for extended periods on previous missions, and both say that they're enjoying their time in space on this one.

"It is just amazing how, when you come across the hatch after you've been here, it's like, 'Oh, my gosh! I remember what this is all like! I remember feeling what it's like floating!' And I think both of us adapted really quickly," Williams said during the CNN interview.

She also said that the end of their current spaceflight will be an emotional one: "I think both of us will be a little bit sad when that feeling of space sort of leaves us."

NASA is currently targeting no earlier than March 12 for the launch of the Crew-10 mission, which will fly the Crew Dragon capsule Endurance rather than SpaceX's new Dragon. A typical crew overlap aboard the space station lasts about a week, so Wilmore said he expects Crew-9 to depart for Earth around March 19.

Originally posted on Space.com.

Human spaceflight quiz: How well do you know our journey into space?

Stranded Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams finally have a return date to head back to Earth, and it's a few weeks earlier than previously expected.

NASA announced Tuesday (Feb. 11) that the two astronauts, who hitched a ride to the International Space Station (ISS) on a Boeing Starliner spacecraft last June, will head home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule that will leave Earth with the ISS Crew-10 on Wednesday, March 12. After a few days' handover period, Williams and Wilmore will leave the ISS with the rest of the Crew-9 mission, after having spent about 250 consecutive days in orbit.

Williams and Wilmore were initially meant to spend about a week in space, but problems with the propulsion and helium systems on their Boeing Starliner led NASA to return the capsule to Earth empty after three months of troubleshooting couldn't resolve the issues. The capsule ended up landing safely in New Mexico on Sept. 7, 2024. However, a watchdog report just released by the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel found that new thruster problems did appear during the descent. In October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing is in the early stages of considering a sale of its space business, including Starliner.

Related: Boeing Starliner astronauts could spend nearly 300 days stuck in space — is that a new record?

As for the stranded pair, they have made the most of their time in orbit: Williams recently broke the record for the most nonconsecutive hours of spacewalking by a female astronaut.

A long-awaited homecoming

In December 2024, NASA announced that Williams and Wilmore would return on a newly designed SpaceX Dragon capsule in late March 2025 at the earliest. But now, the astronauts and the rest of Crew-9 will come home on a previously flown Dragon capsule, the Endurance. This will allow the swap between Crew-9 and Crew-10 to happen sooner while SpaceX continues to finalize the interior and final integration of the new Dragon capsule, according to NASA.

Along with Wilmore and Williams, astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will leave the ISS in March. They'll be replaced by NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. The precise day of the return will be determined by weather conditions near Florida, where Endurance will splash down.

An amateur photographer on Earth has captured an extremely rare photo of "stranded" NASA astronaut Suni Williams floating outside the International Space Station (ISS) as it passed overhead. The image was taken during a recent spacewalk, when Williams broke the record for most non-consective hours spent spacewalking by a female astronaut.

Charline Giroud, a biochemist at the University of Oxford in England and astrophotography enthusiast, snapped the striking photo Jan. 30 using a small telescope as the ISS passed over Oxfordshire at an altitude of around 250 miles (410 kilometers). The shoot required extreme precision as the space station was traveling at around 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h).

"I was very lucky to capture this event under clear skies with my telescope from my hometown, it was a fantastic moment," Giroud told Spaceweather.com.

At the time, ISS commander Sunita "Suni" Williams was undertaking her fifth career spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA), to help remove a defunct part of the station. Following this excursion, Williams has now accumulated a total of 62 hours and 6 minutes floating in the vacuum of space, overtaking retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson to become the female astronaut with the most non-consecutive hours spent spacewalking, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. (Whitson still holds the record for most individual spacewalks by a female astronaut with six EVAs.)

In the photo, Williams is visible as a tiny white blob attached to the end of the robotic arm, named Canadarm-2, which looks like a golden line near the station's center (see below).

Related: 15 jaw-dropping spacewalk images

In addition to breaking the impressive EVA record, Williams is "also the first female astronaut to be photographed from the ground during a spacewalk," Giroud said. "Congratulations Suni!"

NASA astronaut Barry "Butch" Wilmore, who has been stuck on the ISS alongside Williams for seven months, was also on the spacewalk, which lasted 5 hours and 26 minutes. However, he was working in the shadow of an airlock as the space station passed over the U.K. and is therefore invisible in the photo, Giroud said.

Stranded in space

Williams and Wilmore have been on board the ISS since June 6, 2024. They were initially scheduled to stay in space for around a week. However, they became stranded when the Boeing Starliner capsule that delivered them to the station experienced multiple leaks, temporarily forcing it out of commission. The astronaut pair could now spend a total of more than 300 days orbiting Earth.

The faulty Starliner capsule was eventually returned to Earth in September and successfully touched down in New Mexico upon reentry, leading to speculation that the astronauts may have been able to safely travel onboard the spacecraft. However, the risks to their safety were deemed too great at the time.

The astronaut pair has since had their return date pushed back several times due to logistical challenges — most recently in December, when their February return date was pushed back to some point in late March.

Related: 10 times space missions went very wrong in 2024

Since taking office, U.S. president Donald Trump has made it a priority to return Williams and Wilmore to Earth and has "ordered" Elon Musk to return the pair on a SpaceX capsule before the proposed March return date, Space.com recently reported. However, it is currently unclear how or if this will happen.

The renewed urgency of their return may have been fueled by recent tabloid rumours that Williams' health has deteriorated significantly during her stay on the ISS. However, these unfounded stories were refuted by Williams, who has only experienced minor health effects that are expected of astronauts that experience long stays in space — and is clearly still fit enough to set spacewalking records.

This is also not the first time that NASA astronauts have endured extended missions in space. In 2023, NASA's Frank Rubio completed a 371-day stay in space — a record for an American astronaut — after the Russian Soyuz capsule he was traveling in was damaged by a piece of renegade space junk.

A pair of astronauts who launched aboard Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in June for a 10-day trip to the International Space Station (ISS) will now spend at least nine months in space, after NASA announced yet another delay to their return flight.

NASA said in a blog post Tuesday (Dec. 17) that the next crew swap to the ISS will happen no earlier than late March 2025. The Crew-10 mission will launch four crew members to the space station. It was originally scheduled for February, but NASA and SpaceX have delayed the launch in order to complete a new Dragon spacecraft for the mission. The Dragon spacecraft is the private spaceflight company's crewed vehicle that can carry up to seven astronauts at a time into low-earth orbit.

"Fabrication, assembly, testing, and final integration of a new spacecraft is a painstaking endeavor that requires great attention to detail," Steve Stich, the manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said in the blog post.

The delay, however, means an extra month in space for NASA's Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams — the two astronauts who flew to the station aboard Boeing's Starliner crew-delivery vehicle earlier this year. The mission was expected to last a little more than a week, but the craft experienced issues with its thrusters on its approach to the ISS. This led to a three-month delay in the spacecraft's return as NASA tried to figure out the problem. Ultimately, the agency sent the spacecraft back to Earth without its crew. It landed in September without incident.

Related: NASA warns of potential 'catastrophic failure' on leaking ISS — but Russia doesn't want to fix it

Record stays in space

Wilmore and Williams have inadvertently become long-term residents of the ISS, though their trip is not threatening any records. For example, astronaut Scott Kelly stayed aboard the ISS for 340 days between 2015 and 2016 as part of a twin study — his astronaut twin brother Mark stayed on Earth so researchers could compare the two and learn about the impacts of space on health and physiology. In 2023, astronaut Frank Rubio spent a year straight in orbit, the first American to do so. (Rubio's length of stay was also unplanned, as his Soyuz spacecraft sprung a leak.) Six other people have spent more than a year in space.

The Crew-10 mission will carry NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov to the ISS. After a handover period, Williams and Wilmore, along with NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will return to Earth. The ISS was resupplied in November, according to NASA, including "special items" for the astronauts to celebrate the holidays in space.

What it is: The Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, two dwarf satellite galaxies of the Milky Way

Where it is: 160,000 light-years away, in the constellations Dorado and Mensa (for the Large Magellanic Cloud) and 200,000 light-years away, in the constellations Tucana and Hydrus (for the Small Magellanic Cloud)

When it was shared: Dec. 2, 2024

Why it's so special: Our Milky Way galaxy does not travel through space alone. A spiral galaxy with a disk that spans more than 100,000 light-years, it sits within a neighborhood called the Local Group, which includes more than 50 other galaxies. Some of the neighborhood's less-massive galaxies orbit the Milky Way as satellites.

Two satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, can be seen in the night sky only from the Southern Hemisphere — or from space. This image was taken by Don Pettit, NASA's oldest active astronaut, at 69 years old. He arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Sept. 11, after launching from Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, along with two Russian cosmonauts.

He took this long-exposure image from a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked to the ISS. It was one of three related images published on X by NASA; two featured the Magellanic Clouds, and the other showed the Milky Way.

Called irregular satellite galaxies because of their distorted shapes, the Magellanic Clouds each contain billions of stars. Many incredible astronomical observations have been made there. Perhaps the most famous was in the Large Magellanic Cloud, where in 1987, astronomers spotted the last supernova to be seen with the naked eye.

Last month, astronomers revealed the first high-quality, zoomed-in photo of a star outside our galaxy. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the star, WOH G64, is 1,500 times wider than the sun and on the brink of exploding in a violent supernova.

The Magellanic Clouds are most easily seen between December and April from the Southern Hemisphere.

On his fourth spaceflight, Pettit has been taking long-exposure images and posting them on X, including a star trail, SpaceX Starlink satellites and Las Vegas at night, one of the brightest places on Earth.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have been besieged by a weird, possibly toxic smell after the arrival of a Russian cargo spacecraft.

The strange odor — reportedly smelling of spray paint — leapt out at Russian cosmonauts after the docking of the Progress spacecraft with the Russian Poisk module of the ISS on Saturday (Nov. 23), forcing them to close the hatch and put on protective equipment.

"After opening the Progress spacecraft's hatch, the Roscosmos cosmonauts noticed an unexpected odor and observed small droplets, prompting the crew to close the Poisk hatch to the rest of the Russian segment," NASA wrote on X on Sunday (Nov. 24).

Following the closing of the hatch, air scrubbers were activated to remove any contaminants from the space station's air, and by Sunday engineers in mission control deemed the air quality inside to be at normal levels.

"There are no concerns for the crew, and as of Sunday afternoon, the crew is working to open the hatch between Poisk and Progress while all other space station operations are proceeding as planned," NASA representatives wrote.

Related: ISS dodges its 39th piece of potentially hazardous space junk. Experts say it won't be the last.

Yet what exactly caused the smell, and just how hazardous it was, remains unclear. Reports from the website Russian Space Web claim that the fumes released were "toxic". Nonetheless, astronauts opened the hatch on Monday (Nov. 25) to find that the unusual odor had come from the "outgassing from materials" inside Progress's pressurized cargo section, NASA representatives told CNN.

This isn't the first time that the Poisk module has caused trouble for the floating laboratory's cosmonauts. According to a recent NASA report, a mysterious five-year leak to the module has intensified to the point that it could lead to the "catastrophic failure" of the station, said Bob Cabana, the chair of NASA's ISS Advisory Committee. Russian officials downplayed the claim, and so far little has been done to address the problem.

Regardless, not much time remains until the ISS is put out of commission. The station's operational life will continue until 2030, after which it will be pushed out of orbit by SpaceX to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Instead of building a replacement, NASA has said that it will leave the construction of successors to the station to private companies, and will instead focus on crewed missions to the moon and Mars.

On Nov. 19, the International Space Station (ISS) dodged a potentially dangerous piece of space junk left in orbit from a satellite that broke up in 2015.

The maneuver, which involved the ISS raising its usual orbit of about 250 miles (440 kilometers) above Earth's surface, was the first of its kind in 2024. Without it, NASA officials said the flying object could have come within a perilously close 2.5 miles (4 km) of the space station.

