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The surprising discovery of entities smaller than viruses raises profound questions about what life is and how it got started

Humanity will eventually need somewhere to live on the Moon. While aesthetics might not be the primary consideration when deciding what kind of habitat to build, it sure doesn’t hurt. The more pleasing the look of the habitat, the better, but ultimately, the functionality will determine whether or not it will be built. Dr. Martin Bermudez thinks he found a sweet synergy that was both functional and aesthetically pleasing with his design for a spherical lunar habitat made out of blown glass. NASA apparently agrees there’s potential there, as he recently received a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant to flesh out the concept further.

Bermudez’s vision’s artistic design looks like something out of an Arthur C. Clarke novel: a glass sphere rising off the lunar surface that could potentially contain living and work areas for dozens of people. His firm, Skyeports, is founded on creating these blown glass structures in space.

The design has some challenges, as Dr. Bermudez discusses in an interview with Fraser. First is how to build this thing. It’s far too large to ship in any conventional lunar lander. However, there’s also no air on the Moon to use as the blown gas to create the spherical shape. Dr. Bermudez plans to utilize argon, which would initially be shipped up from Earth to fill the sphere. Argon has several advantages in that it’s a noble gas and not very reactive, so it’s unlikely to explode in the furnace while the glass is blown.

Video animation showing the blown glass concept.
Credit – Skyeports YouTube Channel

Surprisingly, the lack of outside air pressure actually makes it easier to form a sphere than it would be on Earth since less pressure would be necessary to expand the sphere outwards. There are some nuances in the glass as well, with it being more like a glass lattice with embedded titanium or aluminum to make it stronger. Specific kinds of glass, such as borosilicate glass, could potentially add to the strength of the glass itself.

Most of the materials required to create such a structure could already be found on the lunar surface. Lunar regolith is full of the raw building materials required to make the structure work. Some of it has already been blasted into glass-like structures called agglutinates when micrometeoroids hit the lunar surface.

Those micrometeoroid impacts pose another risk to the glass sphere. Dr. Bermudez suggests having multiple layers of glass protecting the habitat, each with a layer of argon between them, like modern-day double-glazed windows. He suggests that spinning the outer layer might also provide some advantage, as will the spherical shape itself, as the impact force will dissipate better into the structure than it would on a flat surface.

3D printing is one of the fabrication technologies the blown glass sphere will have to compete with, as Fraser discusses.

Dr. Bermudez’s dreams don’t stop at the Moon, though. He suggests such a glass-blown structure could be useful on Mars or asteroids, where the microgravity would make it even easier to create these structures. On Mars, such a habitat might be limited to the top of Olympus Mons, where the atmosphere is thinner, and there isn’t as much wind and dust that could erode away the outer layers.

Many use cases exist for a structure like this, though many technical challenges remain. NIAC is the place for novel ideas that could potentially impact space exploration, and this one certainly fits that bill. As Dr. Bermudez works through de-risking his design, we get closer than ever to a future of aesthetically pleasing habitats on the Moon and everywhere else in the solar system.

Learn More:
NASA / Martin Bermudez – Lunar Glass Structure (LUNGS): Enabling Construction of Monolithic Habitats in Low-Gravity
UT – Glass Fibers in Lunar Regolith Could Help Build Structures on the Moon
UT – Recreating the Extreme Forces of an Asteroid Impact in the Lab
UT – Conceptual Design for a Lunar Habitat

Lead Image:
Artist’s concept of a lunar sphere on the lunar surface.
Credit – NASA / Martin Bermudez

The post A Blown-Glass Structure Could House Astronauts on the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “crimes,” came with a link: “Disestablish the Church of England“. And this time it’s Jesus rather than Mo who shows the characteristic hypocrisy or doublethink of the Divine Duo.  Also, note the decline in respect for religion!

In lieu of readers’ wildlife today, I’ll show some drawings and photos in honor of Darwin’s Birthday.  (Note to those malcontents who think that evolution is a religion that worships Darwin as a God: no, we do not think Darwin is infallible. He made a lot of errors, and his neglect of genetics and of how species really arise are big lacunae. Nevertheless, he’ll gone down in history as perhaps the most influential biologist ever.)

This comes from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior.

