NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this color-enhanced image on April 1 at 2:38 a.m. PST (5:38 a.m. EST) during its 12th close flyby of the gas giant planet. At the time, the spacecraft was 4,087 miles (6,577 kilometers) from the tops of Jupiter’s clouds at 35.6 degrees north latitude. This image was created by citizen scientist Emma Walimaki using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. JunoCam’s raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at: www....

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the report of the Kepler spacecraft’s death was greatly exaggerated. “Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Kepler has been reborn and is continuing to make discoveries. Even better, the planet it found is ripe for follow-up studies,” says lead author Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). NASA’s Kepler spacecraft detects planets by looking for transits, when a star dims slightly as a planet crosses in front of it....

Massive galaxies in the Universe have stopped making their own stars and are instead snacking on nearby galaxies, according to research by Australian scientists. Astronomers looked at more than 22,000 galaxies and found that while smaller galaxies were very efficient at creating stars from gas, the most massive galaxies were much less efficient at star formation, producing hardly any new stars themselves, and instead grew by eating other galaxies. The study was released today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, published by Oxford University Press....

Levels of 14 proteins in the blood of critically ill COVID-19 patients are associated with survival. A single blood sample from a critically ill COVID-19 patient can be analyzed by a machine learning model which uses blood plasma proteins to predict survival, weeks before the outcome, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS Digital Health by Florian Kurth and Markus Ralser of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, and colleagues....

A team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, used atmospheric data from 19 exoplanets to obtain detailed measurements of their chemical and thermal properties. The exoplanets in the study span a large range in size – from ‘mini-Neptunes’ of nearly 10 Earth masses to ‘super-Jupiters’ of over 600 Earth masses – and temperature, from nearly 20C (68F) to over 2000C (3600F). Like the giant planets in our solar system, their atmospheres are rich in hydrogen, but they orbit different types of stars....

“This study offers a simple and more elegant solution for why Mars is small, barren, and uninhabitable,” said Matthew S. Clement, OU graduate student in the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, OU College of Arts and Sciences. “The particular dynamics of the instability between the giant planets kept Mars from growing to an Earth-mass planet.” Clement and Nathan A. Kaib, OU astrophysics professor, worked with Sean N....

Giant ridges on the surface of landslides on Mars could have formed without ice, challenging their use by some as unequivocal evidence of past ice on the red planet, finds a new UCL-led study using state-of-the-art satellite data. Detailed three-dimensional images of an extensive landslide on Mars, which spans an area more than 55 kilometers (34 miles) wide, have been analyzed to understand how the unusually large and long ridges and furrows formed about 400 million years ago....

The observations, which constitute a very detailed map of the filaments, were made on SSA22, a massive proto-cluster of galaxies located about 12 billion light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius, making it a structure of the very early universe. The findings, published in Science, give new insights into galaxy formation. The dominant belief at one time was that galaxies formed and then organized into clusters, in a bottom-up way, but now it is generally believed that filaments in the universe fueled the formation of clusters of galaxies and galaxies at places where the filaments crossed, creating dense regions of matter....

Scientists have ‘peeled back the ice’ from 46,000 glaciers between southern British Columbia and south-central Alaska to look at how much potential salmon habitat would be created when underlying bedrock is exposed and new streams flow over the landscape. Modeling glacier retreat under different climate change scenarios, researchers discovered that, under a moderate temperature increase, the glaciers could reveal potential new Pacific salmon habitat nearly equal to the length of the Mississippi River (6,275 km)....

The main goal of the Luna-27 lander is to study the composition of the soil near the lunar south pole. Water is a key target: there may be concentrations of frozen water at or below the surface. A major European contribution to the mission is Prospect, a robotic drill and a miniature laboratory with a suite of scientific instruments designed to penetrate the Moon’s soil to depths of up to one meter, acquire lunar samples, and deliver them to the mini labs hosted by the lander....