Space junk refers to any fragment of human-made machinery that remains in Earth's orbit after serving its intended purpose. This year's single dodge maneuver — technically called a Pre-determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver — marks a significant drop from the five similar maneuvers the ISS was forced to perform in 2023. It's also fewer than those performed in 2020 through 2022, when the ISS modified its orbit at least twice per year to prevent collisions with space junk.

Astronauts aboard the ISS were lucky that so few pieces of debris came close enough to require maneuvers this year, but that probably won't last, said Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics and a space junk modeling expert at the University of Southampton in the U.K. "For all we know, next week there will be three maneuvers," Lewis told Live Science.

Related: Sci-fi-inspired tractor beams are real and could solve a major space junk problem

NASA records show the latest maneuver is the 39th time the ISS has dodged space junk since the first part of the ISS launched in November 1998, and the risk of collisions is increasing every year due to growing amounts of space junk clogging up the sky.

The ISS receives warnings, or "conjunction messages," about incoming space junk from the U.S. Space Force, although that responsibility may soon change hands, Lewis said. A fragment is considered potentially risky if experts forecast it will enter a pizza-box-shaped area that extends 2.5 by 30 by 30 miles (4 by 50 by 50 km) around the ISS. "Anything that goes into that box, then that triggers the next phase," Lewis said, "and they keep going through that process until they've identified if there is a real risk."

The threshold to act on perceived risks is much lower for the ISS than for other spacecraft because there are humans on board, Lewis said. "They're looking at events typically that will be higher [risk] than 1 in 10,000," he said.

It's raining satellites

How often space junk approaches the ISS depends on several factors, including the sun's activity and "fragmentation events," when satellites break up in orbit, Lewis said.

Solar activity — including coronal mass ejections, flares and high-speed winds — follows an 11-year cycle and peaks during solar maximum, which researchers say is now underway. At solar maximum, the sun emits a huge amount of energy that gets absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and causes it to expand. This, in turn, increases the drag force on objects in orbits up to 1,200 miles (2,000 km) above Earth's surface, meaning they get pulled toward the planet at a faster rate than in periods outside solar maximum.

The effect of solar activity on space junk is a bit like falling rain, Lewis said. "The rain gets harder, if you like, during a solar maximum," so pieces of debris are more likely to cross the low ISS orbit, he said. "You'd expect to see more maneuvers during the solar maximum."

Yet the sun's fast-growing activity throughout 2024 does not seem to have had a major impact on collision risks with the ISS.

Anti-satellite tests

The impact of solar activity on the ISS is somewhat predictable, but less-foreseeable factors also affect space junk collision risks. Anti-satellite (ASAT) tests, when countries deliberately destroy satellites in orbit, are especially concerning because they produce a huge amount of debris that can linger for long periods, Lewis said.

In 2022, the U.S. and other countries pledged not to conduct ASAT tests, but China, Russia and India have not adopted the resolution. NASA records show that a Russian ASAT test on Nov. 15, 2021, is responsible for almost half — four out of nine — of all ISS collision avoidance maneuvers carried out in the past three years. The satellite in question, Cosmos-1408, was a long-dead Soviet spacecraft launched in 1982.

Another ASAT test on a Chinese weather satellite called Fengyun-1C in 2007 is responsible for at least four collision avoidance maneuvers since then. China shot down the satellite at a height of 500 miles (800 km) above Earth's surface, which is much higher than the 300-mile-high (480 km) orbit of Cosmos-1408 and explains why the ISS had to swerve around Fengyun-1C debris as recently as August 2023, Lewis said.

Space junk orbiting Earth at high altitudes experiences much weaker drag than space junk in low orbits, meaning it lasts longer in orbit before crashing down through the atmosphere, Lewis said. The ISS is still at risk from Fengyun-1C fragments as a result of the weather satellite's high orbit, he said. But "Cosmos-1408 was lower, so the fragments wouldn't have lasted as long."

Clouds of junk

While the ISS has performed only one collision avoidance maneuver so far this year, a rare event involving a cloud of space junk also forced astronauts to take shelter in a spacecraft docked to the space station in June. The incident took place after a defunct Russian satellite broke apart in orbit, sending more than 100 fragments flying dangerously close to the ISS.

In the case of such urgent events, there is no time to change the ISS' orbit. "Those things have to be planned," Lewis said. "You can't just do them by flicking a switch."

The astronauts resumed normal operations shortly thereafter, and there was no damage to the space station — but events like these have the potential to ruin the ISS, Lewis said.

"The fragments are typically of a size that will go through any shielding on the space station, and the space station is a pressurized system in a vacuum," he said. "If you want an analogy, blow up a balloon and stick a pin in it; it's exactly the same process."

The ISS is not the only spacecraft that runs the risk of destruction by space junk. Due to the speed at which objects travel in orbit, any operational satellite could become obsolete if it were to cross paths with a fragment from a long-forgotten rocket. The average piece of space junk reaches speeds of 18,000 mph (29,000 km/h), or almost seven times faster than a bullet, according to NASA.

Even a chip of paint can cause irreparable damage at these speeds, and a 4-inch (10 centimeters) object triggers "a catastrophic fragmentation of a typical satellite," according to the European Space Agency. Around 29,000 objects of this size or larger currently orbit Earth, but those form only a fraction of the more than 170 million pieces — or 9,900 tons (9,000 metric tons) — of debris estimated to be out there.

SpaceX's Starlink satellites illustrate the scale of the problem, Lewis said. Between June 2023 and June 2024, Starlink's fleet of 5,500 satellites made nearly 75,000 maneuvers in total to prevent collisions with space junk. "The number of conjunction messages that they would have received from the U.S. Space Force would have been in the millions," Lewis said.

Looking ahead

NASA plans to retire the ISS in 2031, but until then, the space station will continue to host experiments on behalf of NASA scientists and private contractors. And while it does so, the floating laboratory will probably have to perform many more space junk avoidance maneuvers, Lewis said.

The problem with space junk is that it multiplies: The more space junk there is in orbit, the greater the risk of collisions becomes and the faster the mass of debris grows. Therefore, the best mitigation strategy is to remove satellites that have reached the ends of their missions, Lewis said.

"That has an enormous effect on the future population, because you're removing objects from orbit, so they can't be collision threats," he said. (The ISS will be deorbited at the end of its mission.)

Most space agencies and companies recognize the need for responsible behavior in orbit, Lewis said, and regulations aim to ensure that all actors are held to high standards. "Keeping a clean environment helps their bottom line, because they don't have to make as many maneuvers, [and] they wouldn't lose satellites in collisions," Lewis said. "There is a purpose to those regulations."

The International Space Station (ISS) is leaking — and major space agencies are divided over what to do about it.

The leak is located in a Russian segment of the station known as a PrK module, which connects Russia's Zvezda service module to the space station's main body. NASA and Russian space agency Roscosmos have known about the leak since at least 2019, but its underlying cause remains a mystery. Since its discovery, cosmonauts have taken various steps to minimize its impact, including sealing off the segment when it is not in use. But Roscosmos and NASA now disagree about the leak's severity.

According to a recent NASA report, the leak has intensified to the point where it poses a risk to the ISS's goal of operating until 2030. What's more, some NASA officials believe it could lead to "a catastrophic failure" of the station, Bob Cabana, the chair of the agency's ISS Advisory Committee, said during a public meeting.

However, Russian space officials have downplayed the severity of the leak, insisting that it will not jeopardize future ISS operations, according to CNN.

The ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2000. Most of its infrastructure is a quarter-century old, and it is possible that years of mechanical stress have caused tiny fissures to form in the walls of certain sections. Additional stress from colliding with small pieces of debris and micrometeors could also have contributed to the perforation.

Related: NASA offers SpaceX $843 million to destroy the International Space Station

NASA and Roscosmos have agreed to seal off the leaky segment if the rate of air loss becomes "untenable." But they have not yet reached a consensus on what, exactly, qualifies as an untenable rate. Currently, air is escaping at a rate of around 2 to 2.5 pounds (0.9 to 1.1 kilograms) per day above the space station's equilibrium, according to NASA. In April, it briefly spiked to 3.7 pounds per day (1.7 kg); if left unchecked, it could spike again.

The agencies are reportedly working closely with one another to monitor the situation as it unfolds. And NASA plans to add an extra seat — called a "pallet seat" — aboard future SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in case any astronauts need to evacuate.

"The station is not young," NASA astronaut Michael Barratt said during a news briefing. "We will expect to see more wear and tear in various other places."

The space station is expected to operate through to 2030, after which it will be deorbited into Earth's atmosphere for a fiery farewell. NASA currently has no plans to build a replacement for the ISS and instead will focus on crewed missions to the moon and Mars, according to the agency.

Tardigrades, the ubiquitous microscopic animals that resemble gummy bears with eight legs, are renowned for their ability to survive some of the harshest environmental conditions for decades without food and water.

These hardy animals can easily endure levels of radiation that would be lethal to most other forms of life, extreme temperatures and even survive in the vacuum of space. Some scientists think that uncovering the genes responsible for their remarkable resilience, particularly to ultrahigh radiation, could unlock a range of potential applications from cancer research to space exploration.

And we may be closer than ever to unlocking them. Chinese scientists have now identified a new species of tardigrades hosting thousands of genes that become more active when exposed to radiation. The findings point to a complex defense system that shields tardigrade DNA from radiation-induced damage and can pave the way for devising better protection for astronauts from the stresses of long-duration missions, researchers say.

The new species, named Hypsibius henanensis after China's Henan province where it was collected about six years ago, was pummeled with doses of radiation many times higher than what would be lethal for humans. The bombardment affected 2,801 tardigrade genes associated with DNA repair, cell division, hormone metabolism and immune responses, according to a paper published Oct. 25 in the journal Science.

Related: 1st tardigrade fossils ever discovered hint at how they survived Earth's biggest mass extinction

One of the genes that became most active, called DODA1, appears to resist radiation damage by enabling tardigrades to produce antioxidant pigments known as betalains, which can erase some of the harmful reactive chemicals inside cells that are caused by radiation. When the researchers treated human cells with a tardigrade's betalains, they found the cells fared much better at surviving radiation than untreated cells, study co-author Lingqiang Zhang, who is a molecular and cellular biologist at the Beijing Institute of Lifeomics, told Nature News.

Tardigrades, commonly known as water bears or moss piglets, have been the subject of extensive research due to their extraordinary resilience. In 2007, they became the first animals to survive exposure to outer space after a Russian crewless capsule ferried 3,000 living tardigrades on a European mission to low Earth orbit, and exposed them to the hard vacuum of space for 10 days. 68 percent of them survived and gave birth to normal offspring. The same occurred with tardigrades that were blasted to space in 2011 on the final flight of NASA's space shuttle Endeavour.

A few thousand tardigrades were spilled onto the moon's surface after riding there aboard Israel's Beresheet spacecraft, which crashed during landing. While the fact that the specimens lay dormant on lunar soil raised ethical questions, microbiologists have deemed their chances of colonizing the moon zero, given the lack of oxygen and liquid water.

Tardigrades' most recent trip to space was in 2021 to the International Space Station, where a long-term study of their genes and other survival techniques is underway.

"We want to see what 'tricks' they use to survive when they arrive in space, and, over time, what tricks their offspring use," Thomas Boothby, an associate professor of molecular biology at the University of Wyoming, said in a previous NASA statement. "Are they the same or do they change across generations? We just don't know what to expect."

Scientists know from previous research that tardigrades persist through unfavorable conditions by rapidly suspending their metabolism, for which they lose majority of their body water and shrink to half their normal sizes, a state known as cryptobiosis. After returning from space, they regained their former vigor within just 30 minutes of becoming hydrated.

The tiny creatures are also likely capable of producing heaps of antioxidants — such as the newfound reservoir of betalains — to combat harmful, radiation-induced changes in their bodies, scientists say.