Here is my own Jewish Darwin Fish, just photographed:

More from Athayde. A mockery of the Christian Fish (there are many):

A big Darwin Award for this:

Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on this day in 1809 and attended Shrewsbury School as a boarder beginning at age 8. He went to the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1825, but couldn’t stand the sight of blood and preferred collecting beetles. He dropped out and attended Cambridge University until 1831, when he started on the epic five-year voyage of the Beagle.  Here is his statue is in front of Shrewsbury School:

Bs0u10e01, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Darwin was pretty well off, and became more so when he married Emma Wedgwood, heiress of the Wedgwood pottery company. He married Emma in 1839 and in 1842 they moved to Down House in Kent (visit it; it’s not far from London!).  The couple had ten children, seven of whom survived. Darwin lived at Down House the rest of his life (he died in 1882), and it was there that he wrote On the Origin of Species and all his subsequent books. Here’s his study in Down House, which is pretty much as it was when he worked there.  I understand that he wrote in the chair, using a board placed over the arms. There’s also a basin behind a screen where Darwin would go to vomit, for he was often ill with a disease that we still don’t understand.

It’s me at Down House: August 19, 2008. You can see that Darwin had a nice mansion:

My friend Andrew Berry, who went to Shrewsbury School, and Janet Browne, who wrote the definitive biography of Darwin (two volumes). It is magnificent and written beautifully: a must-read. Janet showed us around Down House, which was a rare opportunity! I understand she’s revising it into one volume, perhaps because people lack attention spans these days, but I’d read the two-volume bio.

A cat I photographed at Down House. Darwin didn’t have much truck with cats and preferred d*gs. However, there are cats there now:

Here’s a tweet that points to many caricatures of Darwin and Darwinism, carefully collected and curated by John van Wyhe on his fantastic Darwin Online website. There are caricatures of Darwin, caricatures of evolution, and drawings from the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial”. I’ll give a few of each, with permission from van Wyhe.

For #DarwinDay, John van Wyhe shares this new collection of Darwin/evolution caricatures on the Darwin Online website: darwin-online.org.uk/Caricatures….Image: "This way to daylight my sons," Darwin says to Huxley and Tyndall (holding the banner of Science) in an 1873 caricature#histsci #HPS

— Michael D. Barton (@darwinsbulldog.bsky.social) 2025-02-12T03:25:05.199Z

Caricatures of Darwin. All captions are from the website:

c.1828 Two humorous ink sketches of Darwin riding giant beetles by fellow Cambridge undergraduate Albert Way, with captions “Darwin & his hobby.” and “Go it Charlie!”. The joke in this instance being Darwin’s obsession with collecting beetles as an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge. See Diana Donald’s entry on this here. See some of Darwin’s beetle captures here. (Yale University Library & Falvey Library, Villanova University) 1871 “MR. BERGH TO THE RESCUE.” At the door of the “SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. PRES. BERGH”. Harper’s Weekly (19 August): 776.

A postmortem portrait:

1882 “THE LATE CHARLES DARWIN.” The Wasp (San Francisco) 8, no. 300 (28 April): front cover.

Caricatures of Darwinism:

1872 “London: a Pilgrimage” by Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré. The gaping human visitors seen from inside the Monkey House, in the Zoological Gardens, London, appear rather monkey-like themselves. This was only a year after Darwin’s Descent of man was published.

1909 “How true! How True! | DARWIN [on cover of a magazine] | IN THE GOLDEN CHAIN OF FRIENDSHIP | REGARD ME AS A ‘MISSING’LINK!” By H. H. Tammen. “994”. USA postcard, stamped 1912.And two from the Scopes Trial:

1925 “Tennessee’s St. Patrick”. Los Angeles Times (27 March). Bryan wields a club “Evolution must not be taught in the schools of Tennessee” against scurrying apes and monkeys.

And from Chicago (a Darwinian town) showing how banning the teaching of evolution just creates interest in it:

1925 “HOW THEY ARE TEACHING EVOLUTION IN TENNESSEE”. Chicago Tribune (27 May).

It’s always good (and frustratingly rare) to see the mainstream media get it right when it comes to pseudoscience in medicine. Too often the narrative is – scientists are baffled at this alternative “one easy trick” to improve your health. Most mainstream articles on pseudoscience in medicine frame their reporting around a positive anecdote, and at best throw in some token skepticism […]

The post BBC Takes On Appeal to Nature Fallacy first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A waste-water surveillance network of strategic international airports could quickly detect outbreaks of new diseases – and provide early warnings of future pandemics

A groundbreaking study has uncovered how specific genetic mutations influence cancer treatment outcomes -- insights that could help doctors tailor treatments more effectively. The largest study of its kind, the research analyzed data for more than 78,000 cancer patients across 20 cancer types. Patients received immunotherapies, chemotherapies and targeted therapies.

