NASA made the decision to cut SpaceX's Crew-11 mission short due to an undisclosed medical concern with one of the astronauts; the crew was scheduled to spend a six-month stint on the International Space Station (ISS) and return around late February, but they're now in the final stages of preparing for their departure. The hatch between the station and their Crew Dragon spacecraft is expected to close at approximately 3:30 p.m. EST (2030 GMT) today, followed by undocking around 5:05 p.m. EST (2305 GMT).

NASA will begin hatch closure coverage at 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) today followed by undocking coverage at 4:45 p.m. EST (0245 GMT, Jan. 15). You can watch the broadcast on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and the agency’s YouTube, as well as here on Space.com.

NASA mission managers polled "go" on Tuesday (Jan. 13) to proceed with Crew-11's undocking, saying in a statement, "Weather is looking excellent for Dragon's parachute-assisted splashdown off the coast of California."

The Crew-11 mission launched to the ISS on Aug. 1, 2025, carrying NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japan's Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. The quartet wasn't scheduled to depart until the astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-12 launched to take their place. But concerns about a medical situation leading up to a planned Jan. 8 spacewalk, or EVA, quickly escalated to NASA's decision of returning the crew early.

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced the mission's end during a press conference the same day as the canceled EVA, and crews aboard the ISS began their preparations to leave — including a change of command ceremony during which Fincke transferred the symbolic key to the ISS to Roscosmos' Sergey Kud-Sverchov.

With its departure ahead of Crew-12's arrival, Crew-11 leaves behind a skeleton crew of three aboard the ISS, including Kud-Sverchov and fellow cosmonaut Sergei Mikaev as well as NASA astronaut Chris Williams. Crew-12 is currently scheduled to launch no earlier than Feb. 15.

After they undock, Crew-11 astronauts face an 11-hour deorbit trajectory, with an expected to splashdown on Thursday (Jan. 15) at 3:41 a.m. EST (0841 GMT), off the coast of California, in the Pacific Ocean.

A post landing press conference is scheduled for Thursday at 5:45 a.m. EST (1045 GMT), which will also be broadcast here as well.

For a few years now, the agency has been working to develop a nuclear reactor that could power one or more bases on the lunar surface, which NASA wants to establish via its Artemis program.

This past December, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling to begin construction of such a base by 2030 — and for a nuclear reactor to be ready to launch toward the lunar surface by that same year.

And on Tuesday (Jan. 13), NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that they have signed a memorandum of understanding that reaffirms their commitment to meet that ambitious deadline.

"Under President Trump’s national space policy, America is committed to returning to the moon, building the infrastructure to stay and making the investments required for the next giant leap to Mars and beyond,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement on Tuesday.

"Achieving this future requires harnessing nuclear power," he added. "This agreement enables closer collaboration between NASA and the Department of Energy to deliver the capabilities necessary to usher in the Golden Age of space exploration and discovery."

Nuclear power makes sense for crewed outposts in deep-space locales such as the moon and Mars, many exploration advocates say. Fission systems can generate electricity continuously for years without the need to refuel, and they aren't affected by changing weather or sunlight conditions.

NASA and DOE have worked together on space nuclear energy systems for more than half a century: Over the decades, many of the agency's deep-space robotic explorers, such as its Cassini Saturn orbiter and Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers, have used radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) as a power source.

"History shows that when American science and innovation come together, from the Manhattan Project to the Apollo mission, our nation leads the world to reach new frontiers once thought impossible," U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in the same statement. "This agreement continues that legacy."

The quartet — NASA's Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Kimiya Yui of Japan and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov — are cutting their planned six-month mission short by about a month due to a medical concern affecting one of them. NASA has not revealed that astronaut's identity or the nature of the medical issue, citing privacy concerns.

Read on for details about Crew-11's first-of-its-kind return to Earth.

What time will Crew-11 leave the ISS?

Current plans call for Crew-11's Crew Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, to depart the space station on Wednesday (Jan. 14) at 5:05 p.m. EST (2205 GMT).

The hatches between Endeavour and the ISS will close about 90 minutes before that, at 3:30 p.m. EST (1930 GMT), if all goes according to plan.

What time is Crew-11's return to Earth?

Crew-11's journey home to Earth will be relatively brief. Endeavour is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on Thursday (Jan. 15) at 3:41 a.m. EST (0841 GMT), 51 minutes after conducting a deorbit engine burn.

The above schedule is not set in stone, however. "Mission managers continue monitoring conditions in the recovery area, as undocking of the SpaceX Dragon depends on spacecraft readiness, recovery team readiness, weather, sea states and other factors," NASA officials wrote in a statement on Jan. 9.

If the schedule changes, we'll let you know.

Can I watch Crew-11's return to Earth?

Yes, you can watch Crew-11's undocking and splashdown, as well as a few other activities related to the astronauts' return to Earth.

According to NASA's Jan. 9 update, the agency will cover hatch-closing on Wednesday (Jan. 14) beginning at 3:00 p.m. EST (2000 GMT). NASA's livestream will return at 4:45 p.m. EST (2145 GMT) that same day for undocking.

Splashdown coverage will start Thursday (Jan. 15) at 2:15 a.m. EST (0715 GMT), which will allow us to follow the de-orbit burn at 2:50 a.m. EST (0750 GMT) and splashdown 51 minutes later. A return-to-Earth press conference is scheduled for 5:45 a.m. EST (1045 GMT) on that same day, and NASA will apparently webcast that as well.

These events will air on NASA+, and the agency will likely stream them via its YouTube channel as well. In addition, SpaceX will provide its own webcast, which will begin 15 minutes before undocking on Wednesday and resume roughly an hour before splashdown on Thursday. SpaceX's feed will be available on its website and its X account.

To find their "Starfleet Academy" characters' pulse, Giamatti’s Klingon/Tellarite space pirate Nus Braka and Hunter's USS Athena captain and Starfleet Academy chancellor, they both fearlessly plunged into the parts with unbridled enthusiasm.

"I felt pretty alive right away, it was right there on the page," Giamatti tells Space.com. "Certainly getting into all of that gear. The first time they put me in all of that gear, I thought, 'Ooh, I get this guy. This guy has had a life. Look at all the stuff I'm wearing. All the stuff of where he's been and who he is.' Getting myself fully suited up, I was really like, 'Oh, I see. I’m ready to go!'"

Hunter found her Captain Nahla Ake by leaning into the character’s calm humanity.

"What was really interesting, it was when I read the script and saw that Nahla has a lot of speeches, because she's captain, and so there’s orientation and exposition for the characters but also for the cadets and also for the audience," she explained.

"I wanted the first ship-wide speech I delivered on the bridge to have intimacy. I wanted it to be not a speech. I wanted it to be a conversation with the cadets, who are not in the room. So it was like a 32nd century thing that I wanted to figure out. How to make it not formal, how to bridge the gap between me, the crew, and the cadets who were not present. I just wanted no formality between me and them."

Giamatti and Hunter’s familiarity and personal connections with "Star Trek," especially in its 60th anniversary year, also helped ground them in the production for an enjoyable overall experience.

"I started watching as a child when 'The Original Series' was in syndication in the early '70s," Giamatti shares. "I began watching with my father, who thought it would be a good idea for me to watch this because I would enjoy it. So I've had a lifelong relationship to it. Being a part of this very special sort of world, being allowed into it felt like a lovely sort of privilege. But it didn't feel stodgy. It felt really warm and welcoming. It was a lovely atmosphere the whole time. Everything about it was wonderful for me."