"We have seen them do this in response to radiation on Earth," said Boothby. "We think the ways tardigrades have evolved to withstand extreme environments on this planet may also be what protects them against the stresses of spaceflight."

Originally posted on Space.com.

This new spaceflight tech has a very retro feel.

The world's first wooden satellite, a tiny Japanese spacecraft called LignoSat, arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday (Nov. 5) aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule.

LignoSat measures just 4 inches (10 centimeters) on each side, but it could end up having a big impact on spaceflight and exploration down the road.

"While some of you might think that wood in space seems a little counterintuitive, researchers hope this investigation demonstrates that a wooden satellite can be more sustainable and less polluting for the environment than conventional satellites," Meghan Everett, the deputy chief scientist for NASA's International Space Station program, said in a press briefing on Monday (Nov. 4), a few hours before the Dragon capsule lifted off.

Conventional satellites are made primarily of aluminum. When they burn up in Earth's atmosphere at the end of their lives, they generate aluminum oxides, which can alter the planet's thermal balance and damage its protective ozone layer.

Related: NASA and Japan to launch world's 1st wooden satellite as soon as 2024. Why?

These impacts are becoming more of a concern as the orbital population grows, thanks to the rise of megaconstellations like SpaceX's ever-growing Starlink broadband network, which currently consists of about 6,500 active satellites.

Wooden satellites like LignoSat — which substitutes magnolia wood for aluminum — could be part of the solution going forward; they wouldn't pump such damaging pollutants into the atmosphere when they fell back to Earth, mission team members have said.

"Metal satellites might be banned in the future," retired Japanese astronaut Takao Doi, an aerospace engineer who's now a professor at Kyoto University, told Reuters. "If we can prove our first wooden satellite works, we want to pitch it to Elon Musk's SpaceX."

LignoSat, which was developed by researchers at Kyoto University and the Tokyo-based logging company Sumitomo Forestry, will soon get a chance to prove itself.

About a month from now, the cubesat will be deployed into orbit from the ISS' Kibo module. If all goes according to plan, its onboard electronics will record and beam home key health data for the next six months.

"Student researchers will measure the temperature and strain of the wooden structure and see how it might change in the vacuum environment of space, and the atomic oxygen and radiation conditions as well," Everett said.

LignoSat team members also say a successful test could have implications far beyond Earth orbit.

"It may seem outdated, but wood is actually cutting-edge technology as civilization heads to the moon and Mars," Kenji Kariya, a manager at the Sumitomo Forestry Tsukuba Research Institute, told Reuters. "Expansion to space could invigorate the timber industry."

Originally posted on Space.com.

NASA and its Russian counterpart have identified 50 "areas of concern" related to a long-running leak aboard the space station, a media report states.

The leak has been ongoing since 2019 in the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) and was the focus of a new report from NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) published in September. While NASA and Roscosmos are addressing the leak, it remains a top "safety risk" for astronauts on board, the OIG report stated.

NASA officials, speaking in an exclusive with the Washington Post, said they are tracking four cracks and 50 other "areas of concern" on the ISS. The cracks have "all been covered with a combination of sealant and patches" by Roscosmos, NASA noted in a statement to the newspaper, and fixes are ongoing. Still, the leaking area is the top risk, at a 5 on a scale of 5, in NASA's internal risk assessments, the OIG stated.

"We have conveyed the seriousness of the leaks multiple times, including when I was in Russia earlier this year," associate administrator Jim Free added in an interview with the Post. Since the leaks are adjacent to a hatch, Free added that Roscosmos acquiesced to a NASA request to close the hatch as much as possible: “We've come to a compromise that they close it in the evening."

NASA astronauts also remain on the U.S. side of the orbiting complex to be close to their escape vehicles, in case of the need of evacuation, the agency noted in its statement to the news outlet. That said, NASA has stressed repeatedly that the leak poses no immediate threat to astronauts.

"Not an impact right now on the crew safety or vehicle operations, but something for everybody to be aware of," ISS program manager Joel Montalbano said in a news conference in February 2024 when the leak temporarily increased to 2.4 pounds per day, up from a historic low of 0.2 pounds per day.

Related: NASA offers SpaceX $843 million to destroy the International Space Station

The leak has been ongoing for five years and patches have been ongoing since it was first uncovered; agency officials noted in a Sept. 27 livestreamed briefing that repair work reduced the high leak observed in April 2024 by roughly a third.

The escaping air originated in a service module transfer tunnel in Russia's Zvezda module that launched in 2000. Zvezda, along with the rest of the ISS, is aging and requires maintenance to keep going in orbit. The ISS is supposed to last until 2030 to serve both NASA's staffing needs, and also to provide commercial low Earth orbit research. In the following decade, NASA hopes to have a set of commercial space stations ready to take over operations.

NASA's OIG is tracking several other risks that could imperil keeping the ISS going that long, ranging from a sudden micrometeoroid strike to supply chain issues.

SpaceX has been tasked to build a large Dragon-type spacecraft to remove the ISS from orbit, in a contract awarded by NASA earlier this year. The OIG stated it will be looking to learn more about the schedule, costs and risks associated with the new vehicle and the deorbiting plan.

Originally posted on Space.com.

Miniature livers will fly aboard the International Space Station in an upcoming study on whether microgravity can encourage the growth of healthy tissue with an ample blood supply.

It's an effort that could potentially lead to personalized, space-grown tissues and organs for use in transplant surgeries, scientists say. In two upcoming experiments, researchers plan to test how well the liver tissue grows in microgravity, as well as trial new technology designed to keep this tissue alive but super-cooled for its journey back to Earth.

"My ultimate goal for these tissues, if they are doing what we imagine and hope they are able to become with the help of microgravity, is to use these tissues for therapy," said Dr. Tammy Chang, a professor of surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. Tissue could be transplanted to treat a variety of liver-function diseases and disorders, Chang told Live Science.

Growing tissues in laboratory dishes on Earth can be challenging, in part because gravity pulls cells into contact with the bottom of a plate or dish. Gravity also puts cells under shear stress because, to keep the cells suspended as they grow, their dish needs to be agitated. In nature, after all, organs emerge in a developing embryo as it floats in amniotic fluid in the womb, or in the fluid cushion provided by an egg.

These everpresent challenges with gravity have led researchers to develop rotating bioreactors that simulate a low-gravity environment by spinning very quickly. This allows tissues and miniature organs, or "organoids" to grow in artificial conditions, but these rotating vessels also put stresses on tissues, especially as the cell clusters within them get larger.

Related: Scientists discover new type of cell in the liver

Chang and colleagues think organoids might grow better in a sustained, high-quality microgravity environment like that found on the International Space Station.

"These organoids that are typically the size of 200 microns in diameter, which is 0.2 millimeters [0.008 inches], will be able to further organize and interact with each other to develop larger tissues and, in particular, tissues that are vascularized," said Chang, who presented her research at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress 2024 in San Francisco on Tuesday (Oct. 22). Vascularized tissues are imbued with many blood vessels.

To grow their space-age liver organoids, Chang and her team use "induced pluripotent stem cells," which are adult cells reprogrammed to be stem cells that can give rise to different kinds of tissue. The researchers then coax these engineered stem cells to transform into liver cells and grow the cells in a special spherical bioreactor, called Tissue Orb. This globular reactor has a central conduit mimicking a blood vessel at its center. Nurturing organoids with this kind of circulatory system is key to growing larger pieces of tissue.

"Our concept is that these organoids in the main chamber can coalesce and interact with the central conduit and develop a more complex and larger vascularized tissue," Chang said.

The upcoming liver-tissue experiment will fly to the ISS in early 2025. The tissues will grow aboard the station for two weeks and then be fixed — set in a preservative solution — for analysis back on Earth. A second experiment, likely to take place later in 2025 or in early 2026, will test a supercooling system for bringing back live tissues Earthside.

These miniature livers aren't the first organoids grown aboard the ISS. Researchers are using space-grown organoids to investigate questions ranging from how the brain ages to how cancer develops and responds to drugs.

Flying an experiment aboard the space station is the culmination of many years of work, Chang said: "It is very exciting to have an experiment going aboard the ISS."

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

Eerie new footage from the International Space Station (ISS) captures Hurricane Milton explosively intensifying into a Category 5 storm as it moves toward Florida.

The video was taken by one of the ISS's external cameras as it flew over the hurricane at 10:28 a.m. EDT (2:28 p.m. GMT on Monday (Oct. 7). It shows the extremely dangerous storm's pinhole eye and powerful 180 mph (290 km/h) winds, according to the National Hurricane Center. Pinhole eye hurricanes are storms with tiny eyes, just a few nautical miles in diameter, which can rapidly intensify to become extremely powerful and deadly.

"This is nothing short of astronomical. I am at a loss for words to meteorologically describe [to] you the storms small eye and intensity," Noah Bergren, a meteorologist at Fox 35 Orlando, wrote on the social platform X. "This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce."

Milton transformed from a Category 1 to a Category 5 in a matter of hours on Monday, defying hurricane models and stunning forecasters to become the fifth most intense Atlantic storm in recorded history. It has since dropped to a Category 4 storm, a strength it is expected to remain at until it makes landfall at Tampa Bay on Wednesday night (Oct. 9) or Thursday (Oct. 10) morning.

Related: We may need a new 'Category 6' hurricane level for winds over 192 mph, study suggests

This is far from the only footage of the monster storm captured from space. Images of Milton from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) show the hurricane spinning just above the Yucatan Peninsula.

The black and red toward the center indicate cold temperatures, which shows that convection — where heat and moisture are transported vertically in the atmosphere — runs deep, indicating more intense thunderstorms, according to NOAA.

Meanwhile, chilling footage from the GOES-19 satellite, shared on X by Colorado State University's Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA), focuses on Hurricane Milton's "powerful, small eye." Another CIRA video also shows flashes of lightning bursting across Milton’s eye wall.

The incoming hurricane has prompted evacuation orders across Florida, which is still reeling from Hurricane Helene making landfall less than two weeks ago.

Since March 2023, average sea surface temperatures around the world have hit record-shattering highs. This not only makes for incredibly active hurricane seasons but also enables storms like Milton to intensify at unprecedented speeds.

"This is the most impactful storm we have faced, much stronger than Hurricane Helene," St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch said at a news conference. "We already will be rebuilding for years because of Hurricane Helene, and that will be exacerbated by the impacts of this storm."

After more than three months in space, Starliner's 10-day Crew Flight Test (CFT) has finally concluded.

The Boeing spacecraft made a successful landing over the weekend, parachuting to a soft touchdown in the dark desert night of White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT) Saturday (Sep. 7). The return marked an end to a long-delayed and issue-ridden mission, which launched with two NASA astronauts, but returned with none. It turns out they would have been totally fine.

Despite the issues it experienced on its flight up to the International Space Station (ISS), Starliner's uncrewed landing performed as expected, with the spacecraft touching down precisely as NASA and Boeing had designed for its delayed return. "If we'd have had a crew on board the spacecraft, we would have followed the same back away sequence from the space station, the same deorbit burn and executed the same entry. And so it would have been a safe, successful landing with the crew on board," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, during a post-landing press conference. But, hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Boeing and NASA spent the past three months performing tests in White Sands, trying to recreate and understand the thruster issues Starliner experienced in space. "It's always hard to have that retrospective look," Stich said after Starliner's return, adding, "if we'd had a model that would have predicted what we saw tonight perfectly, yeah, it looks like an easy decision to go say we could have had a crewed fight, but we didn't have that."

Related: Boeing Starliner astronauts will spend at least 240 days stuck in space — is that a new record?

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard Starliner on June 4, expecting to spend a little more than a week on orbit. The CFT mission was to be Starliner's final qualifying flight before entering into operational rotation as a crew transport to the ISS. However, thruster issues as the spacecraft approached the ISS led to a three-month delay in Starliner's return, which it ultimately did without astronauts onboard.