How can a geologic map of a lunar impact crater created billions of years ago help future human and robotic missions to the lunar surface? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers produced arguably the most in-depth, comprehensive, and highest resolution geologic maps of Orientale basin, which is one of the largest and oldest geologic structures on the Moon. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and mission planners develop sample return missions that could place absolute ages on the Moon’s geology, resulting in better understanding the formation and evolution of our Moon and the Earth.

For the study, the researchers created a 1:200,000-scale geologic map of the Moon’s Orientale basin while focusing on identifying what are known as impact melt deposits, which are molten rocks created from a high-speed impact and intense heat that cooled and is now frozen in time, thus preserving its geologic record of when it was formed billions of years ago. The 1:200,000-scale means the map is 200,000 times smaller than in real life. Additionally, one pixel on the geologic map is equal to 100 meters, or approximately the size of an American gridiron football field, which improves upon previous Orientale basin geologic maps that were created at 1:5,000,000-scale.

“We chose to map Oriental basin because it’s simultaneously old and young,” said Dr. Kirby Runyon, who is a Research Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and lead author of the study. “We think it’s about 3.8 billion years old, which is young enough to still have its impact melt freshly exposed at the surface, yet old enough to have accumulated large impact craters on top of it as well, complicating the picture. We chose to map Orientale to test melt-identification strategies for older, more degraded impact basins whose ages we’d like to know.”

The goal of the study is to not only create an improved geologic map of Orientale basin, but to provide a foundation for future missions to potentially obtain surface samples of the impact melt and return them to Earth for analysis. Such analyses would reveal absolute ages of the impact melt through radiometric dating since these samples have been frozen in time for potentially billions of years. These results could help scientists unravel the Earth’s impact history, as both the Earth and Moon were potentially formed around the same period.

Along with the targeted impact melt, the team successfully identified and mapped a myriad of geologic features within Orientale basin as part of the new geologic map, including smaller craters within Orientale, fractures, fault lines, calderas, crater ejecta, and mare (volcanic basalt deposits), while also constructing a top-to-bottom map of Orientale basin, also called a stratigraphic map, that shows the most recent layers on top with the oldest layers on the bottom.

Image of the most recent Orientale basin geologic map at 1:200,000-scale, which improves upon past geologic maps of the region that were 1:5,000,000-scale. The project focused on impact melt (depicted in red), which was created from the extreme heat of the high-speed impact and has been preserved for potentially billions of years. The stars represent potential landing sites for future sample return missions that scientists can analyze back on Earth to determine the absolute age of Oriental basin. (Credit: Runyon et al.)

Unlike Earth, whose surface processes like plate tectonics and multitude of weather processes have erased impacts from billions of years ago, the preserved lunar geologic record could provide incredible insight into not only Earth’s impact history, but both how and when life first emerged on our planet. This is due to Orientale basin’s crater size and age, as such a large impact on Earth billions of years ago could have postponed or reset how and when life first emerged on the Earth.

“Giant impacts – like the one that formed Orientale – can vaporize an ocean and kill any life that had already started,” said Dr. Runyon. “Some recent modeling has shown that we probably never totally sterilized Earth during these big impacts, but we don’t know for sure. At some point our oceans could have been vaporized from impacts, then recondensed and rained out repeatedly. If that happened a number of times, it’s only after the last time that life could have gotten a foothold.”

While Orientale basin is one of the most striking features on the lunar surface, more than approximately 75 percent of it is not visible from Earth due to its location at the lunar nearside and farside boundary on the western limb of the Moon as observed from the Earth. Therefore, studying the Orientale basin is only possible with spacecraft. Despite this, Orientale basin was first suggested to be an impact crater during the 1960s when scientists at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory used groundbreaking techniques to “image” the sides of the Moon not visible to Earth using telescopic images taken from the Earth.

While NASA is focused on returning astronauts to the lunar surface with its Artemis program with the goal of establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon, returning scientific samples from Orientale basin could provide enormous scientific benefits for helping us better understand both the age of the Moon but also how and when life emerged on Earth billions of years ago.

How will the Orientale basin geologic map help us better understand the Moon’s and Earth’s history in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

The post A Lunar Map for the Best Places to Get Samples appeared first on Universe Today.

Biomedical engineers have demonstrated a new synthetic approach that turbocharges bacteria into producing more of a specific protein, even proteins that would normally destroy them, such as antibiotics. The technique could be a boon to industries that use bacteria to produce a wide range of products such as pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals and biofuels.

Scientists have developed new light-sensitive chemicals that can radically improve the treatment of aggressive cancers with minimal side effects. In mouse tests, the new therapy completely eradicated metastatic breast cancer tumors.

Scientists have developed new light-sensitive chemicals that can radically improve the treatment of aggressive cancers with minimal side effects. In mouse tests, the new therapy completely eradicated metastatic breast cancer tumors.