Likewise, for Hunter, the absence of narrative restrictions in this legendary sci-fi universe allowed for a refreshing sense of ease while filming.

"There’s nothing punitive about the boundaries of 'Star Trek,'" she notes. "You can do this, you can't do this. No, that’s where we don't go. There was none of that. It felt like a playground, a little bit of a sandbox. 'Here we are, you guys go have some fun.' And it was really easy to have fun with Paul. The scripts just offered so many opportunities for mischief and good times."

"Star Trek: Starfleet Academy" streams exclusively on Paramount+ starting Jan. 15.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) studied this unfortunate galaxy, known as GS-10578 or by the slightly snappier nickname "Pablo's Galaxy" in honor of the first astronomer to study it in detail. The light from Pablo's Galaxy has taken around 11 billion years to reach us, meaning the JWST and ALMA allow astronomers to see it as it was just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. For such an early galaxy, it is exceptionally massive, containing as much mass as around 200 billion suns.

The majority of the stars in Pablo's Galaxy seem to have formed between 12.5 billion and 11.5 billion years ago. However, this galaxy seems to have stopped forming stars and has exhausted its supply of star-forming cold gas despite its relatively young age. As astronomers define the cessation of star formation and the transition into quiescence as the "death" of a galaxy, that means Pablo's Galaxy "lived fast and died young."

The team behind this study first released results concerning Pablo's Galaxy back in Sept. 2024, using the JWST alone, finding that the supermassive black hole at its heart is pushing away huge amounts of gas at speeds as great as 2.2 million miles per hour (3.5 million km/h). That's fast enough to allow this star-forming matter to escape the gravitational influence of Pablo's Galaxy entirely.

Adding ALMA, an array of 66 radio telescopes located in the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile, the researchers observed Pablo's Galaxy for a further seven hours searching for carbon monoxide, which they could use as a way to trace cold hydrogen gas, the stuff that forms stars. However, this search turned up empty-handed.

But this in itself was telling.

"What surprised us was how much you can learn by not seeing something," team member Jan Scholtz from Cambridge University in the UK said in a statement. "Even with one of ALMA's deepest observations of this kind of galaxy, there was essentially no cold gas left. It points to a slow starvation rather than a single dramatic death blow."

Meanwhile, a further 6.5 hours of observations with the JWST revealed that Pablo's Galaxy is losing about 60 suns' worth of mass in gas each year. At that rate, the galaxy's fuel for star formation could have been exhausted in a timescale of between 16 million and 220 million years. If that seems like an incredibly long period of time, consider that scientists normally estimate that it takes as long as a billion years to exhaust their fuel for star-formation in a galaxy such as this.

"The galaxy looks like a calm, rotating disc," team co-leader Francesco D'Eugenio of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology said. "That tells us it didn't suffer a major, disruptive merger with another galaxy. Yet it stopped forming stars 400 million years ago, while the black hole is yet again active.

The team reconstructed the star formation history of Pablo's Galaxy, finding that fresh gas has been prevented by the black hole pushing gas outward from falling back into the galaxy. This prevents allowing the "fuel tanks" for star birth from being refilled. They also discovered that the supermassive black hole in this young galaxy didn't push away all of its gas at once, but has been experiencing repeated cycles of gas expulsion.

"So the current black hole activity and the outburst of gas we observed didn't cause the shutdown; instead, repeated episodes likely kept the fuel from coming back," D'Eugenio added.

The team's findings could help to explain why the JWST has been discovering lots of old-looking galaxies in the early universe.

"You don't need a single cataclysm to stop a galaxy forming stars, just keep the fresh fuel from coming in. Before Webb, these were unheard of," Scholtz said. "Now we know they're more common than we thought — and this starvation effect may be why they live fast and die young."

With the effectiveness of the ALMA/JWST telescope tag-team established, astronomers hope that further observations of Pablo's Galaxy can reveal more about the mechanism used by the supermassive black hole to prematurely starve this galaxy to death.

The team's research was published on Tuesday (Nov. 25) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

To better understand how microbes may act differently in space, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria, also called phages — in identical settings both on the ISS and on Earth. Their results, published recently in the journal PLOS Biology, suggest that microgravity can delay infections, reshape evolution of both phages and bacteria and even reveal genetic combinations that may help the performance against disease-linked bacteria on Earth.

"Studying phage–bacteria systems in space isn't just a curiosity for astrobiology; it's a practical way to understand and anticipate how microbial ecosystems behave in spacecraft and to mine new solutions for phage therapy and microbiome engineering back home." Dr. Phil Huss, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study's lead authors, told Space.com.

Bacteriophage basics

Bacteriophages, or phages, are the most abundant biological entities on the planet, with experts estimating around 10³¹ or ten nonillion bacteriophages on Earth. Not surprisingly, bacteriophages, a name meaning to "eaters of bacteria," are found everywhere, shaping the microbial ecosystems in oceans, soils and even our bodies. But one place where phages may have the most human impact is as a possible treatment against antibiotic resistant bacteria and other bacterial infections.

These phages work as tiny "delivery systems" wrapped in proteins. But unlike a delivery person giving a delicious pizza, some phages (like the T7 phage used in this study) infect bacteria by attaching to a specific surface feature on the cell — often a molecule embedded in the bacterial cell's outer membranes — and injecting its genetic material. Once inside, the phage hijacks the bacteria's machinery to make many copies of itself. Finally, it explodes the bacterial cell and releases a new wave of phage particles that can infect nearby bacteria.

This specific attack process by the phage then kicks off an evolutionary arms race between phages and bacteria, as bacteria can evolve resistance to these attacks by changing or hiding the phage's "landing pad" found on the cell's surface.

And things only get more complicated when microgravity gets involved.

A virus-bacteria showdown in orbit

To study how microgravity affects this process, the researchers used a bacteriophage called T7 and its bacterial prey, Escherichia coli, or what is more commonly known as E. coli. To isolate the effects of microgravity as cleanly as possible, the team prepared two identical sets of sample tubes of the bacteria, unshaken, and incubated at the same temperature for one, two or four hours, and a longer period of 23 days. One set of tubes went to the ISS in 2020, carried by Northrop Grumman's NG-13 Cygnus spacecraft while the other stayed below on Earth.

"The experiment had to work within strict NASA constraints: sealed cryovials had to pass biocompatibility and leak testing, withstand multiple freeze–thaw cycles, and remain safe to handle on orbit," Huss explained. "The sample size is much lower than what we are used to terrestrially and designing an experiment around this is challenging!"

The team also varied the starting ratios of phage to E. coli so that some samples having more phage would be expected to be infected quickly while others would take longer and show stronger dynamics.

Because the two experiments couldn't run in perfect parallel, the team recorded the exact incubation times on the ISS and then matched them on Earth afterward, a common workaround for many ISS biological experiments.

Microgravity slows down interactions

Under typical Earth lab conditions, the T7 phages can infect and kill E. coli cells in well under an hour, given the life cycle of the phage. But in the system's completely sealed and shake-free setup, which mimicked the conditions of microgravity, the system moved more slowly overall.

On Earth, the control group showed a surge in bacterial infections between two and four hours, but in microgravity, the surge didn't appear at any of the shorter incubation periods, suggesting that the phages' infection process had slowed down. Yet, the longer incubation vials told a different story, as after 23 days in orbit, the infection process was successful with fewer E. coli found in the vials.