NASA announced its decision for Starliner to return uncrewed at the end of August, reassigning Wilmore and Williams as part of ISS Expedition 71. That required the agency to designate two empty seats aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft launching SpaceX's Crew-9 astronaut mission for NASA later this month so that Wilmore and Williams can ride home in them at the end of the Crew-9 rotation in February.

That means by the time they come home, instead of ten days in space, the duo will have spent ten months aboard the station.

A path forward for Starliner is currently unclear. The spacecraft was slated to begin six-month crew ration missions to the ISS starting in February next year, but that has already been pushed back to August 2025, at the earliest.

"I want to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, re-entry and landing," Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing's Commercial Crew Program said in a statement. "We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program."

Originally posted on Space.com.

A new video from an astronaut's vantage point in space catures a bright green burst over Earth as a meteor exploded in the night sky.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, commander of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission, shared a new time-lapse of photos taken from the International Space Station as it passed over Cairo, Egypt. While aiming to photograph the Milky Way's Core, Dominick ended up capturing a bright green fireball that exploded on Monday (Sept. 2) at 8:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT).

The outburst seen in the time-lapse was created by a meteor that entered Earth's atmosphere and burned up. Dominick shared the new view in a post on X (formally Twitter) on Sept. 3.

"I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought," Dominick wrote in his post. "They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere — a rather bright one called a bolide."

Dominick shared two versions of the timelapse. In his initial post, the timelapse was slowed down to one frame per second, offering a more detailed view of the fleeting meteor as it streaked across the sky and then exploded. In the comments, Dominick shared a faster version, in which the meteor appears as only a very brief flash in the top right of the frame.

Related: Asteroid 10 times bigger than the dinosaur-killing space rock smashed Jupiter's largest moon off its axis

Given the exceptional brightness of the meteor, it is considered a bolide, which is a large meteor that explodes in Earth's atmosphere with enough force to create a sonic boom. This type of meteor can last several seconds, or even minutes, and create a bright glow across the sky that outshines the stars and moon.

"I think it is interesting to compare the size of the bolide blast to other objects in view like the Mediterranean, Cairo, or lightning strikes," Dominick commented.

The timelapse includes 20 individual images taken from inside of the space station's Cupola module.

"When I went to review the shots afterwards I found the bolide," Dominick said in his post.

Dominick has been a prolific photographer during his stay aboard the ISS as part of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission. The NASA astronaut and U.S. Navy test pilot has captured auroras, several meteors exploding above Earth and more on camera during his stay on the orbital lab.

Originally posted on Space.com.

On March 18, 2025, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams splashed down into the Gulf of Mexico aboard a SpaceX crew capsule, finally completing their unexpected nine-month mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

When the two astronauts rode an experimental Boeing Starliner spacecraft to the ISS on June 5, 2024, their stay in orbit was meant to last as few as eight days. But due to persistent leaks and errors aboard Starliner, the Boeing-made spacecraft was ultimately sent back to Earth without a crew — leaving Williams and Wilmore stuck on the ISS for more than nine months while a replacement capsule was arranged.

When the pair finally returned home in March, the astronauts had completed 286 consecutive days in space. But while that unexpectedly long duration sounds like a lot, it's totally normal for astronauts, and far from a new record.

Related: NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were carried away on stretchers after return from space. Here's why that's normal.

Astronauts typically spend an average of six months aboard the ISS, where they conduct experiments and maintain the space station before returning to Earth, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. However, missions can extend many months longer, for a variety of reasons, including long-duration experiments and unforeseen incidents.

Who has spent the longest time in space?

The record for the most consecutive days in space by an American goes to astronaut Frank Rubio, who spent 371 days aboard the ISS from September 2022 to September 2023.

Rubio was initially expected home in March 2023, but his stay in space more than doubled after a small meteoroid or piece of space junk slammed into the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that was meant to carry him home in December 2022, causing irreparable damage. Rubio, along with Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, had to wait another six months in space before a replacement Soyuz capsule arrived to bring them home.

Related: How do tiny pieces of space junk cause incredible damage?

While Prokopyev and Petelin also clocked 371 consecutive days in space, they did not break any Russian records. Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov — who holds the record for the most consecutive days spent in space by any human — worked aboard Russia's now-defunct Mir space station for 437 days, or more than 14 months, from January 1994 to March 1995. Polyakov volunteered for this mission as part of a study of the effects of long-term spaceflight on human health.

Other notable long-haul stays in space include American astronaut Christina Koch's 328 days aboard the ISS from March 2019 to February 2020 — the longest single spaceflight by a woman — and American astronaut Scott Kelly's 340 days in space from March 2015 to March 2016.

How does space affect the human body?

Kelly's extended spaceflight — which broke records at the time but has now been surpassed several times — was part of NASA's groundbreaking twins study, which compared Kelly's physical and mental health pre- and post-spaceflight to the baseline health of his identical twin brother Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut and current Arizona senator who remained on Earth during his brother's time in orbit.

The twin study revealed that astronauts experience a number of changes during long stays in orbit, including changes in gene expression, body weight and gut microbiome composition. It added to a still-growing body of research that shows that astronauts who spend extended amounts of time in microgravity are also likely to experience short-term health impacts such as muscle and bone loss, vision problems, lower immunity, an increased risk of blood clots and inflammation, and DNA damage. Most of these changes revert to normal after six months back on Earth, researchers have found. However, the study of spaceflight on human health is still in its infancy.

During their stay in orbit, Williams and Wilmore likely experienced some of these temporary changes, as well as changes in mental health associated with isolation and boredom, prior research suggests. But their extended stay in space was hardly unprecedented — and much safer than sending the pair home on a spacecraft with unresolved technical issues.

On its way to the ISS in June, Starliner sprung several helium leaks and showed issues with several of its smaller thrusters. The craft docked safely with the space station, but months of testing were unable to resolve the issues with certainty. On Aug. 24, NASA officials announced that, in the interest of safety, Starliner would undock from the ISS without a crew in early September, sending it back to Earth empty while Williams and Wilmore waited for their ride home in 2025. On Sept. 6, the empty Starliner successfully returned to Earth without issue.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Aug. 27 to correct an error stating that Starliner had a number of hydrogen leaks. They were in fact helium leaks. It was updated again on March 24, 2025, after the astronauts successfully returned home.

NASA's two stranded astronauts will be brought home from the International Space Station (ISS) on a SpaceX vehicle in February 2025, leaving the faulty Starliner spacecraft that took them there to return without a crew, the agency has said.

The announcement, made at a news conference on Saturday (Aug. 24), is the final nail in the coffin for Boeing's first Starliner Crew Test Flight, whose astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams have been stuck aboard the ISS since June, waiting for NASA officials to assess several technical issues that appeared during Starliner's voyage to space.

Originally planned to last as few as eight days, the first crewed test flight of Boeing's spacecraft was marred by numerous helium leaks and thruster faults on its outward leg, delaying its return by more than two months.

Now, following an agency-wide review, NASA has decided that there is too much uncertainty for the spacecraft to safely bring its crew home.

"NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with [SpaceX's] Crew-9 next February, and that Starliner will return uncrewed," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a news conference on Aug. 24. "I want you to know that Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision. We want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS."

Starliner blasted off on its inaugural crewed test flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5. But not long after entering orbit, a number of faults appeared on the spacecraft — including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters.

This forced engineers to troubleshoot issues from the ground. Tests conducted at Starliner's facility in White Sands, New Mexico, revealed that during the spacecraft's climb to the ISS, the teflon seals inside the five faulty RCS thrusters likely got hot and bulged out of place to obstruct the propellant flow, according to NASA.

Related: Fixing Boeing's leaky Starliner — and returning NASA's stranded astronauts to Earth — is much harder than it sounds

A hotfire test conducted while the craft was docked to the ISS on July 27 showed the thrust was back at normal levels, but NASA engineers were still concerned that the problem could reappear during the craft's descent back to Earth. They were also worried that the helium leaks could knock out some of the craft's orbital maneuvering and attitude control system (OMAC) thrusters, which maintain the spacecraft on a safe flight path.

"There was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters," Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said at the news conference. "If we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence, I think we would have taken a different course of action."

NASA's new plan is to bring the astronauts home aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule instead. The vehicle will be sent to the ISS on Sept. 24 carrying members of the ISS's Crew-9, who will take over from the current Crew-8 aboard the space station. Instead of Crew-9's usual four-person crew, two astronauts will go to the ISS to leave space for Wilmore and Williams to return in February 2025.

The Starliner capsule is expected to undock from the ISS and make a controlled, uncrewed descent back to Earth in early September, NASA said.

Boeing built the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. The company has so far spent roughly $1.6 billion to address numerous setbacks in the development of Starliner, putting its long-term involvement in NASA's program into question.

"We continue to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft," Boeing said in a statement posted on X on Saturday. "We are executing the mission as determined by NASA, and we are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return."

The moon's glow meets a multicolored aurora in a new astronaut image from space.

International Space Station (ISS) and NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, a veteran photographer of the Expedition 71 crew, captured the moon and auroras from his perch 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth.

"The aurora have been amazing the past few days. Great timing for trying out a new lens that recently arrived on Cygnus," Dominick said on X, formerly Twitter, in one of the posts. (Cygnus is a cargo spacecraft from Northrop Grumman that arrived Aug. 6).

Dominick and the Expedition 71 crew witnessed powerful auroras in recent days, which happen when the sun's charged particles interact with gas molecules in Earth's atmosphere. The gas molecules emit light when they become excited to higher energy levels than the norm, with different molecules spurring different colors of light. (Green, for example, results from oxygen.)

Related: 32 stunning photos of auroras seen from space

Both green and red hues are visible in Dominick's recent images and video. "The moon makes it way towards the horizon to set amongst red and green aurora," Dominick wrote in another X post. "Felt so lucky to grab this shot."

The red-and-green auroras, tinged with moonlight, are Dominick's latest photos as part of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission. His visit happens to coincide with a peak in auroral activity, allowing him to capture images of auroral shows backdropped by spacecraft like Boeing's Starliner, SpaceX Crew Dragon or Russia's Soyuz.

Dominick said recently that he has obtained as many as 200,000 photos aboard the ISS, during the mission meant to last half a year. Many of these photos were taken in his spare time, although, like all astronauts, he also does photography for Earth observation and ISS maintenance purposes.

Originally posted on Space.com.

Two astronauts marooned in space may sound like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster, but for two NASA crew members, it is now a reality. Commander Barry Wilmore and pilot Sunita Williams are currently in limbo on the International Space Station (ISS).

They arrived in the Boeing Starliner spacecraft — the first test of the spaceship with astronauts. Wilmore and Williams were supposed to stay on the ISS for around eight days and return on the same spacecraft. But there is now debate about the safety of Starliner after it experienced helium leaks and thruster problems on its way to the ISS.

In coming days, Nasa and Boeing may decide to clear Starliner to carry the astronauts back to Earth. This means their stay might not last too much longer. But if officials decide against Starliner, the astronauts face waiting an additional six months in orbit before returning. So how do astronauts cope with a potential six-month wait for a lift home?

Waiting for things is difficult at the best of times. Under normal circumstances, it is frustrating, stressful and anxiety-provoking. But in extreme situations, with high stakes, waiting can be purgatory.

Part of the reason that waiting is difficult is that it distorts our sense of time. Think of last time you were waiting for a delayed train, test results or a text from a potential new partner. Did it fly by or drag? For most people, time spent waiting crawls at a glacial pace. As a result, delays and periods of anticipation often feel much longer than they actually are.

Waiting slows our perception of time, because it changes the amount of time that we spend thinking about time. During normal daily life we often ignore time; our brains have a limited capacity. If time isn't important, we simply don't think about it, and this helps it to pass quickly.