Combustion engines, the engines in gas-powered cars, only use a quarter of the fuel's potential energy while the rest is lost as heat through exhaust. Now, a study demonstrates how to convert exhaust heat into electricity. The researchers present a prototype thermoelectric generator system that could reduce fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions -- an opportunity for improving sustainable energy initiatives in a rapidly changing world.

Surveys before, early on in and towards the end of the covid-19 pandemic suggest that although older people's well-being dipped in 2020, it increased once virus-related restrictions in England were lifted

We have the transit method to thank for the large majority of the exoplanets we’ve discovered. When an exoplanet transits its star, the dip in starlight tells astronomers that a planet is present. Analyzing the light can tell them about the planet’s size and atmospheric properties. However, a star’s surface isn’t always uniformly heated. There can be hotter, brighter spots and colder, dimmer spots that change over time.

New research says these temperamental stars are distorting our understanding of exoplanets.

The number of confirmed exoplanets is approaching 6,000. Astronomers want to understand these planets better in all their bewildering variety. The only way to do that is to examine light and how it changes in exquisite detail. When an exoplanet transits in front of its host star, astronomers can ‘read’ the starlight as it passes through the planet’s atmosphere.

However, new research shows that the stars that host all these planets can pollute the light signal from their orbiting planets, giving us a distorted view of their sizes, temperatures, and atmospheres.

The research is “A Population Analysis of 20 Exoplanets Observed from Optical to Near-infrared Wavelengths with the Hubble Space Telescope: Evidence for Widespread Stellar Contamination,” and it’s published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The lead author is Arianna Saba from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London.

A star’s surface is defined in large part by its temperature, which is influenced by the star’s powerful magnetic fields. Magnetic fields can inhibit the heat flow from a star’s interior to its surface, creating a cooler, dimmer region. Conversely, it can channel more heat into other areas, creating brighter regions.

This extraordinarily detailed image of the Sun’s surface comes from the Solar Orbiter during a recent close encounter. Swirling magnetic fields help create cooler and hotter regions on the surface. Image Credit: ESA – European Space Agency

“Some stars might be described as ‘patchy’ – they have a greater proportion of colder regions, which are darker, and hotter regions, which are brighter, on their surface. This is due to stronger magnetic activity,” said study co-author Alexandra Thompson.

“Hotter, brighter regions (faculae) emit more light, and so, for instance, if a planet passes in front of the hottest part of the star, this might lead researchers to over-estimate how large the planet is, as it will seem to block out more of the star’s light, or they might infer the planet is hotter than it is or has a denser atmosphere,” Thompson explained. “The reverse is true if the planet passes in front of a cold starspot, making the planet appear ‘smaller.’

These temperamental stars can also produce false positives.

“On the other hand, the reduction in emitted light from a starspot could even mimic the effect of a planet passing in front of a star, leading you to think there might be a planet when there is none. This is why follow up observations are so important to confirm exoplanet detections,” said Thompson.

This image shows our Sun during a period of high activity, with multiple hot spots and cool spots. Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

The question is, how much of our understanding of these exoplanets is polluted by these patchy stars? Is stellar contamination creating a bias in our understanding of the exoplanet population?

To find out, Saba and her co-researchers examined the archival data from 20 exoplanet atmospheres previously observed with the Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instruments. These workhorse instruments “see” in UV, infrared, and visible light. They wanted to know if observations taken with the same instruments at different times produced different results and if any differences were confined to observations in specific wavelengths.

“To obtain spectral information from the near-ultraviolet to the near-infrared, we reanalyzed 16 WFC3 and over 50 STIS archival data sets with our dedicated HST pipeline,” the authors write in their paper. “Across our target sample, we observe significant divergence among multiple observations conducted with the same STIS grating at various epochs, while we do not detect variations in the WFC3 data sets.”

This suggested that stellar contamination is an issue, but the researchers dug deeper to understand how. Using Bayesian tools and other analytic models, they found that stellar activity had contaminated about half of the exoplanet atmospheres in their sample to varying degrees. Six of the exoplanets had pronounced contamination, and six others had lesser degrees of contamination.

“These results were a surprise – we found more stellar contamination of our data than we were expecting,” said lead author Saba. “This is important for us to know. By refining our understanding of how stars’ variability might affect our interpretations of exoplanets, we can improve our models and make smarter use of the much bigger datasets to come from missions including James Webb, Ariel and Twinkle.” Twinkle is a low-cost mission that will study exoplanet atmospheres from Low-Earth Orbit.