So why do the researchers think the slowdown happened?

"We hypothesize that reduced fluid mixing in microgravity, because there's no gravity-driven convection, lowers the encounter rate between phage and bacteria, and that microgravity-induced stress on the host may alter receptor expression or intracellular processes, further slowing productive infection," Huss added.

In other words, in microgravity, phages and bacteria don't bump into each other as often and the bacteria may have evolved to be more resistant to phage attacks that make infection harder, so the entire cycle starts later than it does on Earth.

Microgravity mutations

After 23 days, the team analyzed the genetic make-up of the phages and saw mutations across its genome, but with microgravity-specific mutations, especially in genes tied to structure and host interaction. These mutations changed how the phage infects the bacteria.

"To me one of the most striking findings was not just that mutations appeared across the phage genome, but that microgravity pushed evolution into corners of the phage we still don't fully understand," Huss said.

Based on their findings, microgravity may not just change how fast infection happens but also which of a virus's genes matter most when it comes to successfully infecting a bacterial host.

"We're just beginning to scratch the surface," Dr. Srivatsan Raman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, another lead author on the study, told Space.com. "We just have to do more experiments with more complex conditions."

The phages weren't the only ones to change, as the bacteria seemed to evolve too. The E. coli exposed to the phages accumulated many more mutations than bacteria without phage threats, consistent with selection pressure that drives evolutionary arms races.

Some of the most notable changes hit genes linked to the outer membranes, potentially altering phage attachment while helping bacteria survive stress.

"Microgravity doesn't just slow things down, it qualitatively reshapes phage–host coevolution, from infection dynamics to the specific genes and mutations that matter," Huss noted.

Microgravity as a way forward for Earth-based medicine?

Using a technique called deep mutational scanning, the team scanned for over 1,600 mutation variants in the phage genome, finding that the "winning" mutations in microgravity differed sharply from those on Earth.

"Our results support microgravity as a distinct selection environment that reveals different parts of the fitness landscape than we can capture terrestrially," said Huss.

The researchers used these mutations to create altered phages which they tested on uropathogenic E. coli — strains of E. coli associated with urinary tract infections — that were more resistant to the T7 phages' attacks. The results showed that these altered viruses could kill the resistant bacteria.

"What we found in the study was that phage mutants that were enriched in microgravity could treat uropathic bacteria and kill them. So, which tells us that there's something about the microgravity condition that makes it relevant for treating pathogens on Earth," Raman said.

This has big implications for possible future treatments of bacterial diseases here on Earth, from salmonella poisoning to pneumonia to sepsis. But conducting the further testing required to get there may be tricky.

"Running these experiments on the ISS, that's not trivial," Raman added. "I mean, that takes years of planning, and there's just a lot of logistical challenges to get through. To run these experiments, pulling them off in a routine manner would actually be a little challenging to execute."

What about the future of spaceflight?

Zooming from the microscopic to the macroscopic, these results suggest that space microbes won't stay static but instead adapt and evolve in microgravity-specific ways.

"What our data makes clear is that microbes can adapt rapidly and in unexpected ways in microgravity," Huss added. "In principle, those same pressures could enrich traits we worry about on Earth, including drug resistance or altered virulence. This is a plausible evolutionary trajectory that future experiments should actively test by monitoring antibiotic susceptibility, stress responses, and competitive interactions over time."

Could these adaptations truly be a threat for humans on long-term space missions? Possibly, but for Raman, more testing is needed before that conclusion could be reached.

"Pathogens evolve all the time," Raman said. "I think we ought to do more studies to see if bacteria can evolve towards mutations that might make them more pathogenic under microgravity conditions. Those are not experiments that we've actually done in this study.

"But bacteria are very resilient and they evolve all the time. So I wouldn't rule out the possibility, but again, one has to do these rigorous experiments to ask: can a bacteria become a pathogen under ISS conditions?"

One such area of future space research could be looking at the human microbiome, as it's still not well understood how the microbiome evolves in the conditions of space.

For humans on Earth, the results of this study are more positive, as microgravity could help scientists to develop phages that can kill off more resistant bacteria.

"The real power of these space-derived fitness landscapes is that they don't stand alone. They can be merged with the rich terrestrial datasets we already have to sharpen engineering strategies for therapeutic use cases. That's arguably the most immediately actionable takeaway," said Huss.

The supermassive black hole pair, or binary, lurks at the heart of the quasar OJ287, located at the center of a galaxy around 1.6 billion light-years away from Earth. Using a level of resolution that would be able to spot a tennis ball on the surface of the moon, the team spotted two shockwaves flowing down the jet of OJ287. The shocks, interestingly, were seen traveling at different speeds. And as they travel, passing through strong magnetic fields, these shockwaves appear to produce a phenomenon never seen before.

This is just the latest major black hole breakthrough delivered by the EHT, which in April 2017 captured the first-ever image of a black hole, the supermassive black hole M87*, released to the public in 2019. The network of telescopes followed this up with an image of Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way's own supermassive black hole, which the public got to see in 2022.

Since then, the EHT has continued to make waves in black hole science.

"This result shows that the EHT is not only useful for producing spectacular images, but can also be used to understand the physics that govern black hole jets," EHT team member Mariafelicia De Laurentis said in a statement. "Distinguishing observationally between what is due to geometry and what is instead the result of real physical processes is a key step in comparing theoretical models with observations."

Snapshots of a black hole jet

The team captured two snapshots of the OJ287 system on April 5, 2017, and then on April 10 in the same year. These revealed substantial changes in both the structure and polarization of the OJ287 that occurred over the course of just five Earth days. That is the shortest interval over which such changes have been observed in a black hole jet.

These changes are thought to be the result of shocks interacting with instabilities in velocity called Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. They result in a highly twisted structure within a jet, with three distinct polarized components: two slower and rotating in opposite directions to one another, one faster and rotating counterclockwise. This represented the first direct confirmation of a helical magnetic field with the jet of a black hole.

"We are spatially resolving the individual shock components and observing their interaction with Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities," team member Ilje Cho of the Korea Institute for Astronomy and Space Science said. "This is the first time we have directly observed this interaction between shocks and instabilities in a black hole jet."

"These observed variations in the jet are usually interpreted in terms of a precession effect of the jet itself. However, precession models would expect the jet components to move ballistically along the jet," EHT team member Rocco Lico of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) said. "Our observations, however, indicate non-ballistic motions of these components, calling into question the precession hypothesis as the sole explanation for the observed morphology of the source." The rapid motions measured by the team suggested the kinetic energy of the particles exceeds the magnetic energy within the internal regions of the jet. This favors the development of Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities, which arise due to the difference in velocity at the surface between the jet, which moves at speeds approaching light-speed, and the much slower surrounding matter. These instabilities can cause helix-shaped distortions that manifest as a "twisted" structure, just like that which the EHT spotted in the OJ287 jet.

The twisted structure of the jet observed in OJ287, the high degree of polarization of the three components, and the evolution of their polarization angles, indicate a complex interaction between Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities and shocks in a jet permeated by a helical magnetic field.

"These rotations in opposite directions are the smoking gun," research team leader José L. Gómez of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía-Csic said in the statement. "When the shock wave components interact with the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, they illuminate different phases of the helical structure of the magnetic field, producing the polarization oscillations we observe."

The team's model proposes that the Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities generate filamentary structures that interact with propagating shocks in the jet.