Related: Why time seems to fly by

When we are waiting, our desire to know when the wait is over increases how much we think about time. This "clock watching" can make the minutes and hours feel like they are passing at a snail's pace. Stress, discomfort and pain exacerbate this effect, meaning that waiting in difficult situations can seem even longer.

Waiting also slows our perception of time because it influences what we do and how we feel. Normal life is busy and full of ever-changing activities and interactions. The sudden need to wait halts the flow of life, often leaving us with nothing else to do, thus increasing levels of boredom and frustration.

In general, time filled with activity passes more quickly. We all got a taste of this during COVID lockdowns. When we were stuck inside unable to see friends and engage in normal daily activities, the loss of routine and distractions caused time to drag for many.

For the astronauts stuck on the ISS, anxiety about when they will return, limited opportunities for activities and fewer opportunities to contact friends and families combine to make their wait to return home feel significantly longer than six months — if it should come to that.

However, as academics who research the effects of time on human psychology and biology, our ongoing work with crew members at research stations in Antarctica aims to shed light on whether waiting in extreme environments is different to waiting during normal daily life.

A year in Antarctica

While being stuck for six months on the ISS may sound like many people's worst nightmare, it is not uncommon for scientists to spend long periods isolated and confined in extreme environments. Every year, organisations such as the Instituto Antártico Argentino (which uses the Belgrano II Antarctic station), the French Polar Institute and the Italian Antarctic Programme, in cooperation with the European Space Agency (which all use Antarctica's Concordia station), send crews of people for up to 16 months to conduct research on the frozen continent.

During the March to October polar winter, teams spend six months in near darkness — and from May to August, in complete darkness — facing outside temperatures of up to -60C, wind speeds of 160 km/h (100 mph) and storms which prevent almost all outdoor activity. Limited internet coverage can also prevent constant communication with the outside world.

For the last year, we have researched how life in Antarctica influences people's experience of time. Each month, we asked crew members how time felt like it was passing in comparison to before their mission. Trapped on base, with limited contact with the outside world, you might expect time to drag. However, our results suggest the opposite may be true.

Analysis of crew members' experiences indicated that being constantly busy with complex tasks such as scientific research helped time to pass swiftly, according to 80% of crew responses. Only 3% of responses indicated that time actually dragged, and these reports occurred when nights were long and there was little to do.

These experiences may provide hope for those stuck on the ISS. Like life on an Antarctic station, these Nasa astronauts have a busy and mentally demanding existence. These factors may help time to pass quickly.

However, a key factor of their wait may be their ability to tolerate the uncertainty of when they will return. Wilmore and Williams will spend their time in a space equivalent to the inside a Boeing 747 plane. But better information about "when" things will happen and "why" delays are being incurred can help people to tolerate waiting and reduce its impact on their wellbeing.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

NASA has pushed back the decision to return its stranded Starliner astronauts to the end of August pending a "major discussion" about the spaceship's flight readiness, agency officials have said. 

Originally planned to last just 8 days, numerous leaks and other technical issues suffered by Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station (ISS) in June delayed the planned return flight by more than two months, and left its two astronauts — Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams — stuck in space.

As engineers continue to collect and debate test results on the craft's problems, NASA bosses are still mulling over whether to return the two astronauts on Starliner, or take them back on a SpaceX Dragon capsule six months later instead.

"It's a fairly major discussion to decide whether or not we're going to have crew on board for Starliner's return." Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate, said at a news conference Wednesday (August 14). "We're expecting that the data analysis will be ready for a program board by the middle to end of next week, and will be ready for a flight readiness review around the end of next week."

Boeing built the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. 

Starliner blasted off on its inaugural crewed test flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5. But not long after entering orbit, a number of faults appeared — including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters. 

This forced engineers to troubleshoot issues from the ground. Tests conducted at Starliner's facility in White Sands, New Mexico, revealed that during the spacecraft's climb to the ISS, the teflon seals inside the five faulty RCS thrusters likely got hot and bulged out of place to obstruct the propellant flow, according to NASA. 

Related: Fixing Boeing's leaky Starliner — and returning NASA's stranded astronauts to Earth — is much harder than it sounds

A hotfire test conducted while the craft was docked to the ISS on July 27 showed the thrust was normal, but NASA engineers are concerned the earlier thruster problems could reappear during the craft's descent back to Earth. They are also worried that the helium leaks could knock out some of the craft's orbital maneuvering and attitude control system (OMAC) thrusters, which maintain the spacecraft on its flight path.

"The worst case would be some integrated failure mechanism, between the helium leaks and the RCS thrusters," Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said at a previous news conference on Aug. 7. "Then you could end up in some cases that aren't as easily controlled — more stressing cases that the team is worried about." 

NASA's leading contingency plan is to bring the astronauts home aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule instead. The vehicle will be sent to the ISS as early as Sept. 24 carrying members of the ISS's Crew-9, who will take over from the current Crew-8 aboard the space station. Instead of Crew-9's usual four person crew, two astronauts will go to the ISS to leave space for Wilmore and Williams to return in February 2025.

"I do want to keep this in perspective, if Butch and Suni do not come home on Starliner, they will have about 8 months in orbit," Russ DeLoach, NASA's chief of safety and mission assurance, said at the Aug. 14 news conference.

Yet despite Starliner's problems, NASA said that its astronauts are safe and comfortable aboard the ISS.

"This mission was a test flight... they knew this mission might not be perfect," Joe Acaba, NASA's chief astronaut, said at the press conference. "Human space flight is inherently risky, and as astronauts, we accept that as part of the job." 

 There is still no return date for Boeing's stranded Starliner astronauts, who have been stuck on the International Space Station (ISS) since June after their spacecraft developed multiple issues, NASA has announced. 

Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams rode to orbit in Boeing's spacecraft following years of delays, successfully blasting off on Starliner's inaugural crewed flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5. They were scheduled to stay a week in orbit.

But during the flight the spacecraft suffered a series of issues, including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters, forcing engineers to troubleshoot issues on the ground. This extended the two astronauts' stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to the current 50 days. 

Yet NASA and Boeing say that even though ground tests have been completed, there is still no clear date for a flight home.

"We don't have a major announcement today relative to a return date," Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said at a news conference on Thursday (July 25). "We're making great progress, but we're just not quite ready to do that."

When the astronauts will return remains unclear, but NASA officials have previously said that the spacecraft has enough fuel to remain in orbit until mid-August at the latest.

Stich said that NASA and Boeing may perform a test fire of the spacecraft "as early as next week." Following this review, Stich added, an undock time will be set.

Related: Fixing Boeing's leaky Starliner — and returning NASA's stranded astronauts to Earth — is much harder than it sounds

Starliner was built as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to take astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttle program in 2011. SpaceX's Crew Dragon also came from this initiative and has tallied 13 crewed flights since it began operating in 2020.

But Starliner's journey into orbit has been much more troubled. A software glitch on its first uncrewed test flight pushed Starliner onto the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was scrubbed due to a faulty fuel valve. Other issues, including problems with parachutes and the need to remove nearly a mile (1.6 kilometers) of flammable tape, also subsequently cropped up.

The current, third crewed flight attempt was briefly delayed by issues with a vibrating oxygen valve and a small but persistent helium leak. Engineers ultimately deemed the craft safe to fly despite those issues. After liftoff, the leaks multiplied and several thrusters conked out, delaying the craft's docking with the ISS's Harmony module and later postponing its return to Earth.

NASA officials say the spacecraft is still safe, and that the return has been delayed this long so that scientists can collect as much data as possible on the malfunctioning RCS thrusters before they are jettisoned and burn up upon reentry.

"The last several weeks have been really useful in understanding thruster and helium anomalies and how to address these problems for future flights," Mark Nappi, Boeing vice president and the manager of the company's commercial crew program, said at the news conference. "That's been the real goal here."

To better understand how these thrusters — which are essential for tilting the craft at the right angle to enter Earth's atmosphere — might behave, engineers at Starliner's facility in White Sands, New Mexico, have been disassembling copies of them, inspecting them part by part for potential faults, and firing them to collect data.

During their extended time aboard the ISS, Wilmore and Williams have performed a number of maintenance tasks and scientific projects. Once a week, they have returned to the Starliner capsule to work through the thruster issues with engineers at ground control.

The astronauts' stay has been largely safe but not entirely without incident. On June 27, a defunct Russian satellite broke apart in orbit, sending debris toward the ISS and forcing Williams and Wilmore, along with the other seven astronauts on board, to take cover inside their respective space capsules.

Speaking at a July 10 news conference beamed from the ISS, Wilmore and Williams told reporters that they were confident Starliner could return them to Earth safely.

When asked about backup plans to return the astronauts without Starliner, Stitch said that contingency plans involving SpaceX's Crew Dragon have been looked into, but their focus was on using Boeing's craft.

"Obviously the backup option is to use a different system. I would rather not go into all those details until we get to that time — if we ever get to that time," Stitch said. "We really have our team focused on, as we close in on this final flight rationale, returning Butch and Suni on Starliner."

Antimatter particles detected on the International Space Station (ISS) may be evidence for unknown physics, new research suggests.

The particles, antimatter versions of helium nuclei, may have been produced by cosmic fireballs, — and physicists can't explain how those fireballs formed using the Standard Model, the theory which describes the zoo of subatomic particles.

All elementary particles have corresponding antiparticles with opposite electric charges, which annihilate each other on contact. Theory suggests half the matter in the universe should have been antimatter, which would mean the universe would have destroyed itself soon after the Big Bang.

Yet antimatter in the universe is scarce and fleeting. While particle accelerators can generate antiparticles through collisions of protons and electrons, and special detectors observe antiparticles from high-energy space collisions, such as those from supernova explosions, these usually yield only single antiparticles like positrons (antielectrons) and antiprotons.

Related: Mysterious 'unparticles' may be pushing the universe apart, new theoretical study suggests

However, about eight years ago, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) aboard the ISS detected around 10 antihelium nuclei. These nuclei consisted of two antiprotons and either one or two antineutrons (for antihelium-3 and antihelium-4 versions, respectively). If confirmed through further analysis, the discovery would challenge the Standard Model of particle physics

According to the Standard Model, making antihelium-4 requires that at least three or four antiprotons and antineutrons be near enough to each other and be moving slowly enough to stick together, study co-author Michael A. Fedderke, a postdoctoral researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, told Live Science in an email. Based on these requirements, one antihelium-4 would be produced for every 10,000 antihelium-3.

"The really interesting thing about the AMS-02 candidate events is that the data seem to be consistent with about one antihelium-4 event for every two to three antihelium-3 events," Fedderke said., That's far above what the Standard Model predicts.

In the new study, published June 21 in the journal Physical Review D, the team tried to explain this discrepancy using hypothetical objects called fireballs. These fireballs could result from currently unobserved phenomena, such as the collision of extremely dense clumps of dark matter — a mysterious substance that makes up about 80% of the universe's matter but does not interact with light so can't be directly observed.

"A fireball is a dense, energetic region of space containing large numbers of antiparticles," study co-author Anubhav Mathur, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University, told Live Science. "Once formed, it expands at close to the speed of light, releasing antiprotons, antineutrons, and antihelium into the surrounding environment. The antinuclei subsequently travel outward, and some of them reach the Earth where they can be detected."

The researchers modeled fireballs of various sizes and behavior. They found that if the fireballs were large, "composite" objects made of many dark matter particles, then the amount of antihelium nuclei they produced matches well with the preliminary results detected aboard the ISS, Fedderke said.

While these findings are promising, they are still preliminary and require further validation. Follow-up studies will help determine if their hypothesis is correct.

"On the observational side, we're looking forward to AMS-02 completing their analysis of their candidate antihelium events, as well as to them taking more data in future which may shed further light on this puzzle," Fedderke said.