This figure from the paper illustrates some of the divergent results from observing exoplanets in different epochs. There was significantly more divergence among STIS observations than among WFC observations. STIS G430 and G750L are different gratings, and G102 and G141 are different WFC grisms. Image Credit: Saba et al. 2025.

Stellar contamination of exoplanet observations is no small matter. It can skew results in very pronounced ways. “Accounting for stellar activity can significantly alter planetary atmospheric parameters like molecular abundances (up to 6 orders of magnitude) and temperature (up to 145%), contrasting with the results of analyses that neglect activity,” the authors write in their paper.

According to the researchers, there are two ways to determine if stellar variability is affecting exoplanet data.

“One is to look at the overall shape of the spectrum – that is, the pattern of light at different wavelengths that has passed through the planet from the star – to see if this can be explained by the planet alone or if stellar activity is needed,” said Saba. “The other is to have two observations of the same planet in the optical region of the spectrum that are taken at different times. If these observations are very different, the likely explanation is variable stellar activity.”

One of the key findings concerns optical and UV observations. Since stellar activity is much more visible in optical and UV, exoplanet observations based on these wavelengths are more likely to reveal the contamination. Conversely, IR observations may overlook the contamination.

“Our results emphasize the importance of considering the effects of stellar contamination in exoplanet transit studies; this issue is particularly true for data sets obtained with facilities that do not cover the optical and/or UV spectral range where the activity is expected to be more impactful but also more easily detectable,” the paper states.

“The risk of misinterpretation is manageable with the right wavelength coverage,” said Thompson. “Shorter wavelength, optical observations such as those used in this study are particularly helpful, as this is where stellar contamination effects are most apparent.”

This issue clearly needs more investigating, and the researchers say they’ve identified stars that need more follow-up. They also explain that previous exoplanet atmosphere studies should be revisited, especially ones that lacked broad optical or UV coverage. By the same token, future exoplanet atmospheric studies should be multi-wavelength.

According to the authors, the active stars identified in this research should also be studied more thoroughly. This will increase astronomers’ understanding of how they influence observations of exoplanet atmospheres. Better models and analytic tools are also needed.

We’re still in the very early days of examining exoplanet atmospheres, so these results aren’t exactly surprising. The JWST is probing some exoplanet atmospheres, and future missions like the ESA’s ARIEL (Atmospheric Remote-Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large survey) will do the same. ARIEL will perform the first large-scale survey of the chemistry of exoplanet atmospheres, highlighting the significance of these results.

“Our findings demonstrate the significant role that stellar contamination may have in all exoplanet spectra observations,” the authors write in their conclusion. “Therefore, comprehending, modeling, and correcting for the impact of stellar activity is important for a complete characterization of exoplanet atmospheres.”

The post Temperamental Stars are Messing With Our Exoplanet Efforts appeared first on Universe Today.

Critics have been calling for NASA to cancel its extremely pricey Space Launch System rocket for ages, but now that it seems to be facing the axe from Elon Musk’s government efficiency task force, it may be time to think again

During the 1970s, while probing distant galaxies to determine their mass, size, and other characteristics, astronomers noticed something interesting. When examining the rate at which these galaxies rotated (their rotational curves), they found that the outer parts were rotating faster than expected. In short, their behavior suggested that they were far more massive than they appeared to be. This led to the theory that in addition to stars, gas, and dust, galaxies were surrounded by a “halo” of mysterious, invisible mass – what came to be known as Dark Matter (DM).

It was famed astronomer Vera C. Rubin, for whom the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (formerly the LSST) is named, who first proposed that DM played an important role in galactic evolution. Astronomers have since theorized that DM haloes must have existed shortly after the Big Bang and were integral to the formation of the first galaxies. In a recent study, an international team examined the core regions of two galaxies that existed 13 billion years ago. Their observations confirmed that DM dominated the haloes of these quasars, offering fresh insight into the evolution of galaxies in the very early Universe.

The research team was led by Qinyue Fei, a graduate student and visiting researcher from Peking University, and his colleagues from the University of Tokyo’s Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU). They were joined by researchers from Peking University’s Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA-PKU), the Center for Astrophysical Sciences at John Hopkin’s University, the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, Cambridge (KICC), multiple observatories and universities. Their study was published on February 5th in The Astrophysical Journal.

Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the team was able to visualize the emission line of ionized carbon (C II) in two galaxies located 13 billion light years away. Like the “hydrogen line” (H I), this refers to the spectral line created by the transition of elemental carbon into ionized carbon. This way, they were able to study the gas dynamics within the Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs, or quasars) of these very early galaxies. The active nature of these galaxies indicates that they have supermassive black holes (SMBH) at their centers.

