Space

The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and former NASA staffers. If the plans are carried out, one of the missions would be permanently terminated, because the satellite would burn up in the atmosphere.

The data the two missions collect is widely used, including by scientists, oil and gas companies and farmers who need detailed information about carbon dioxide and crop health. They are the only two federal satellite missions that were designed and built specifically to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases.

It is unclear why the Trump administration seeks to end the missions. The equipment in space is state-of-the-art and is expected to function for many more years, according to scientists who worked on the missions. An official review by NASA in 2023 found that "the data are of exceptionally high quality," and recommended continuing the mission for at least three years.

Both missions, known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, measure carbon dioxide and plant growth around the globe. They use identical measurement devices, but one device is attached to a stand-alone satellite while the other is attached to the International Space Station. The standalone satellite would burn up in the atmosphere, if NASA pursued plans to terminate the mission.

NASA employees who work on the two missions are making what the agency calls Phase F plans for both carbon-monitoring missions, according to David Crisp, a longtime NASA engineer who designed the instruments and managed the missions until he retired in 2022. Phase F plans lay out options for terminating NASA missions.

Crisp says NASA employees making those termination plans have reached out to him for his technical expertise. "What I have heard is direct communications from people who were making those plans, who weren't allowed to tell me that that's what they were told to do. But they were allowed to ask me questions," Crisp says. "They were asking me very sharp questions. The only thing that would have motivated those questions was [that] somebody told them to come up with a termination plan."

Three other academic scientists who use data from the missions confirmed that they, too, have been contacted with questions related to mission termination. All three asked for anonymity because they are concerned that speaking about the mission termination plans publicly could endanger the jobs of the NASA employees who contacted them.

Two current NASA employees also confirmed that NASA mission leaders were told to make termination plans for projects that would lose funding under President Trump's proposed budget for the next fiscal year, or FY 2026, which begins October 1. The employees asked to remain anonymous, because they were told they would be fired if they revealed the request.

...Exotic matter is a hypothetical form of matter theorized to contain unusual properties often characterized by a negative energy density, meaning it would have a negative mass or exert a repulsive gravitational force. Wormholes would require a shell of exotic matter, but just like wormholes, exotic matter has never been observed and is considered hypothetical.

“If you could somehow create that state of matter, then, according to general relativity, you could have a wormhole. But if you ask me whether that kind of matter is possible, I doubt it,”...

As of now, scientists don’t know enough about the characteristics of wormholes to confidently identify them, such as the types of situations that would create a wormhole, the properties of a wormhole, and how to detect said properties...

One key feature is that a wormhole would look like a sphere, not a hole, says Lupsasca, adding that to travel through a wormhole would be like “getting sucked into a ball and then expelled from another ball.”...

Imagine living in a two-dimensional world, like a sheet of paper. When that sheet of paper is folded over . . . these separate locations in “space-time” are joined together in much the same way a wormhole might do. Similarly, if a person were to go through a wormhole, it would change their location in both space and time.

The next four-person team to live and work aboard the International Space Station departed from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, taking aim at the massive orbiting research complex for a planned stay of six to eight months.

Spacecraft commander Zena Cardman leads the mission, designated Crew-11, that lifted off from Florida's Space Coast at 11:43 am EDT (15:43 UTC) on Friday. Sitting to her right inside SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavourcapsule was veteran NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, serving as the vehicle pilot. Flanking the commander and pilot were two mission specialists: Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonov of Russia.

Cardman and her crewmates rode a Falcon 9 rocket off the launch pad and headed northeast over the Atlantic Ocean, lining up with the space station's orbit to set the stage for an automated docking at the complex early Saturday.

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Link to the actual research paper

Although NASA and its counterpart in Russia, Roscosmos, continue to work together on a daily basis, the leaders of the two organizations have not held face-to-face meetings since the middle of the first Trump administration, back in October 2018.