The General AntiParticle Spectrometer (GAPS) project, which will launch a balloon over Antarctica later this year to detect antimatter cosmic rays, including antihelium nuclei, could also shed light on the matter, Fedderke added.

For the past few weeks, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stuck on the International Space Station (ISS) after the first crewed voyage of Boeing's new Starliner spacecraft hit a snag. Concerns raised by Boeing and NASA over thruster problems and several helium leaks (helium is used in Starliner's engine system) have prevented the craft from making the return journey as scheduled. NASA has now said the astronauts may have to stay put until the next scheduled crew switchover in August — potentially on another ship.

Boeing and NASA are trying to put a positive spin on the extension by saying they are testing systems required for longer Starliner missions. But the project has already suffered several delays, having originally been set to lift off for the first time with crew in 2017. This, combined with the latest problems raise questions over the whole Starliner programme.

Starliner was noted as having a small helium leak before it even launched. Helium is an inert gas (much like neon or xenon), meaning that it is very unreactive with other materials.

This makes it ideal when coming into contact with rocket fuel and high temperatures, although producing it is an expensive process. It is pressurised and used to push fuel into the engines at the correct rate. Helium leaks can mean that not enough fuel will reach a thruster.

The leak spotted while Starliner was on the launch pad was determined to be negligible and the spacecraft was sent to orbit regardless. However, this turned into a larger problem when additional helium leaks were identified following launch, meaning that several of the spacecraft's small manoeuvring thrusters couldn't be used.

Four of the five thrusters have been repaired while Starliner has been docked to the ISS, but it raises concern for other thrusters cutting out during the return journey to Earth. On Starliner's return, re-entering Earth's atmosphere requires a very specific "angle of attack" to ensure there is not too much friction heating up the vessel.

RELATED: NASA astronauts say they're 'confident' Starliner will bring them home, despite no return date in sight

An inability to adjust the orientation of the craft or the orbital parameters for re-entry could in the worst-case scenario result in massive heat build up and the destruction of the spacecraft with two astronauts on board.

There are additional thrusters and other so-called "redundancies" — back up systems — designed into the spacecraft, so this is a very unlikely scenario. However, so were the helium leaks. While Boeing and NASA have considered it safe to return on Starliner, it's perfectly conceivable that the astronauts might have some trepidation and anxiety — especially as these issues did not occur with the uncrewed test flights.

The next particular problem is that Starliner returns and jettisons its service module on re-entry as it returns to the surface on land rather than at sea (like Russian spacecraft Soyuz did and the SpaceX Dragon capsules do). This means that the bit of the spacecraft with all the vital information on will be burned up, making it very difficult to determine what actually went wrong.

Investigations in space

Currently ground tests are being run by NASA and investigations are being conducted on the ISS to gather as much information as possible before the return.

The astronauts made it up to the ISS and are safe there. While it is likely that Starliner will return to Earth, should a major fault be discovered while it is docked to the ISS, there are other return vehicles that can be used to ferry the two crew members back home.

The astronauts' safety will no doubt be paramount in the minds of both agency and industry. But this is not the first problem with Starliner. The vehicle has suffered from major delays since conception as part of the Commercial Crew Program in 2010.

The contract indicated that Starliner should be ready by 2017 with a two-year delay before the first successful unmanned launch in 2022 (there was a failed attempt in 2019). The main crewed launch was then delayed by a month.

These delays indicate that Boeing is falling behind its main commercial competitor SpaceX, which won a contract at the same time as Boeing in 2010 to build vehicles that could transport crew to the ISS. SpaceX successfully launched a crewed mission with the Dragon capsule in 2020. To give an indication of the success, Crew Dragon is currently completing its fifth manned mission to the ISS, and has also completed 30 cargo missions.

Boeing has been a major player in space missions with NASA for decades, playing a major role in the space shuttle programme, for example. This relationship continues with the company's role in the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will send astronauts on their way to the Moon.

The company has been one of the biggest and most admired contractors in the aerospace industry. However, the problems with the Starliner come not long after widely publicised incidents with Boeing aircraft, so the corporation could do without any further problems with its crewed spacecraft to add to its woes.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Venturing outside of the International Space Station (ISS) is challenging enough without having to worry about nature calling in the middle of your spacewalk — now, scientists say they've devised a new way to capture astronauts' pee and recycle it into drinkable water within minutes. 

For years, astronauts on spacewalks around the ISS have relieved themselves using a disposable diaper inside their spacesuit, known as a maximum absorbency garment (MAG). These garments, first designed in the early 1980s, collect and store urine, enabling astronauts to "go" on the go. But given spacewalks can sometimes take up to eight hours, MAGs can leave astronauts physically uncomfortable and at risk of skin irritation and infection. 

MAGs also don't recycle the water in urine, so while on their walk, astronauts must rely on a fixed supply of 0.2 gallons (0.95 liters) of water that they carry in an in-suit drink bag. 

But now, scientists think they have a solution to this problem: a new, lightweight system that can collect and purify around 1.69 fluid ounces (500 milliliters) of water from urine within a person's spacesuit and in just five minutes. 

Related: Circus 'Wall of Death' stunt may keep astronauts fit on the moon

If implemented, the system would involve astronauts wearing an undergarment that's made from a flexible compression material and lined with antimicrobial fabric. The system also includes a humidity sensor that senses urine; the sensor sits within a silicone cup beneath the wearer's genitalia. 

The detection of pee switches on a vacuum pump that then draws the urine up into a filtration device carried on the astronaut's back. The filter measures about 15 inches (38 centimeters) tall and 9 inches (23 cm) wide. Within the 17.6-pound (8 kilogram) filtration device, urine would be transformed into fresh water that could subsequently be delivered into the spacesuit's drink bag. 

The new system is still in its initial testing stage. However, if it makes it through development, it could help solve a dilemma for astronauts engaging in space exploration, the team who developed the system say. The issue of how to deal with urine on spacewalks is particularly relevant considering that NASA plans to establish a permanent outpost on the moon by the end of the decade. 

The team described their new device in a paper published Friday (July 12) in the journal Frontiers in Space Technology. So far, in the lab, the device has been shown to effectively remove the major components of urine and reduce its salt levels to meet health standards, the team says. 

"Getting urine away from the body as quickly as possible should reduce some of the health complications that astronauts are currently experiencing like rashes, urinary tract infections, and digestive distress," Sofia Etlin, the lead study author and a researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine, told Live Science in an email. 

"Second, the greater overall supply of water that our system generates will keep the astronauts hydrated," Etlin added. 

Spacesuits are limited in their size and battery capacity, so the bulk and energy requirements of the new system would need to be carefully considered. However, improving astronauts' health and performance and supplying them enough water for emergencies is a worthy trade-off, the authors wrote in the paper. 

"When it comes to sending new technology to space, the process is quite time intensive," Etlin said. The team has tested the filtration system, "but further study with humans will be required to maximize fit and comfort." 

The team also needs to check that the device works under conditions realistically found in space, such as microgravity. If successful in tests on Earth, the spacesuit would then be trialed during real spacewalks from the ISS.   

"Our system would likely only be implemented into new spacesuits according to their specifications, which would require some further tailoring of the technology," Etlin said. "So we'll definitely not see astronauts diaper-free next year, but you can never tell what the future holds."

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

Two NASA astronauts who are stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) after riding there aboard Boeing's Starliner say they are "confident" that the spacecraft can get them home safely.

Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams have been living on the ISS for over a month. The astronauts rode to orbit on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, which, after years of delays, successfully blasted off on its inaugural crewed flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:52 a.m. EDT on June 5.

But it wasn't long before a spate of issues began to plague the fledgling spacecraft. Engineers discovered five separate helium leaks in the spacecraft's thruster system and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters, which will be essential for safely orienting the craft to reenter Earth's atmosphere.

With these issues in mind, NASA and Boeing delayed the return of the spacecraft to later this month, leaving the astronauts stranded aboard the ISS.

Still, the astronauts said they are sure they will be able to return home safely aboard Starliner.

"We've been through a lot of simulations," Williams said at a news conferenceWednesday (July 10). "I feel confident that if we had to — if there was a problem with the International Space Station — we could get in our spacecraft, we could undock, talk to our team and figure out the best way to come home."

Related: China's secret space plane has released another unknown object over Earth

During their time aboard the ISS, Wilmore and Williams have been performing a number of maintenance tasks and participating in scientific projects. Once a week, they have returned to the Starliner capsule to work through thruster issues with engineers at ground control.

The astronauts' stay has been largely safe but not entirely without incident. On June 27, a defunct Russian satellite broke apart in orbit, sending debris toward the ISS and forcing Williams and Wilmore, along with the other seven astronauts on board, to take cover inside their respective space capsules. 

Due to limited battery life, Starliner was initially only approved to stay docked with the ISS for 45 days, narrowing the troubleshooting window. Fortunately, NASA officials revised that window, saying the batteries could be good for an additional 45 days, allowing the astronauts to stay in orbit well into fall.

Williams and Wilmore said they are confident that the Starliner will be able to return them home.

"We are ready. We will be ready unless the data shows otherwise," Wilmore said at a separate news conference Wednesday. "But right now, based on what we know, we're absolutely ready."

Key to Starliner's safe reentry is the ability of its RCS thrusters to perform a safe deorbit burn.  That capability isn't in much doubt, Williams said at the news conference. But the one potential challenge to returning home that hasn't been fully assessed is the status of the RCS thrusters.

"We'll find out if they really are degraded," Williams said. "I think, with the number of jets we have, we're probably going to find something really positive." 

"We've practiced a lot, so I have a real good feeling in my heart that this spacecraft will bring us home, no problem," she added. 

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have been forced to take shelter inside the docked Starliner spacecraft after a defunct Russian satellite broke apart in orbit, sending potentially dangerous debris racing around Earth.

The ISS's nine crew members — including the Boeing Starliner's stranded Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — took cover for about an hour last night (June 27) shortly after 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT).

The astronauts took the precautionary measure following the breakup of the Resurs-P1 Russian Earth observation satellite, which shattered into more than 100 pieces near the space station on Wednesday (June 26).

"Mission Control continued to monitor the path of the debris, and after about an hour, the crew was cleared to exit their spacecraft and the station resumed normal operations," NASA said on the social platform X.

Orbit-monitoring company LeoLabs first noticed the Resurs-P1 satellite, declared dead since 2022, breaking apart when it spotted a "debris-generating event in Low Earth Orbit" on June 26, according to a post on X. The U.S. Space Command said there were "no immediate threats" to other satellites. The exact cause of the satellite's breakup remains unknown.

Related: Mysterious object that crashed through Florida home was likely space junk from the International Space Station

Space junk in orbit above Earth is a growing problem for astronauts and satellites. Space agencies around the world try to keep tabs on the more than 30,000 of the largest pieces of junk, but many more pieces of debris are too small to monitor.

Scientists have proposed multiple ways of tidying up Earth's orbit, such as gathering junk up in nets, collecting it with clawed robots or firing a half-mile-long (0.8 kilometer) tether from another spacecraft to grab pieces of debris.

This recent event also highlights the risks faced by NASA and Boeing in completing its beleaguered Starliner mission, which left astronauts Wilmore and Williams stranded aboard the ISS following multiple issues with the spacecraft.

The two astronauts were originally due to return to Earth on June 13 after a week on the ISS, but their stay has been extended indefinitely after engineers discovered five separate helium leaks on the spacecraft's thruster system and failures to five of its 28 reaction-control system thrusters.

Due to limited fuel used in maintaining its orbit, Starliner can only stay docked for 45 days, so the window for a safe return flight continues to narrow.

NASA plans to keep the ISS operational through at least 2030. After that, the massive space station will be safely deorbited into Earth's atmosphere, before safely crashing into the ocean. Earlier this week, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract worth up to $843 million to help build a vehicle to safely deorbit the ageing space station.