They then employed numerous models to determine the velocity of the gases (nonparametric) the mass distribution (parametric) of the galaxies. This was assisted by DysmalPy and 3DBarolo, two software tools specifically designed to measure the rotation curves of galaxies. According to their results, which captured the rotation curves from the inner regions to the outskirts, DM accounted for about 60% of these early galaxies. “Vera Rubin provided the first evidence for dark matter using the rotation curves of nearby local galaxies. We’re using the same technique but now in the early Universe,” said Kavli IPMU Professor (and study co-author) John D. Silverman.

Interestingly, previous studies of galaxies in the early Universe revealed a low mass fraction of DM in their outskirts. However, the data obtained by Fei and his colleagues showed a flat rotational curve, similar to massive disk galaxies observed in the local Universe. The team’s findings shed light on the intricate relationship between DM matter and SMBHs and offer crucial hints as to how galaxies evolved from the early Universe to what we observe today.

Further Reading: IPMU, The Astrophysical Journal

The post A New Study Reveals How Dark Matter Dominated the Early Universe appeared first on Universe Today.

Locomotion makes things move, and certain forms of locomotion make them move better than others. Those more effective types of locomotion change depending on the environment, which is even more true for space exploration. Methods that might work well on Earth or even other planets, such as helicopters, might be utterly useless on others. But, specialized forms of locomotion abound, and the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts (NIAC) phase I grants for this year include a closer look at one such specialized form – jumping.

The Legged Exploration Across the Plume (LEAP) program would utilize a specially designed jumping robot to explore the lower parts of the massive plumes emitted from Enceladus. The concept is based on the Salto jumping robot, initially developed by a team at UC Berkeley. Justin Yim, now a professor at the University of Illinois and the NIAC Phase I grantee, worked on it as part of his PhD thesis.

In an interview with Fraser, Dr. Yim details what makes Salto unique. For its size, which measures only about 50 centimeters, and weight, which is planned for less than .5 kg, Dr. Yim believes the robot could jump upwards of 100m horizontally on the surface of Enceladus.

Operations of the LEAP robot – launching off from and returning to the Orbilander.
Credit – Justin Yim / NASA

That is a significant advantage over other forms of locomotion on the icy moon. Enceladus has no atmosphere, so flying would have to be powered by a rocket, which will use up fuel, rather than by rotors, like Ingenuity was able to do on Mars. However, the surface is also icy and uneven, making having a rover trundle impractical.

Jumping, however, offers the best of both worlds. It requires relatively little power and, as such, could be done multiple times without depleting a robot’s battery. But it is also terrain agnostic, soaring above the most challenging parts. It would also allow the robot to jump directly through the lower part of the plumes that Enceladus ejects into the Saturnian system, the remnants of which form one of Saturn’s spectacular rings.

No other form of locomotion would be able to get that close to the source of the plumes, and since those plumes are some of the most interesting parts of Enceladus, studying them up close is appealing for many reasons. One mission in particular, the Enceladus Orbilander, which was a proposed flagship mission that the 2023 Decadal Survey supported, would be able to capture the upper parts of a geyser as it flew through one on its orbital path but would be unable to collect any data on its lower parts. At least as initially envisioned, its lander wouldn’t be capable of moving through a geyser.

CNET video describing Salto, the inspiration for LEAP.
Credit – CNET YouTube Channel

LEAP could potentially hitch a ride with the system, though. Utilizing the lander as a launch platform would save significant design effort of the robot itself. It could even use the Orbilander as a recharging station, allowing it to explore even further afield. 

There are some challenges, though – the original design of Salto only had one reaction wheel, which allowed its engineers to control the robot pitch, allowing it to perform the feet of aligning for multiple jumps off walls, kind of like characters do in video games. However, to truly control itself, LEAP would need two other reaction wheels to control yaw and rolls, giving engineers direct control over all three axes of the robot’s orientation. Dr. Yim added that, as part of the Phase I study, the researchers planned to assess using those reaction wheels to control motion in these three dimensions to assist in righting the robot if it falls over. Inevitably, given Enceladus’s rough and icy slick surface, it will undeniably eventually fall over.

As Dr. Yim discusses with Fraser, there is always a trade-off between size, weight, and capability for robots. Even larger versions of LEAP wouldn’t necessarily be able to travel as far or as efficiently as a smaller one does – though they might be able to carry more payload. One of the limitations of a small jumping robot is the mass limits placed on its ability to jump. Therefore, Dr. Yim expects simple instrumentation, like a flow meter and a camera, to be the extent of what LEAP will be able to carry into the plume, rather than fancier instrumentation like a mass spectrometer that might provide more insight but would be too bulky for jumping.