MIT physicists are reigniting the possibility, which they previously had snuffed out, that a bright burst of gamma rays at the center of our galaxy may be the result of dark matter after all. For years, physicists have known of a mysterious surplus of energy at the Milky Way’s center, in the form of gamma rays — the most energetic waves in the electromagnetic spectrum. These rays are typically produced by the hottest, most extreme objects in the universe, such as supernovae and pulsars....

The specific quantum material in question is known by the chemical formula Mn3Si2Te6. However, you could also simply call it “honeycomb” because its manganese and tellurium atoms form a network of interlocking octahedra that look like the cells in a beehive. When physicist Gang Cao and his colleagues at CU Boulder synthesized this molecular beehive in their lab in 2020, they were in for a shock: Under most circumstances, the material behaved a lot like an insulator....

It’s not surprising that debates over COVID-19 vaccines frequently center around issues involving cardiovascular health. The high-profile collapse of Danish soccer player Christian Eriksen in June initiated a myth about the link between sudden cardiac death and vaccination among athletes that persists several months later. Perhaps the most common point of conflict concerning COVID-19 vaccines is the risk of myocarditis following immunization, particularly among young people. What do the numbers tell us about COVID-19, vaccines, and myocarditis?...

“This shows that we must factor the gut microbiome into our understanding of how nanomaterials affect the immune system,” says the paper’s corresponding author Bengt Fadeel, professor at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. “Our results are important for identifying the potential adverse effects of nanomaterial and mitigating or preventing such effects in new materials.” Graphene is an extremely thin material, a million times thinner than a human hair....

A study describing the process appeared in the journal Nano Research on March 15, 2022. In the face of the climate change challenge, in recent years, policy-makers have increasingly focused on carbon-capture-and-utilization (CCU), wherein CO2 is drawn down from the atmosphere and then used as a feedstock for industrial chemicals (such as carbon monoxide, formic acid, ethylene, and ethanol) or for the production of carbon-neutral synthetic fuels (especially useful for hard-to-electrify transport sectors such as long-haul aviation and shipping)....

There are currently no plans for NASA to conduct or fund a servicing mission or compete this opportunity. Rather, this study is designed to help the agency understand the commercial possibilities. SpaceX – in partnership with the Polaris Program – proposed this study to gain understanding of the technical challenges associated with servicing missions. Other companies may propose similar studies with different rockets or spacecraft as their model, as this study is non-exclusive....

During flight day 14, NASA engineers continued with the jet firing development flight test objective that began on flight day 12. Today, teams demonstrated the “low” portion of the reaction control thruster firing time range. This test objective is designed to exercise Orion’s reaction control system jets in a different configuration to model how thruster jets will be used during the Artemis II mission, furthering NASA’s understanding of spacecraft operations before they have crew onboard....

The new Paramount film “Interstellar” imagines a future where astronauts must find a new planet suitable for human life after climate change destroys the Earth’s ability to sustain us. Multiple NASA missions are helping avoid this dystopian future by providing critical data necessary to protect Earth. Yet the cosmos beckons us to explore farther from home, expanding human presence deeper into the solar system and beyond. For thousands of years we’ve wondered if we could find another home among the stars....

Currently, most missions rely on ground-based antennas paired with atomic clocks for navigation. Ground antennas send narrowly focused signals to spacecraft, which, in turn, return the signal. NASA uses the difference in time between sending a signal and receiving a response to calculate the spacecraft’s location, velocity and path. This method, though reliable, could be made much more efficient. For example, a ground station must wait for the spacecraft to return a signal, so a station can only track one spacecraft at a time....

Liftoff from Vandenberg’s Space Launch Complex 4E is targeted for 12:47 p.m. PDT (3:47 p.m. EDT), with an instantaneous launch window. If needed, an additional launch opportunity is available on Wednesday, May 23. The twin satellites of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-on, or GRACE-FO, will track the movement of water around Earth. This short video explains how and why it’s important. GRACE-FO, a collaborative mission of NASA and the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ), continues the work of the original GRACE mission in observing the movement of water and other mass around our planet by tracking the changing pull of gravity very precisely....