NASA is preparing to destroy the International Space Station (ISS), awarding SpaceX an up to $843 million contract to push the station safely out of orbit and back to Earth.

According to the space agency's plans, SpaceX's specially designed deorbit vehicle will drag the football field-size ISS back to Earth sometime after the end of its operational life in 2030. The ISS will smash into our planet's atmosphere at a speed of more than 17,000 mph (27,500 km/h) before landing in a crashdown spot in the ocean. 

Deorbiting the space station "supports NASA's plans for future commercial destinations and allows for the continued use of space near Earth," Ken Bowersox, NASA's associate administrator for Space Operations Mission Directorate, said in a statement. 

The floating laboratory's first parts were launched in 1998, and it has been occupied by astronauts from the U.S., Japan, Russia, Canada and Europe since 2000, who have completed more than 3,300 scientific experiments in a close orbit above Earth.

But the space station is showing its age: technical faults and leaks continue to cause issues for crews, and the contracts between the five participating national space agencies — which marked an era of global cooperation in space following the end of the Cold War — will end by 2030.

The ISS also faces risks from the growing problem of space junk — orbital debris made of other defunct satellites, whipping around Earth at high speeds. On thursday (June 27) nine astronauts aboard the ISS were forced to take shelter in the docked Boeing Starliner crew capsule after hundreds of pieces of debris from a shattered Russian satellite threatened the space station's safety. The crew were allowed to return to the ISS after about an hour, and operations continued as normal.

Related: What is Point Nemo, the remote, watery satellite graveyard where the ISS will go to die?

But it's still unclear exactly when the space station will be brought crashing back to Earth. The 2030 end date is in NASA's budget, but the space agency is committed to operations throughout 2030.

"There's nothing magical that happens in 2030," Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, said at a Jan. 25 news conference.

The ISS will likely continue its work until the commercial space stations slated to replace it come online, Stich added. These include Axiom Space's Axiom Station, and the Orbital Reef designed by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Both stations are slated to come online by the end of this decade.

When the ISS is ready to be destroyed, it is also unclear how much other space agencies will shoulder the burden. NASA said in its statement that "the safe deorbit of the International Space Station is the responsibility of all five space agencies," but the extent of their financial or technical involvement in SpaceX's drag-and-dump is unspecified.

The ISS's fiery descent won't be the first performed by a decommissioned space station. In 2001, Russia's Mir space station was sent plummeting back to Earth, and its surviving fragments were swallowed by the Pacific Ocean.

Editor's note: NASA announced on Friday that Starliner's troubleshooting has been extended for a third time, meaning that the astronauts will stay aboard the International Space Station indefinitely until some time in July.

Two NASA astronauts who rode to orbit on Boeing's Starliner are currently stranded in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after engineers discovered numerous issues with the Boeing spacecraft. Teams on the ground are now racing to assess Starliner's status.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were originally scheduled to return to Earth on June 13 after a week on the ISS, but their stay has been extended for a third time due to the ongoing issues.  The astronauts will now return home no sooner than June 26th, according to NASA. 

After years of delays, Boeing's Starliner capsule successfully blasted off on its inaugural crewed flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:52 a.m. EDT on June 5. But during the 25-hour flight, engineers discovered five separate helium leaks to the spacecraft's thruster system.

Now, to give engineers time to troubleshoot the faults, NASA has announced it will push back the perilous return flight, extending the crew's stay on the space station to at least three weeks. 

"We've learned that our helium system is not performing as designed," Mark Nappi, Boeing's Starliner program manager, said at a news conference on June 18. "Albeit manageable, it's still not working like we designed it. So we've got to go figure that out."

The return module of the Starliner spacecraft is currently docked to the ISS's Harmony module as NASA and Boeing engineers assess the  vital hardware issues aboard the vessel, including five helium leaks to the system that pressurizes the spacecraft's propulsion system, and five thruster failures to its reaction-control system. 

Related: China's secret space plane has released another unknown object over Earth

After powering the thrusters up on June 15, engineers found that most of these issues appeared to be at least partially resolved, but their exact causes remain unknown. 

However, the Harmony module's limited fuel means Starliner can only stay docked for 45 days, so the window for a safe return flight is narrowing.

The issues are the latest in a long list of setbacks and headaches for Boeing's spacecraft. The company built the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. SpaceX's Crew Dragon also came from this initiative and has racked up 12 crewed flights since it began operating in 2020.

But Starliner's first uncrewed test flight in 2019 was scuppered by a software fault that placed it in the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was held back by issues with a fuel valve. After more reviews last year, the company had to fix issues with the capsule's parachutes and remove around a mile (1.6 kilometers) of tape that was found to be flammable.

The current mission is Boeing's third attempt to take the crew to the ISS. The previous two were scrubbed by a vibrating oxygen valve on the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket on which Starliner was mounted (and which was developed by Lockheed Martin) and a computer glitch in a ground launch sequencer, respectively.

Boeing's Starliner has sprung two additional leaks en route to the International Space Station (ISS), forcing the two astronauts on board to close them manually, according to NASA.

After years of delays, Boeing's Starliner capsule successfully blasted off on its inaugural crewed flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:52 a.m. EDT yesterday (June 5). Following a 25-hour flight, the two-person crew are set to join a team of astronauts on the ISS later today (June 6).

But a handful of hours into the journey, just as NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams were preparing to go to sleep for the night, two helium leaks appeared on the spacecraft. This is in addition to a third leak that engineers discovered prior to launch.

The astronauts were given instructions on how to fix the new leaks, and were required to close valves manually to stop the helium from escaping. 

"Teams have identified three helium leaks on the spacecraft. One of these was previously discussed before flight along with a management plan," NASA wrote on X late on Wednesday . "The other two are new since the spacecraft arrived on orbit. Two of the affected helium valves have been closed and the spacecraft remains stable."

Related: China's secret space plane has released another unknown object over Earth

Fixing the faults cut into an hour of the crew's nine-hour bedtime. But following the fixes, Boeing and NASA determined the crew were safe and told them to sleep while the situation was monitored.

"Helium is used in spacecraft thruster systems to allow the thrusters to fire and is not combustible or toxic," Boeing noted during a previous helium leak.

The effect of the leaks remains unclear. Nonetheless, Starliner remains on course and is expected to dock with the ISS today. 

Boeing developed the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. SpaceX's Crew Dragon also came from this initiative and has racked up 12 crewed flights since it began operating in 2020.

But Boeing's capsule has lagged significantly behind. Starliner's first uncrewed test flight in 2019 was scuppered by a software fault that placed it in the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was held back by issues with a fuel valve. After more reviews last year, the company had to fix issues with the capsule's parachutes and remove around a mile (1.6 kilometers) of tape that was found to be flammable. 

The current launch is Boeing's third attempt to take the crew to the ISS. The previous two were scrubbed by a vibrating oxygen valve on the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket on which Starliner is mounted (and which was developed by Lockheed Martin) and a computer glitch in a ground launch sequencer, respectively.

Auroras are perhaps the most spectacular natural light shows on Earth — and they look even more majestic from above.

Also called the northern lights (aurora borealis) and southern lights (aurora australis), auroras occur when charged particles from the sun crash into our planet's atmosphere and ride its magnetic-field lines toward the poles. As they zip along, those particles knock into other molecules in the atmosphere, exciting them and causing them to emit vibrant colors that are visible to the naked eye. Still, the full scope of this natural wonder is hard to take in from the ground.

Here are 32 of the most spectacular aurora photos taken by astronauts in orbit, showcasing the incredible scale and unbelievable beauty of Earth's atmospheric lights.

1. View of the southern lights from Challenger

A green aurora slices through the Southern Hemisphere somewhere between Antarctica and Australia. This vintage shot of the southern lights was captured in April 1985 by astronaut Robert F. Overmyer aboard the space shuttle Challenger.

2. Aurora over Moscow

The northern lights swoop beneath a full moon as Moscow glows like a golden spider in the left of the frame. This photo was taken in April 2014 by an Expedition 39 crewmember aboard the International Space Station (ISS). 

3. A world-eating serpent

A vivid-green, nearly round aurora curls over the Southern Hemisphere like an enormous serpent. This exquisite photo was taken with NASA's IMAGE satellite in September 2005 from its orbit more than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) over Earth.

4. Auroras at solar maximum

A green-and-red aurora snakes across the Southern Hemisphere in this photo taken from space shuttle Discovery in May 1991. This photo was captured during solar maximum — the period of maximum solar activity in the sun's 11-year cycle — when outbursts of charged solar particles are far more common, resulting in more frequent auroras on Earth.

5. Aurora with a dragon

Earth is bathed in green, orange and red auroral light in this photo taken from the ISS in August 2016. In the foreground, a SpaceX Dragon resupply vehicle docks with the space station's Harmony module.

6. Blood-red aurora

A blood-red aurora hovers over Earth in this eerie image taken from the ISS in October 2001. Red auroras occur when charged solar particles slam into oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere, briefly exciting them; when the atoms return to their unexcited state, they emit red light as a byproduct, according to NASA.

7. Sinuous southern lights

A sinuous green aurora curls through the Southern Hemisphere in this photo taken from space shuttle Discovery in spring 1991. Much of the shuttle's operations over Earth's nightside were devoted to studying auroras, according to NASA.

8. Sparkling cities

Splotchy cities in Russia and Ukraine sparkle beneath the northern lights in this photo taken from the ISS in January 2019. Vast fields of snow and ice are clearly visible from space.

9. Aurora at sunrise

A green aurora steals the show from a blue sunrise creeping over the horizon as European cities twinkle in the predawn light. This image was captured by Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti aboard the ISS in March 2015.

10. Aurora with a vortex

A low-pressure area, or cloud vortex, spirals over the Gulf of Alaska as the northern lights dance overhead. This image was taken by a crewmember of the Endeavor while the space shuttle was docked with the ISS in March 2008.

11. Aurora with Orion

A multicolored aurora spikes toward the constellation Orion while the Southern Hemisphere sleeps below. This photo was taken from the space shuttle Endeavor in April 1994.

12. Southern lights at sunset

The southern lights swoop across the atmosphere in a bow shape while the waning light of the setting sun crawls over the horizon to the west. This image was taken from the ISS in February 2003.

13. Sea of green

The Indian Ocean becomes a sea of green as the southern lights douse the atmosphere overhead. This image was taken by Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide aboard the ISS in August 2021.

14. Waves of white

Peaks of light stab 200 miles (320 km) over the Southern Hemisphere in this dazzling image of the southern lights. Astronauts took the photo from the space shuttle Columbia in March 1994, according to NASA.

15. Corkscrew in the sky

The aurora australis corkscrew over the Southern Hemisphere at night, stunning astronauts. This photo was taken by the crew of NASA's Atlantis orbiter during a nine-day mission in 1992.

16. Space station over a green planet

Two modules of the ISS gaze down at a stormy sea of green auroras below. This image was taken by European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet in August 2021, during his tenure aboard the ISS.

17. Rainbow in the atmosphere

Gorgeous bands of red, green and orange auroras slice across the Southern Hemisphere in this epic photo snapped by astronaut Tim Peake. Peake took this photo from aboard the ISS in early 2016.

18. Northern lights before Christmas

Golden European cities shimmer at Christmastime in this December 2018 photo of the northern lights. ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst caught this gorgeous image from aboard the ISS.

19. "6 nose prints on the window"

The dark ocean broods beneath the green southern lights in this image snapped from the ISS in June 2018. "Saw my first Aurora Australis on this mission today, my silent magical old friend," ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst, who took the photo, wrote on social media. "6 nose prints on the window, despite being busy with science."

20. Aurora over Canada

A colorful display of northern lights dance over Canada in this January 2016 photo taken by ESA astronaut Tim Peake during his stay aboard the ISS. The dark foreground shows Banff and Jasper national parks, while the bright city lights of Edmonton and Calgary glow in the distance.