Dr Yim discusses some of the technical background of Salto.
Credit – BiomimeticMillisys YouTube Channel

Like all NIAC Phase I projects, this one is still very early in development. The outcome of this round is expected to be a case study that shows the parameters that must be considered in any future design or prototyping. Whether or not it ends up on Enceladus, the jumping concept behind LEAP appears to be an important locomotion style for many future robots, so expect to see more jumping around near you sometime soon.

Learn More:
NASA / Justin Yim – LEAP – Legged Exploration Across the Plume
UT – A Hopping Robot Could Explore Europa Using Locally Harvested Water
UT – A Robot Hopper to Explore the Moon’s Dangerous Terrain
UT – Miniaturized Jumping Robots Could Study An Asteroid’s Gravity

Lead Image:
Artist’s depiction of the LEAP robot jumping over a geyser on Enceladus.
Credit – NASA / Justin Yim

The post A Jumping Robot Could Leap Over Enceladus’ Geysers appeared first on Universe Today.

The JWST was never intended to find asteroids. It was built to probe some of our deepest, most demanding questions about the cosmos: how the first stars formed, how galaxies have evolved, how planets like ours take shape, and even how life originated. However, it’s first and foremost a powerful infrared telescope and its unrivalled infrared prowess is helping it contribute to another important goal: defending Earth from dangerous asteroids.

Humanity doesn’t want to share the dinosaurs’ fate. About 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub impact wiped them out. An asteroid 10 to 15 km (6 to 9 mi) wide struck Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, ending the dinosaurs’ 165-million-year reign. Only avian dinosaurs survived.

With that haunting backdrop, there’s a growing effort to identify dangerous space rocks that could strike Earth. In 2005, the US Congress directed NASA to “establish a Near-Earth Object Survey Program to detect, track, catalogue, and characterize certain near-Earth asteroids and comets.” That effort has paid dividends, especially when it comes to large asteroids that pose an existential threat.

Finding the largest main-belt asteroids hasn’t been difficult. They practically announce their presence to our powerful telescopes. Large asteroids around 100 kilometres in diameter or greater are potentially devastating, but they tend to follow stable orbits in the main belt.

However, decameter-size impactors are more elusive. These are asteroids tens of meters in diameter, and their smaller masses mean they can more easily become part of the Near-Earth Object (NEO) population due to interactions in the main belt. While these aren’t civilization-ending size rocks, they can reach Earth more frequently and cause megaton-size explosions. They’re behind the Tunguska Event in 1908 and the Chelyabinsk explosion in 2013.

The JWST is helping scientists understand this population of space rocks, and new research illustrates how. It’s titled “JWST sighting of decametre main-belt asteroids and view on meteorite sources.” It’s published in Nature, and the co-lead authors are Julien de Wit and Artem Burdanov, both from the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT.

“Asteroid discoveries are essential for planetary-defence efforts aiming to prevent impacts with Earth, including the more frequent megaton explosions from decametre impactors,” the authors write. “Although large asteroids (~100 kilometres) have remained in the main belt since their formation, small asteroids are commonly transported to the near-Earth object (NEO) population.” NEOs are objects whose closest approach to the Sun is less than 1.3 AU. This boundary includes objects that can come close enough to cross Earth’s orbit or can be potentially influenced by Earth’s gravity.

This diagram shows the orbits of 2,200 potentially hazardous objects as calculated by JPL’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). Highlighted is the orbit of the double asteroid Didymos, the target of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission, launched in 2021. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Most asteroids are detected with ground-based optical telescopes that sense the sunlight they reflect, which is their albedo. Relying on asteroids’ albedo measurements, though, is fraught with errors. For example, small objects with a high albedo can appear larger than large objects with a small albedo.

Asteroids also give off thermal emissions or infrared energy, and that’s where the JWST comes in. “With an exquisite sensitivity in that wavelength range and a large aperture, JWST is ideal for detecting the thermal emission of asteroids and revealing the smallest main-belt asteroids (MBAs),” the authors write in their paper.

According to the researchers, the JWST’s infrared measurements can constrain an object’s size to within 10% to 20%, while albedo measurements alone can be off by a factor of 3-4x. That’s a huge discrepancy that could lead to a risky misunderstanding of the main asteroid belt’s population.