"These interactions compress the magnetic field and amplify the emission in specific regions of the jet, explaining the observed features in both total intensity and polarized light, as well as the rapid variations in polarization angles and the apparent non-ballistic motions observed, despite the presence of a globally rectilinear jet," Lico said. "For the first time, high-resolution EHT data allow us to directly visualize these structures, providing concrete evidence of the interaction between jet instabilities, shocks, and helical magnetic fields."

OJ287 was the ideal candidate to make these observations because the dancing supermassive black holes in this pair are well known for their periodic outbursts, making it a unique laboratory to study black hole physics.

The team's research was published on Jan. 8 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Martin's image highlights the nebula's chaotic, radiation-sculpted structure, whose cosmic dust and gas are being actively shaped by the thousands of energetic young stars that coalesced within its roiling expanse.

The Orion Nebula's core has been excavated in part by the ultraviolet light cast out by a collection of four colossal young stars known collectively as the "Trapezium", named for their resemblance to the geometric shape.

The nebula's close proximity to Earth has made it a popular target for astronomers looking to unravel the complex environment in which new stars like our sun are born. Scientists have even used powerful observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope to capture images of protoplanetary disks surrounding newborn stellar bodies, much like the one our own solar system formed from some 4.5 billion years ago.

Martin captured the nebula's light over the course of three hours in December 2025 using a 6-inch (157 mm) Newtonian reflector paired with a set of narrow-band filters, which only permitted light from specific wavelengths to be collected. "There has been a staggering amount of rain in Southern California and I had to grab the few hours of clear skies when I could, so I was battling light pollution, clouds, dew and the moon," Martin told Space.com in an email.

The light collected using each filter was then assigned its own color "channel" during the editing process using the astrophotography program PixInsight. "My personal aesthetic is to render images as close as possible to what your eyes could see if they were as sensitive as an astronomical camera," continued Martin. "Thus, I used the average OIII signal for green and blue and the sum of SII and H-alpha for red".

How to see the Orion Nebula

January is the best time of the year to see the Great Orion Nebula as it climbs high overhead in the winter sky. Look to the southeastern horizon in the hours following sunset in mid-January to find the recognizable stars of the constellation Orion. Next locate the three stars of the Orion's Belt asterism.

Look less than 5 degrees — roughly the span of your three middle fingers held at arm's length — to the lower right of the bottom most star Alnitak to find a tighter line of three stars representing "Orion's Sword". The fuzzy patch of light surrounding the middle star is Orion's Nebula, which is visible to the naked eye on clear nights.

If you're inspired to explore it yourself, check out our roundups of the best telescopes for exploring the night sky and photographers can find our top picks for the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your deep space astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s) and comments along with your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Many of us know about the famed "overview effect," which describes how a trip to the final frontier changes how astronauts view the world and their place in it. But the new study focused on the physiological rather than the philosophical.

Rachel Seidler and a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took MRI scans of the brains of 26 astronauts and 24 non-astronaut participants to determine what, if any, impacts prolonged spaceflight has on one of our body's most important organs.

Their study, published on Jan. 12, showed a consistent pattern of the brain shifting backward and upward, and rotating upward, after time in microgravity, with some positional changes still detectable months after astronauts return to Earth.

Scientists have long tracked how spaceflight affects the human body, but exactly what microgravity does to the brain's anatomy remains an ongoing question. This study analyzed data from 15 astronauts who provided MRI scans before and after their missions to space, and combined that with MRI data from another 11 astronauts and two dozen participants of a long-duration, head-down tilt bed rest "microgravity analog" experiment.

Rather than track whole-brain movement, the researchers divided the brain into 130 separate regions and examined each one individually. The regional analysis showed many areas with significant displacement across two spatial axes, pointing to widespread repositioning rather than a localized effect.

Across participants, the study found that brains tended to shift backward and upward, and rotated in pitch, indicating that microgravity is associated with a measurable change in how the brain sits inside the skull. The dataset included participants with a range of time-in-space histories, from short missions to long-duration stays, divided into groups of roughly two-week, six-month and one-year mission durations. It identified significant positional shifts across large portions of the brain, with some displacements measured as high as 2.52 millimeters (0.1 inches) in subjects with the most time in space.

When the researchers compared astronauts with the bed-rest participants, they found movement in broadly similar directions, but with key differences. Astronauts showed a stronger upward movement, while bed-rest participants showed a stronger backward component. Additionally, only a portion of the changes in brain shape observed after spaceflight were present in the bed rest group, and exactly how spaceflight affects individual brain regions remains unclear.

The authors say the comparison helps clarify what microgravity is doing to brain anatomy and highlights the limits of current simulation techniques.

The study also examined whether changes in certain brain regions correlated with differences in how astronauts performed after landing back on Earth. One thing that isn't immediately restored when someone returns from space is the inner ear's sense of direction, causing many astronauts to experience balance issues. The researchers found that displacement affecting sensory-related brain regions was correlated with larger declines in astronaut balance after spaceflight.

And, while astronauts normally find their footing within a week or so of their return, the physical shifts in their brains were found to persist for up to six months post spaceflight, underscoring, the study says, "the long-lasting effects of spaceflight on neuroanatomy."

The scientists note that their work faces constraints typical of spaceflight research, including limited sample sizes and tight imaging timelines, and recommend future studies with larger astronaut crews on a broad range of mission lengths to better understand how quickly brain shifts can begin, how they evolve and how that shapes recovery back on Earth.

• NASA will return 4 ISS astronauts home early in 1st-ever medical evacuation
• ISS astronaut evacuation shouldn't interfere with Artemis 2 moon mission
• How does NASA handle astronaut medical issues in space?

Latest news on ISS astronaut medical evacuation.

NASA prepares to return 4 astronauts home early

NASA is drawing up plans today to return four Crew-11 astronauts to Earth from the International Space Station earlier than planned due to a medical concern with one of the space travelers. We will have the latest updates as events unfold here.

The Crew-11 astronauts are NASA's Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japan's Kimuya Yui, and Russia's Oleg Platonov. NASA officials canceled a planned Jan. 8 spacewalk by Fincke and Cardman due to the medical concern, but the agency has not said which of the four astronauts suffered the medical issue out of privacy concerns.

The astronaut who suffered the medical issue is in a stable condition, but NASA does want to return them to Earth where they can receive treatment with better care than the conditions on the ISS allow.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced his decision to bring the Crew-11 astronauts home early on their SpaceX Dragon capsule on Thursday (Jan. 8). The agency is now drawing up plans to both undock the Crew-11 Dragon and splashdown off the Florida coast early, while also accelerating the planned launch of a replacement crew on the SpaceX Crew-12 mission.

The departure of the Crew-11 astronauts will leave NASA astronaut Chris Williams and two cosmonauts, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, on their own on the ISS. Crew-11 launched to the ISS in August 2025, with Williams and crew launching on a Soyuz rocket in November.

Watch this space for more updates on this developing story.

ISS astronaut evacuation won't affect Artemis 2 moon launch

NASA's plan to rturn the four Crew-11 astronauts home early from the International Space Station and accelerate the launch of their replacement team, Crew-12, from Florida should not impact the agency's plans to also launch another crew of astronauts to the moon in February.

NASA chief Jared Isaacman said Thursday that NASA's Artemis 2 mission, which will launch four astronauts around the moon, will remain on track to launch in early February. The mission will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center, where SpaceX will also launch the Crew-12 astronauts. The Crew-11 astronauts will also have to splashdown off the Florida coast before then.