A lot has changed in the nearly eight years since then, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rocky departure of Roscosmos leader Dmitry Rogozin in 2022 who was subsequently dispatched to the front lines of the war, several changes in NASA leadership, and more.

This drought in high-level meetings was finally broken this week when the relatively new leader of Roscosmos, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Bakanov, visited the United States to view the launch of the Crew-11 mission from Florida, which included cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. Bakanov has also met with some of NASA's human spaceflight leaders at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

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paywall bypass: https://archive.is/N7m24

https://archive.ph/VEsEQ

Named L 98-59f, this planet is a non-transiting super-Earth with a minimal mass of 2.8 Earth masses on a 23-day orbit inside the habitable zone of the small red dwarf L 98-59.

L 98-59, also known as TOI-175, TIC 307210830, is an M dwarf about one-third the mass of the Sun.

The system lies approximately 34.5 light-years away in the southern constellation of Volans.

Betelgeuse, one of the most famous stars in the night sky, has a close companion, and that may explain why it dimmed dramatically in 2019-20.

About 640 light-years from the solar system, red supergiant star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion is famous not only for its unmistakable color, but also because it’s one of the closest stars that could soon explode as a supernova.

Approximately 700 times larger than the sun, Betelgeuse has puzzled astronomers for years because it waxes and wanes in brightness every six years, with its recent “Great Dimming” event ultimately attributed to a dust cloud ejected by the star.

Scientists suspected it may have been caused by a companion star, but failed to detect it using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope or the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Now it’s been found, after a team of astrophysicists led by Steve Howell, a senior research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, has pointed the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii at Betelgeuse. The team’s findings were published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

notes : There seem to be two journals published, one of which is still accessible. url link to journal has been fixed

Paper - summarizes the key findings

• Rubin images clearly show the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS with a dust coma, indicative of activity. These observations provide the earliest high resolution evidence of detected cometary activity.

• Rubin multi-filter photometry is consistent with previous bservations in the literature, with significantly smaller error bars. There are not sufficient same-night multi-filter observations to examine surface/coma color or color evolution, but sufficient to exclude photometric variability on short timescales.

• The coma’s radius appeared to increase slightly over the 11 days from ∼ 6,520 km (UT 2025 June 21) to ∼9,380 km (UT 2025 July 02) as measured from azimuthally averaged radial profiles. We estimate an increase in coma level of ∆η ∼0.5 between 2025 June 21 June and 2025 July 2, which we assume to be a lower limit for several reasons, including that 3I/ATLAS was observed nearly head-on (very low phase angle) and the tail could have extended far along the z-axis, as projected on the sky.

• We obtain a V-band absolute magnitude of HV = (13.7 ± 0.2) mag and equivalent effective radius of ∼ (5.6 ± 0.7) km for the nucleus, assuming a spherically symmetric steady-state coma. Due to this simplifying assumption, we consider the latter result to be an upper limit to the true nucleus size. We estimate a mass loss rate ranging from 10 to 100 kg/s, depending on the grain sizes assumed to dominate, and we compute Afρ = (315 ± 15) cm for data obtained on UT 2025 July 2.

• We detect no short-term photometric variability. A sequence of measurements taken on UT 2025 July 2 constrains the apparent brightness variations of 3I/ATLAS to less than 0.1 mag on timescales of less than an hour.

• If the Rubin SSP pipelines had been processing the commissioning data in real time, our modeling shows that there were sufficient SV observations to identify 3I/ATLAS as a moving object.

• If the nominal SV survey strategy continues as planned, 3I/ATLAS should be observed in ten or more observations in each filter through mid August 2025. Future SV observations will likely be able to monitor the coma color as 3I/ATLAS moves towards perihelion.

• Analysis of the derived astrometry suggest that for bright high-SNR and extended active small bodies, the combination of Rubin’s large aperture and LSSTCam’s pixel scale are less impacted by asymmetrical coma provided precise positions for deriving accurate orbital parameters.