Burdanov, de Wit, and their co-researchers developed a new way to detect decametre-size impactors with the JWST by using GPUs, Graphics Processing Units, and what the researchers call “synthetic tracking techniques.” These were initially developed to hunt for exoplanets, but the method is bearing fruit in the effort to catalogue asteroids. The researchers’ synthetic tracking method is designed to detect asteroids in data gathered from exoplanet observations. The JWST observed the TRAPPIST-1 star for more than 90 hours in 2022-23, and these results are based on that data.

“After applying our GPU-based framework for detecting asteroids in targeted exoplanet surveys, we were able to detect 8 known and 139 unknown asteroids,” the authors write. “The 139 new detections could not be attributed to any known asteroids.”

They range from the size of a bus to several stadiums wide. They’re the smallest objects ever detected in the main asteroid belt.

This figure from the new research shows the diameter, flux, and distance from the Sun for the new asteroids. “The dash-dot, solid, and dotted lines represent the size-flux relationships for objects at 2.00, 2.50, and 3.25 au, respectively,” the authors explain. Image Credit: Burdanov et al. 2025.

“We have been able to detect near-Earth objects down to 10 meters in size when they are really close to Earth,” said author Artem Burdanov in a press release. “We now have a way of spotting these small asteroids when they are much farther away, so we can do more precise orbital tracking, which is key for planetary defence.”

“For most astronomers, asteroids are sort of seen as the vermin of the sky, in the sense that they just cross your field of view and affect your data,” study co-author Julien de Wit said.

via GIPHY

de Wit explained the background of this research to Universe Today. Their interest in using the JWST in this way preceded the telescope’s launch.

De Wit and his co-researchers helped discover the TRAPPIST-1 system in 2016. In exoplanet science, objects like asteroids are considered noise that interferes with attempts to detect exoplanets. These asteroids are basically tossed aside in those efforts. In more recent years, astronomers pointed the JWST at the TRAPPIST-1 system and used its infrared capabilities to measure the temperature of the innermost planet and observe stellar flares. Those observations created what de Wit calls “bonus science.”

“Our main line of work relates to detecting and studying exoplanets like the TRAPPIST-1’s seven terrestrial gems,” de Wit explained. “But over the years, we’ve also been wanting to do more with all the astronomical data gathered by exoplanet surveys, and we started mining these fields of view for “bonus science.” One of them relates to detecting objects crossing the field of view, like asteroids. We perfected our methodology ahead of JWST, knowing that synthetic tracking combined with JWST’s unparalleled capabilities in the infrared (part of the wavelength range where these asteroids are the brightest) would change the game.”

These results are just a beginning. Every time the JWST is trained on something, it creates data. All of that data can be combed through to detect more asteroids and to try to understand what family they belong to. Decameter-size asteroids are likely the result of collisional cascades, and researchers would like to understand some of those relationships.

“There is a LOT more archival data to be used as done here. We are now gearing up to mine all of it,” de Wit explained, though it depends on funding. “This would allow us to study the 3D structure of the main belt and relate different sub-populations of these decameter asteroids to specific families of asteroids (and meteorites)!”

We’re expecting thousands of these asteroids in the existing MIR data!” said de Wit.

The discovery of the potentially dangerous asteroid 2024YR4 has focused peoples’ attention on the asteroid threat. It’s a NEO with a small chance of impacting Earth in 2032, though scientists caution against any panic. It’ll pass close to Earth again in 2028 and will be subjected to more precise observations and a reassessment of its risk.

Observing time with the JWST is a hot commodity. We asked the researchers if they’ll have an opportunity to use the space telescope to purposefully detect more asteroids.

“We did put forth a “catch me if you can” proposal with the intent of demonstrating JWST’s capabilities to detect decameter MBAs and then follow up on them to constrain their orbits as a “performance test” for planetary defence efforts,” de Wit said. He explained that “possible impactors often have their aphelion up in the main belt and constraining their orbit well can use observations all the way out there.” Their proposal is waiting for approval.

The 139 new asteroids detected in the main belt are bonus science. The team’s observation method had limitations and wasn’t dedicated to finding the smallest asteroid. However, there’s a lot more JWST data waiting to be mined, and with a more dedicated effort, de Wit and his co-researchers could detect many more.

“An observational setup that would allow for JWST to “drift” along the expected motion of smaller asteroids in the main belt while performing longer exposures would allow for asteroids below 10 meters to be detected,” de Wit told Universe Today.

“With an observational set up dedicated to detecting the smallest main-belt asteroids, we could go much smaller,” de Wit concluded.

Press Release: MIT astronomers find the smallest asteroids ever detected in the main belt

Research: JWST sighting of decametre main-belt asteroids and view on meteorite sources

The post JWST Finds the Smallest Asteroids Ever Seen in the Main Belt appeared first on Universe Today.

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