"These would be totally separate campaigns at this point," Isaacman said during a Jan. 8 press conference to provide an update on NASA's decision to end Crew-11 early. "There's no reason to believe at this point in time that there'd be any overlap that we have to deconflict for."

You can read the full story here by Staff Writer Josh Dinner.

Former astronauts weigh-in on ISS situation

Former Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield posted his thoughts regarding NASA's recent decision to fly Crew-11 astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) back to Earth due to an ongoing medical issue.

"Big decision by NASA leadership, with multiple domino impacts on operations, but I’m glad to see, as always, crew health and safety come first," Hadfield wrote on X.

Normally, NASA overlaps incoming and outgoing crews aboard the ISS, but with the possibility of evacuating Crew-11 before Crew-12's arrival, Hadfield voiced confidence. "The Station will be more vulnerable until the replacement crew of 4 can launch, but we have deep experience running the place with just 3 astronauts for a while," he wrote.

Former NASA astronaut Ed Lu also weighed in on X. "The afflicted space station astronaut ... is almost certainly feeling they have let down the crew. We were trained to get the mission done. But I do trust NASA to do the right thing here."

It's still unclear when exactly Crew-11 will depart the station, or when and if NASA will determine an earlier launch date for Crew-12.

Not NASA's first medical issue in space

While NASA's current astronaut medical issue on the International Space Station has led to the first-ever planned medical evacuation of a crew from the orbiting lab, it is far from the first time the space agency has had to deal with a medical concern in orbit.

Dr. James Polk, NASA's chief medical officer, told reporters late Thursday that medical issues we find common on Earth - like a toothache or other mild malady - are the same sort of things that have historically occurred with astronauts. The specific nature of the current issue, and the astronaut who experienced it, are being withheld for privacy reasons, he added.

Still, there is a record of medical concerns on the ISS, including ones that led to delays for spacewalks or other tasks.

In August 2020, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and his crewmate Akhiko Hoshide had their planned spacewalk called off days before the event due to a minor medical issue that remained undisclosed. And in 2008, European Space Agency astronaut Hans Schlegel was replaced on his ISS spacwalk by NASA astronaut Stanley Love due to a medical concern.

Here's a look at those astronaut medical issues and others from the history of human spaceflight by our writer Josh Dinner.

Astronaut medical issue not an injury, NASA says

As we await updates from NASA on when it will perform the medical evacuation of four Crew-11 astronauts from the International Space Station, there are some details we can glean of the nature of the medical issue concerning one of the astronauts.

You can read our look back at medical issues in space here by Josh Dinner.

Dr. James Polk, NASA's chief medical officer, has said the medical issue is not an injury to the astronaut afflicted, but rather something related to the prolonged exposure to weighlessness by astronauts living and working on the International Space Station.

"It's mostly having a medical issue in the difficult areas of microgravity and the suite of hardware that we operate in," Polk said.

NASA officials have also said the issue was not connected with the Crew-11 astronauts' work at the time to prepare for a planned spacewalk scheduled for Jan. 8, which was subsequently cancelled.

The months-long missions on the ISS can have lasting effects on the human body, forcing astronauts to readapt to live on Earth when they return, including rebuilding the muscle mass and bone density lost in space. At least one astronaut suffered a blood clot in orbit due to deep vein thrombisis at the two-month mark of a planned six-month mission. Physicians on Earth were able to devise a treatment for the astronaut to implement in space to address the issue and complete the mission's full duration.

Crew-11 tests suits, begins packing for medical evac

The four astronauts of NASA's Crew-11 mission on the International Space Station don't have a landing date yet for their medical evacuation from due to a medical concern with one of the crew, but they're already preparing to leave, NASA says.

"No departure date has been announced, though the crew has begun checking the fit and operability of their Dragon pressure suits," NASA wrote in update today. "Fit verification is necessary because the spine lengthens and body fluids shift toward the head in microgravity, affecting torso and limb dimensions. The quartet also tested the suits' audio and video communication systems."

The Dragon pressure suits are the same black and white SpaceX spacesuits worn by Crew-11 astronauts Mike Fincke, Zena Cardman, Kimiya Yui and Oleg Platanov during their launch in August 2025. Cardman will command the Dragon flight home with Fincke as pilot. Kimuya and Platanov will serve as mission specialists.

The astronauts have also begun packing for their trip home.

"The foursome began collecting their personal items and packing them for stowage aboard the spacecraft," NASA wrote in the update.

Cardman spent time today flushing water from and powerfing down two NASA spacesuits on the ISS. She and Fincke were supposed to use the suits during a spacewalk on Jan. 8 and another one next week. Both spacewalks werte canceled due to the medical issue with one of the Crew-11 astronauts.

Yui and Platanov spent time on final science experiments of their mission, including one by Platanov studying how the inner lining of blood vessels work to keep blood flowing in space, in order to avoid the formation of blood clots.

Next Crew-11 landing update tomorrow

Hey, Space Fans, NASA continues to study the return options for the four Crew-11 astronauts and we are awaiting the agency's next update on its landing plans, though it does appear that the medical evacuation of the crew from the International Space Station is not imminent for Saturday. If that changes, we'll definitely post an update here.

In the meantime, we'll pause our updates for the day and join you again on Saturday when we anticipate the next update on NASA's plans to return the Crew-11 astronauts to Earth.

NASA planning on Jan. 15 return of Crew-11 astronauts

NASA is targeting no earlier than 5 p.m. EST (2200 GMT) on Jan. 14 for the early departure of the Crew-11 astronauts after an undisclosed medical incident aboard the International Space Station.

The crew will deorbit aboard Endeavour, with splashdown expected early Jan. 15, off the coast of California, "depending on weather and recovery conditions," according to a post from the space station's account on X.

SpaceX prepares for Crew-11 medical evacuation

SpaceX says it's Dragon spacecraft at the International Space Station is ready to return its four Crew-11 astronauts home in an unprecedented medical evacuation on Jan. 14 and 15.

"Dragon and Crew-11 are targeted t undock from the space station no earlier than Wednesday, January 14," SpaceX wrote in a mission update on X late yesterday.

The SpaceX statement came on the heels of NASA's announcement that the Crew-11 astronauts were scheduled to undock from the space station on Jan. 14 and splashdown off the coast of California early on Jan. 15.

Splashdown is now set for 3:40 a.m. EST (0740 GMT) on Thursday, Jan. 15, NASA officials said.

The Crew-11 Dragon spacecraft will return NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke to Earth alongside Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platanov.

NASA decided to evacuate the crew, which make up four of the seven astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station, on Jan. 8 after an apparently serious medical concern arose with one of the four Crew-11 astronauts. The astronaut is stable, but NASA officials opted for a "controlled medical evacuation" in order to provide astronaut better treatment on the ground, NASA chief Jared Isaacman has said.

NASA Timeline revealed for Crew-11 medical evacuation

With NASA and SpaceX officially targeting a Jan. 14 undocking for the Crew-11 astronauts at the International Space Station, we now know the timeline for the medical evacuation of the four astronauts back to Earth.

NASA announced the undocking date late Friday, as well as a detailed timline of events for the ISS departure and landing. Here's a look at the timeline as it stands now:

Wednesday, Jan. 14 - all times in EST

• 3 p.m. - Hatch closure coverage begins on NASA TV and streaming platforms
• 3:30 p.m. - SpaceX Dragon hatch and ISS hatch closed for undocking
• There will be a break here between hatch closure coverage and undocking views.
• 4:45 p.m. - Undocking coverage begins
• 5 p.m. - Undocking and initial ISS departure
• There will be a break here in coverage between undocking and landing.