21. Waterfall of light

Blue and green auroras crash over the horizon like a waterfall of light in this evocative image of Europe captured by ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet in 2017. The waning glow of the setting sun can be seen far in the background.

22. "I can't look away"

A city smolders in the foreground while colorful auroras peek over the horizon. "The view at night recently has been simply magnificent," ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who snapped the photo, wrote in 2017. "Few clouds, intense auroras. I can't look away from the windows." 

23. "Thick, green fog"

ESA astronaut Tim Peake also took this haunting photo as the ISS passed directly through a curtain of green auroras in 2016. "The ISS just passed straight through a thick green fog of aurora," Peake wrote when he posted the photo. "Eerie but very beautiful."

24. Space station bathed in moonlight

ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti caught this upside-down image of the northern lights while working aboard the ISS in 2015. "An aurora in the distance and the Space Station bathed in moonlight," Cristoforetti wrote on social media at the time.

25. Lighting up the clouds

Looking straight down from the ISS in 2015, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst took this photo of a green aurora washing over the clouds of Earth. "An aurora lighting up the clouds beneath us," Gerst wrote on social media.

26. Blue planet

Green and red auroras swoop over the clouds and ocean in this beautiful image that shows off Earth's reputation as the blue planet. ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst snapped this image from the ISS in 2014.

27. Hello from Canadarm2

The ISS' Canadarm2 robotic arm curls up, seemingly waving at the dazzling auroras below. The last remnants of disappearing sunlight can be seen far to the left in this 2014 photo.

28. Antarctic magic

The Antarctic aurora waves farewell as the sun begins to rise. "Antarctic Aurora fleeing from sunrise," ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst wrote about this 2014 photo. "I have rarely seen something more magical in my life!"

29. Green aurora, green isles

Ireland and the U.K. glow under green and purple auroras in this brilliant 2012 image. ESA astronaut André Kuipers snapped this image during his mission aboard the ISS in 2012.

30. Aurora with the Milky Way

The stars of the Milky Way shimmer above a green aurora in this 2012 photo. Astronaut Andre Kuipers also took this photo during his mission aboard the ISS, part of which can be seen at the top of the image.

31. Upside-down reach

The green hand of the aurora borealis reaches over Earth in this surreal, upside-down photo taken from the ISS. Astronaut André Kuipers took this photo during his mission in 2012.

32. Aurora and crater

Green auroras snake over northern Canada in this epic 2006 photo taken from the ISS. In the foreground, the Manicouagan impact crater stands as a testament to Earth's ancient relationship with space. 

NASA has postponed the first crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule due to an issue with a noisy valve on the rocket meant to carry it into space.

Boeing's Starliner crew capsule was due to blast off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:34 p.m. ET on Monday (May 6) with NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams on board. The two-person crew will be joining a team of astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). 

But two hours before the scheduled liftoff, a valve on the ship's Atlas V rocket began buzzing at an audible 40 hertz, forcing the flight team to halt the mission. 

"Today's Starliner launch is scrubbed as teams evaluate an oxygen relief valve on the Centaur Stage on the Atlas V," NASA representatives wrote in a post on the social platform X, formerly Twitter. "Our astronauts have exited Starliner and will return to crew quarters."

Related: Mysterious object that crashed through Florida home was likely space junk from the International Space Station

Boeing developed the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. SpaceX's Crew Dragon also came from this initiative and has racked up 10 successful missions since it began operating in 2020.

But Boeing's capsule has lagged significantly behind. Starliner's first uncrewed test flight in 2019 was scuppered by a software fault that placed it in the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was held back by issues with a fuel valve. After more reviews last year, the company had to fix issues with the capsule's parachutes and remove around a mile (1.6 kilometers) of tape that was found to be flammable.

However, this latest setback was related to the Saturn V rocket, which TKTK and was due to take Boeing's Starliner into orbit.

"Right now we are going through all the data," Tory Bruno, CEO of the United Launch Alliance which owns the Atlas V rocket, said at a post-scrub press conference. "[There's] a fair chance we'll know tomorrow whether the valve exceeded its life or not or whether it has enough life against the qual limit that we established to do another attempt."

The earliest window for a second launch attempt opens on Friday (May 10), although NASA has yet to announce a new launch date.

The mysterious object that crashed through the roof of a Florida home last month did indeed come from the International Space Station (ISS), NASA has confirmed.

That home, in the seaside city of Naples, belongs to Alejandro Otero. Shortly after the March 8 incident, Otero said he thought the offending object was part of a cargo pallet packed with 5,800 pounds (2,630 kilograms) of aging batteries jettisoned from the ISS in March 2021.

And he was right, according to a new NASA analysis of the object, which was performed at Florida's Kennedy Space Center.

"Based on the examination, the agency determined the debris to be a stanchion from the NASA flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet," agency officials wrote in an update today (April 15).

Related: Sci-fi inspired tractor beams are real, and could solve a major space junk problem

The cylindrical piece of space junk is made of a metallic alloy called Inconel, they added. It weighs 1.6 pounds (0.7 kg) and measures 4 inches (10 centimeters) high by 1.6 inches (4 cm) wide.

The nickel-hydride batteries were dumped after new lithium-ion versions were delivered to the ISS for a power-supply upgrade. The pallet and the batteries were expected to burn up completely in Earth's atmosphere, NASA officials said in today's update — yet that didn't happen, and the agency wants to learn why.

"The International Space Station will perform a detailed investigation of the jettison and reentry analysis to determine the cause of the debris survival and to update modeling and analysis, as needed," NASA officials wrote in today's update.

"NASA specialists use engineering models to estimate how objects heat up and break apart during atmospheric reentry," they added. "These models require detailed input parameters and are regularly updated when debris is found to have survived atmospheric reentry to the ground."

Otero's experience serves as a reminder that there's a tremendous amount of hardware whizzing over our heads.

According to the European Space Agency, Earth orbit hosts about 36,500 pieces of space junk at least 4 inches (10 cm) wide, and a whopping 130 million objects at least 1 millimeter in diameter. Even these tiny shards pose a danger to satellites and other orbiting assets, given the tremendous speeds at which they travel. For example, at 250 miles (400 kilometers) up — the average altitude of the ISS — orbital velocity is about 17,000 mph (27,400 kph).

And, as has been demonstrated, some of this junk comes crashing back to Earth from time to time. For instance, the 23-ton core stages of China's powerful Long March 5B rocket routinely fall in an uncontrolled fashion a week or so after their launches, to the consternation of the international space community.

NASA's new analysis may have financial consequences for the agency and for Otero, by the way.

"I eagerly await communication from the responsible agencies, as their assistance is crucial in resolving the damages from this deliberate release. But more importantly how in the future to arrange the payload so it will burn in its entirety as it reenters," Otero wrote via X on March 8, shortly after his home was hit.

Originally posted on Space.com.

A mysterious object that came crashing through a house in Florida is possibly debris from the International Space Station (ISS).

The cylindrical tube was a few inches long and weighed nearly 2 pounds (0.9 kilograms). It crashed through the roof and both floors of Alejandro Otero's home in Naples, Florida, at 2:34 pm local on March 8, startling his son.

The origins of the object have yet to be determined, but Otero thinks it's likely one of nine drained batteries discarded from the ISS. Earlier the same day, a large cargo pallet carrying the  batteries and belonging to the Japanese space agency JAXA re-entered Earth's atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico. Jettisoned from the space station in 2021, the debris was expected to burn up in the atmosphere, one may have survived reentry. 

"Looks like one of those pieces missed Ft Myers and landed in my house in Naples," Otero wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, in response to a post describing the jettisoned pallet. "Tore through the roof and went thru 2 floors. Almost his [hit] my son."

Related: Sci-fi inspired tractor beams are real, and could solve a major space junk problem

Otero has handed over the home-wrecking debris to officials from NASA.

"NASA collected an item in cooperation with the homeowner, and will analyze the object at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida as soon as possible to determine its origin," Joshua Finch, a NASA spokesperson, told Live Science.

Once engineers identify the provenance of the object, Otero will seek to make a claim against the federal government to pay for his house's repair, although this process could prove complex if the material is deemed to have come from JAXA.

Florida isn't the only place that's been hit by falling space junk. Four of China's Long March 5B boosters — the workhorses of the country's growing space program — fell to Earth between 2020 and 2022, raining debris down on the Ivory Coast, Borneo and the Indian Ocean. In 2021 and 2022, debris from falling SpaceX rockets smashed into a farm in Washington state and landed on a sheep farm in Australia.

Space agencies around the world try to keep tabs on the more than 30,000 largest pieces of junk, but many more pieces of debris are too small to monitor.

Scientists have proposed multiple ways of tidying Earth's skies, such as gathering junk up in nets; collecting it with clawed robots; or firing a half–mile-long (0.8 kilometer) tether from another spacecraft to grab it.

Astronomers have spotted the first known instance of a black hole "hiccup," from a distant cosmic behemoth. The cosmic belches suggest the swirling disks of matter and gas that surround black holes may be home to bigger cosmic objects than previously thought.

The monster black hole, which weighs the equivalent of about 50 million suns and lives in the heart of a galaxy 800 million light-years from Earth, is ejecting hunks of gas into space once every 8.5 days before going quiet again. These "hiccups" come from the black hole's accretion disk, a ring of superheated gas that swirls around the object.

A new study, published March 27 in the journal Science Advances suggests this material is being belched out thanks to a second, smaller black hole that's swooshing in and out in a tilted orbit, kicking up gas like a fast-flying bee buzzing through a cloud of pollen.

These hiccups "were a total surprise," study lead author Dheeraj Pasham, a research scientist with the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in Massachusetts, told Live Science. "We kept scratching our heads for months until the theorists in the Czech Republic came in and provided an explanation of a secondary black hole, which appears to explain all the properties of this system."

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The results suggest the accretion disks around black holes may be home to a surprising array of cosmic objects, including other black holes and stars.

"We thought we knew a lot about black holes, but this is telling us there are a lot more things they can do," Pasham said in a statement. "If our model of a companion repeatedly punching through the accretion disk is right," he told Live Science, "then these hiccups can unveil a whole population of such extreme binaries."

The researchers suspect the immense gravity of the supermassive black hole will someday swallow its companion black hole in a merger, perhaps more than 10,000 years in the future "Because the smaller black hole weighs substantially less than the main black hole, the merger timescale is long," Pasham told Live Science.

A tale of two black holes and an ill-fated star

Astronomers first noticed the monster black hole in December 2020, when telescopes from the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae, or ASAS-SN, spotted a prolonged burst of light from its accretion disk. The survey noticed a flash, now named ASASSN-20qc, after it made a small pocket of the sky 1,000 times brighter. The flash persisted for four months and was likely caused by the supermassive black hole shredding a nearby star to pieces.

Follow-up observations with an X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station (ISS) allowed scientists to catalog subtle, periodic dips in X-ray data from the feasting object, similar to how a planet crossing the face of its host star briefly blocks its light. These were the black hole hiccups.

After discussing the process with colleagues, the researchers determined the black hole hiccuped every time the orbiting secondary black hole punched through the accretion disk, pushing out more material than usual.

While the secondary black hole is the smaller of the two in the system, it is by no means tiny. Scientists estimate it weighs the equivalent of 100 to 10,000 suns, a mass that classifies it as an intermediate black hole. The large difference between the masses of two black holes, differing by a factor of 5,000, makes the newfound duo one of the most extreme mass ratio binaries identified so far.

"This is a different beast," Pasham said in the statement. "It doesn't fit anything that we know about these systems."

In the coming months, the researchers will continue monitoring this system while also studying several other systems that also appear to have the hiccups, Pasham told Live Science. If these black hole binaries also represent extreme mass differences like the newfound duo, then a European Space Agency telescope that just came online, called the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), should be able to detect them. "We anticipate being busy in the next couple of years to model this new population."