Thursday, Jan. 15 - all times in EST

• 2:15 a.m - Landing coverage begins on NASA TV and streaming platforms
• 2:50 a.m. - Dragon Deorbit burn
• 3:40 a.m. - Splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off California coast
• 5:45 a.m. - Post-landing return to Earth press conference

This current timeline could change as NASA and SpaceX monitor weather at the splashdown site.

"Mission managers continue monitoring conditions in the recovery area, as undocking of the SpaceX Dragon depends on spacecraft readiness, recovery team readiness, weather, sea states, and other factors," NASA wrote in an update. "NASA and SpaceX will select a specific splashdown time and location closer to the Crew-11 spacecraft undocking."

Crew-11 early return will leave skeleton crew on ISS

When the four astronauts of NASA's Crew-11 mission return to Earth early on Jan. 15, they will leave behind three crewmates on the International Space Station to keep the orbital lab running until a replacement crew can arrive.

NASA's medical evacuation of Crew-11 astronauts Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui and Oleg Platanov will leave NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev behind on the station as caretakers until four more astronaus on Crew-12 can arrive.

While NASA and SpaceX are working to accelerate the launch of Crew-12's astronauts, the reduced crew size on the station could last at least a month of more. Crew-12 was scheduled to launch sometime in February.

Read our full story on the ISS skeleton crew by Mike Wall.

Japan's Crew-11 astronaut takes photo farewell of ISS

Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui is saying some farewells to the Japan-built section of the International Space Station as he and his Crew-11 crewmates prepare for their medical evacuation from the orbiting lab on Jan. 14.

Yui shared a photo on Friday that he took from a window on the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo module, the largest science laboratory on the space station, showing the module's airlock and experiment platform. The space station's main truss and two giant solar arrays can be seen, as well as the blue arc of the Earth below.

"Today was a very busy day as well, so I was working quite late.," Yui wrote. "I hadn't taken the photos to introduce to everyone, so I just shot them from the window of 'Kibo' a little while ago. Since I'll soon have to bid farewell to this view as well, I want to burn it firmly into my eyes, and even more so, into my heart."

Yui is on his second trip to the ISS with the Crew-11 mission. He's been taking spectacular photos of Earth and space from the station, as well as videos like the one here shared by Space.com writer Anthony Wood:

Astronaut on ISS captures spectacular orbital video of zodiacal light, auroras and the Pleiades

Yui will return to Earh on Jan. 15 in the wee hours of the morning with Crew-11 crewmates Mike Fincke, Zena Cardman (both of NASA) and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platanov, with their SpaceX Dragon capsule splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.

How to watch Crew-11's medical evac from ISS

When NASA and SpaceX return the Crew-11 astronauts to Earth in a medical evacuation of the Internatinal Space Station, the space agency will broadcast it live and you'll have a variety of options to watch it online.

NASA's Crew-11 astronuats - commander Zena Cardman, pilot Mike Fincke (both of NASA, and mission specialists Kimiya Yui of Japan and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platanov - will return to Earth on Jan. 15 after undocking a day earlier due to a medical concern that arose Jan. 7 with one of the astronauts.

NASA will livestream the undocking on Jan. 14 starting at about 3 p.m. EST (1900 GMT) on NASA TV, as well as its NASA+ streaming service. Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Hulu, Netflix and Roku. You can also follow it live on the agency's social media channels like Facebook, Twitch, X and YouTube. All the links are on NASA's Ways to Watch page here.Space.com will also provide a livestream simulcast of NASA's broadcast.

The landing livestreams will begin early Jan. 15 at 2:15 a.m. EST (0615 GMT), with splashdown set for 3:40 a.m. EST (0740 GMT).

This will be our last update of the day, barring any new update from NASA. We'll be back on Sunday to more on the packing and other preparations of the crew ahead of their unplanned departure from the ISS.

Thanks for tuning in.

New commander to take charge soon

Good morning, all. Today is Sunday, Jan. 11 and we are just about three days away from NASA's planned medical evacation of four Crew-11 astronauts from the International Space Station on Jan. 14, and four days away from their splashdown on Jan. 15.

We begin today with news that NASA and its international partners have arranged for an accelerated change of command ceremony on the ISS. That ceremony, which was to occur many weeks from now, will now occur on Monday, Jan. 12, at 2:35 p.m. EST (1835 GMT). You'll be able to watch it live on Space.com, courtesy of NASA. Joining Fincke on the trip to Earth will be Crew-11 commander Zena Cardman of NASA and mission specialists Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonaov of Russia. NASA called for their early return after a medical issue arose with one of the four on Jan. 7.

So why does this command change involve the Crew-11 medical evacuation? It's because the current commander of the International Space Station's joint Expedition 74 mission is Crew-11 pilot Mike Fincke, a veteran ISS astronaut who will now return to Earth early.

Fincke will hand over control of the ISS to Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who arrived at the station in November with fellow cosmonaut Sergei Mikaev and NASA astronaut Chris Williams.

NASA, SpaceX: Weather looks favorable for Crew-11 return

NASA and SpaceX continue to track weather conditions in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California, where a Dragon capsule is expected to splashdown with the four Crew-11 astronauts on Jan. 15 to complete their medical evacuation from the International Space Station.

So far, it seems like the weather does look good for the earlier than planned landing.

"NASA and SpaceX are reviewing weather conditions in the splashdown zones, which currently are favorable for return," NASA wrote in a mission update today.

The Crew-11 Dragon capsule, called Endeavour, will splash down in the Pacific at about 3:40 a.m. EST (0740 GMT) on Thursday, Jan. 14. It will be 12:40 a.m. local time, with the splashdown and recovery occuring in darkness.

SpaceX's recovery crews typically aims to collect the Dragon capsule and extract its crew within an hour or so of splashdown. But good weather and sea conditions are key for a smooth recovery.

SpaceX details 11-hour return to Earth for Crew-11 astronauts

As SpaceX prepares to return four Crew-11 astronauts to Earth for NASA under the first-ever medical evacuation from the International Space Station, the company has shared a few details in what the trip home will look like for the astronauts.

Crew-11 commander Zena Cardman, pilot Mike Fincke (both of NASA) and mission specialists Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonov of Russia will return to Earth on the Dragon Endeavour capsule on Thursday, Jan. 15, but their journey begins a half day earlier on Jan. 14, when they'll undock from the ISS.

"After performing a series of departure burns to move away from the space station, Dragon will conduct multiple orbit-lowering maneuvers, jettison the trunk, and re-enter Earth’s atmosphere for splashdown off the coast of California approximately 11 hours later on Thursday, January 15," SpaceX wrote in an updated mission overview. Splashdown is currently scheduled for 3:40 a.m. EST (0740 GMT) off the southern coast of California.

NASA officials have said the weather forecast currently looks favorable for the return to Earth, but both NASA and SpaceX will continue to monitor conditions since the splashdown is currently scheduled to occur in darkness. Weather conditions and rough seas can influence whether SpaceX and NASA commit to undock from the ISS and target a specific splashdown site.

While 11 hours seems like a long time for a medical evacuation from the ISS, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on Jan. 8 that aside from the early departure from the space station (Crew-11 was expected to last another month or so), Crew-11's return to Earth would follow SpaceX's normal undocking and reentry procedures.

The astronaut who suffered the medical issue (NASA is not naming the astronut due to medical privacy concerns) is in a stable condition and should not require special assistance or measures for the trip home, NASA has said.

SpaceX splashdown options for Crew-11 astronauts

While NASA and SpaceX are poised to return the four Crew-11 astronauts to Earth in the wee hours of Thursday, Jan. 15, the weather will ultimately determine exactly where the SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying the crew will splash down off the coast of Southern California.

NASA said today that the weather looks favorable for a 3:40 a.m. ET splashdown off the California coast, but that the space agency and SpaceX willmake a final decision closer to landing day (likely around undocking on Jan. 14) on which landing zone to target.

"NASA will share more details about its coverage plans in the coming days," NASA officials wrote in an update.

In 2025, SpaceX switched exclusively to Pacific splashdowns for its Dragon capsules to avoid any debris from its expendable "trunk" from falling over populated areas. But there is more than one drop zone available to choose from.

In the past, SpaceX has reserved splashdown sites off the coast of San Diego, Oceanside and Los Angeles in Southern California, and we expect the same for the upcoming Crew-11 Dragon return.

This will be our final update of today for SpaceX and NASA's Crew-11 astronaut medival evacuation from the International Space Station. We'll be back Monday morning, Jan. 12, for the next update.

Thanks for joining us and we'll see you tomorrow.

Crew-11 pilot to hand control of station over today

Good morning. NASA and SpaceX are now two days away from their planned "controlled medical evacuation" of four Crew-11 astronauts from the International Space Station.

To prepare for that departure, Crew-11 pilot Mike Fincke of NASA, who has been commanding the joint Expedition 74 crew on the ISS, will officially relinquish his command in a change-of-command ceremony that will shift control of the orbting lab over to Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov.

The ceremony is scheduled for 2:35 p.m. EST (1835 GMT) today, Jan. 12, and will be webcast live on NASA TV, NASA+ and the space agnecy's streaming service and social media platforms.

Fincke and Crew-11 commander Zena Cardman of NASA, Japan's Kimiya Yui and Russia's Oleg Platonov will undock their SpaceX Dragon capsule from the ISS on Wednesday, Jan. 14 and return to earth early Jan. 15 due to a medical issue with one of the astronauts that occurred on Jan. 7. It is the first-ever medical evacuation of astronauts from the ISS.

The four Crew-11 astronauts will leave behind Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, his fellow cosmonaut Sergei Mikaev and NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who will remain aboard the ISS to complete the remained of a six-month mission that began in late November.

Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui captures stunning view of aurora ahead of ISS departure

As members of Crew-11 continue to wrap up their time aboard the ISS, they are still taking the little moments to appreciate their orbital home for the past several months, and savoring views of Earth from space while they can.

Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui posted a video to X over the weekend, showing a dazzling view of auroras spreading like a tall blanket over the darkened Earth below. "Knowing that I would soon return, the sun must have tried its best, as I was able to capture a very beautiful aurora," a translation of his post says.

A change of command ceremony aboard the ISS is scheduled today at 2:35 p.m. EST (1835 GMT), and will be webcast live on NASA TV, NASA+ and the space agency's streaming service and social media platforms.

Watch NASA Crew-11 astronaut hand over control of the ISS today

NASA astronaut Mike Fincke will hand command of the International Space Station's current Expedition 74 mission over to cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov today (Jan. 12) during a ceremony that starts at 2:35 p.m. EST (1935 GMT). You can watch it live via NASA+, Amazon Prime, and NASA's YouTube channel.

Fincke is one of the four astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-11 mission, which will head back to Earth on Wednesday (Jan. 14). Crew-11 was supposed to stay at the ISS for another month but is coming home early due to a medical issue with one of its astronauts. NASA has not revealed the identity of that crewmember, citing privacy concerns.

The other Crew-11 astronauts are NASA's Zena Cardman, Japan's Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov.

Crew-11 pilot hands ISS control over in heartfelt ceremony

NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, pilot of the Crew-11 mission, officially relinquished command of the International Space Station's Expedition 74 mission today in a heartfelt ceremony that ended it a 7-astronaut group hug.

Read our full story: 'It is bittersweet': Crew-11 astronaut hands over control of ISS ahead of 1st-ever medical evacuation

Fincke turned control of the ISS over to Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchov during the ceremony, and even handed a golden key to the station over to its new chief.

"We're leaving you all with a lot of work, but also with a lot of knowledge knowing that you guys are really going to do super well," Fincke said to Kud-Sverchkov.

The ceremony came just two days before Fincke and three other Crew-11 astronauts will depart the ISS in a "controlled medical evacuation" due to a medical concern with one of the astronauts. NASA called for the early departure - the first of its kind on the ISS - on Jan. 8 after one of the astronauts experienced a medical issue the day before.

The Crew-11 SpaceX Dragon capsule will undock from the ISS on Jan. 14 to return Fincke to Earth alongside Crew-11 commander Zena Cardman of NASA, and mission specialists Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonov of Russia. NASA is not identifying which astronaut suffered the medical issue out of privacy concerns.

The Crew-11 astronauts are scheduled to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California early on Thursday, Jan. 15. They arrived at the ISS in August 2025.

Crew-11 astronauts pack Dragon for ISS departure

The four astronauts of NASA's Crew-11 SpaceX Dragon mission to the International Space Station ended their day today with work to pack up their spacecraft for their planned medical evacuation from the orbiting lab on Jan. 14.

The Crew-11 astronauts moved their personal items and other gear into the Dragon ahead of their planned undocking on Wednesday, a move that came hours after Crew-11 pilot Mike Fincke, who had been serving as ISS commander, turned control over to a Russian crewmate.

"At the end of Monday’s shift, the foursome retrieved computer tablets from inside Dragon and reviewed the steps they will use while departing the station and reentering Earth’s atmosphere," NASA wrote in an afternoon update.

The Crew-11 astronauts, which in addition to Fincke include commander Zena Cardman and mission specialists Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonov of Russia, will undock from the ISS on Jan. 14 and land early on Jan. 15 following a medical issue with one of the astronauts that occured on Jan. 7, NASA has said. It is the first-ever medical evacuation of the ISS.

With the Crew-11 astronauts at the end of their day, this will be our final post of today. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you tomorrow the latest on their return to Earth.

Crew-11 astronauts prepare for ISS medical evacuation

Good morning. We are currently one day away from planned medical evacuation of Crew-11 astronauts from the International Space Station, which is currently scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 14 at 5:05 p.m. EST (2105 GMT).

Read our full story: 'It is bittersweet': Crew-11 astronaut hands over control of ISS ahead of 1st-ever medical evacuation

Yesterday, Crew-11 pilot Mike Fincke - who was commanding the station's Expedition 74 crew - handed control over to Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchov ahead of his departure with Crew-11 commander Zena Cardman and mission specialists Kimiya Yui and Okeg Platonov.

Today, the astronauts are expected to complete their packing up of the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule that will return them to Earth this week. After undocking on Jan. 14, they will spend 11 hours in transit for a splashdown off the coast of Southern California in the wee hours of Thursday, Jan. 14.

Splashdown is currently scheduled for 3:40 a.m. EST (0740 GMT) on Thursday.

Crew-11 saves time for some last-minute science as they prepare their departure

After yesterday's change of command ceremony, astronauts aboard the International Space Station began preparing their SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft for departure. Amid the prep, however, there is still time for science.

An update describes NASA astronaut Zena Cardman using the station's Ultrasound 2 instrument to image NASA astronaut Chris Williams' arteries and collected blood pressure measurements. The two also conducted an ocular examination on one of Cardman's eyes, to assess how her retina, cornea, and lens have been affected by microgravity.

NASA is still targeting Wednesday (Jan. 14) at 5 p.m. EST (2200) for Crew-11's undocking from the ISS. They are expected to splash down off the U.S. Pacific Coast aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour about 11 hours later.

"The time I have left in space is also running out."

Crew-11 astronauts are winding down their last 24 hours aboard the International Space Station. Tomorrow (Jan. 14) at around 3:30 p.m. EST (2030 GMT), NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov and Japan's Kimiya Yui will close the hatch on their SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour and prepare to undock from the ISS.

As they pack and prepare, each are savoring their last views of Earth from space, like this one from Yui posted on X, featuring Japan's HTV-X cargo vehicle docked with the Earth-facing port of the station's Harmony module.

"The time I have left in space is also running out," a translation of Yui's post reads. "Today, my hero 'HTV-X'-kun guided me through the night sky of Earth & space."

Crew-11 astronauts are 'go' for Jan. 14 medical evacuation from ISS

The four astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-11 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) are officially "go" to return to Earth on Wednesday (Jan. 14).

Mission managers gave the go-ahead for undocking today (Jan. 13), NASA officials announced in an update. NASA's Zena Cardman will command Crew-11's SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, while fellow agency astronaut Mike Fincke will serve as pilot. The other two crewmembers, Japan's Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, are mission specialists.

Crew-11 arrived at the ISS in early August and was supposed to remain there until mid-February. However, a medical issue arose last week with one of the four crewmembers — NASA has not announced which one, citing privacy concerns — prompting the first-ever medical evacuation from the orbiting lab.

Undocking is scheduled for 5:05 p.m. EST (2205 GMT) on Wednesday, with splashdown expected less than 11 hours later. And it looks like Mother Nature will cooperate with this plan.

"Weather is looking excellent for Dragon’s parachute-assisted splashdown off the coast of California at 3:41 a.m. [EST] on Thursday," NASA officials wrote in the update.

By the 20th century, rocketry had transformed from curiosity to cutting‑edge science. Visionaries like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth developed the theories and technologies that made true spaceflight possible.

The Cold War accelerated rocket development at a breathtaking pace. Nations raced to build more powerful launch systems, leading to milestones like Sputnik, the first human spaceflights, and the Saturn V. Each achievement pushed the boundaries of engineering and reshaped humanity’s relationship with space.

Today, rockets continue to evolve as new materials, reusable designs, and private‑sector innovation redefine what's possible. This quiz will take you on a journey through the major moments, breakthroughs, and personalities that propelled rocketry from ancient sparks to the space age and beyond.

Whether you're a space buff, a history fan, or just curious about the science of rockets, get ready to see how much of this incredible history you've mastered.

See how well you score below!

Created in 2019, the Space Force is tasked with protecting America's interests in orbit. While its responsibilities are serious, the idea of a dedicated military branch for space has sparked curiosity and plenty of questions throughout its history.

How much do you really know about the Guardians who serve in this branch? Do you know their main mission, their history, or the kinds of operations they oversee? The answers might surprise you, and they reveal just how vital space has become to everyday life on Earth.

Whether you're a military buff, a sci‑fi fan, or just curious about America's newest frontier, it's time to see if you're ready to join the Guardians in spirit.

See how well you score below!

The bright, blurry patch near the center of the image is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy located about 160,000 light-years from Earth. It's close enough to be a familiar sight to skywatchers in the Southern Hemisphere, where it appears as a pale smudge to the naked eye.

What is it?

This image captures two very different kinds of glow at once. Along the bottom edge of the frame, Earth's horizon arcs in bright blue, capped with layered bands of yellow, green and faint red light. Those luminous layers are airglow, a natural shimmer produced when atoms and molecules high in Earth's atmosphere release energy after being excited by sunlight and chemical reactions.

Above that thin, glowing edge, the star field opens up, and sitting among the points of light is the Large Magellanic Cloud, an irregular dwarf galaxy containing billions of stars. It looks soft and cloud-like not because it's made of vapor, but because it's so densely packed with stars, gas, and nebulae that our eyes (and even cameras at modest focal lengths) blend many of its lights into a bright haze.

Where is it?

The photograph was taken from the International Space Station, which orbits Earth at an average altitude of 248 miles (400 kilometers).

Why is it amazing?

The LMC is more than a photogenic companion to the airglow spotted in this image. It's a hotbed of star formation, full of bright nebulae and turbulent clouds where new stars are being born. Because it's close and relatively unobscured compared with many regions of the Milky Way's crowded disk, astronomers use it as a natural laboratory for studying how stars and the dust between them evolve over time. Observing star-forming regions in another galaxy helps researchers test whether the processes we see in our own neighborhood play out the same way under slightly different conditions.

The LMC's scientific importance is anchored by one of the most famous stellar events of the modern era: Supernova 1987A, the closest observed supernova in hundreds of years. That explosion briefly blazed with astonishing intensity and gave scientists a rare chance to watch the aftermath unfold in detail for decades. Over time, observations revealed how the blast interacted with surrounding material, including a bright ring of gas that continued to glow as it was energized by the shock wave. More recently, astronomers have studied how large quantities of dust formed in the supernova's expanding remains — material that can later become the raw ingredient for new stars and planets.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about supernovae and the Large Magellanic Cloud.

For over two centuries, we have watched this star. R Leonis is a Mira variable, a type of aging star that pulsates like a rhythmic, celestial heart. It expands and contracts, dimming and brightening with a regularity that makes it a favorite observing target for backyard astronomers and professional researchers alike. We thought we had its rhythm figured out — a little wobble here, a slight drift there, but mostly a steady, predictable drumbeat in the constellation Leo, the Lion.

But a recent analysis of 200 years of data has revealed that this cosmic heart is beginning to beat faster.

In a new paper accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and available as a preprint via arXiv, researcher Mike Goldsmith dove into the historical records of R Leonis. By combing through the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) archives, Goldsmith tracked the star's brightest and dimmest points across more than two centuries. The result? This old star is changing.

The most shocking finding is that the star's fundamental pulse, which is the time it takes to go from bright to dim and back again, has shortened by about three days since the early 1800s. In the grand scheme of a star's life, three days might seem insignificant. But for a star that usually sticks to a strict schedule, it is a foundational shift. It is the stellar equivalent of your formerly consistent resting heart rate suddenly picking up speed for no apparent reason.

So, what does the faster pulse mean?

The paper suggests we are witnessing the actual, real-time evolution of a star. R Leonis is an oxygen-rich Mira variable, a massive star nearing the end of its life. As it burns through its final reserves of fuel, its internal structure shifts. But the period shortening isn't just a straight line. Goldsmith found clear modulations — long-term cycles of change — on timescales of roughly 35 and 98 years. It appears that the star has multiple overlapping rhythms, like a drummer trying to play three different time signatures at once.

And then there's the dust.

We have always known that these stars are messy creatures. They cough up huge clouds of soot and gas into space, creating a circumstellar disk. Goldsmith noticed something perplexing: The star's dimmest moments show a strange coherence; they stay at a very similar brightness for decades, before shifting. This finding suggests that the dust shells surrounding R Leonis aren't just drifting away sluggishly; they are evolving, thickening and thinning in ways that fundamentally change how we see the star.

The paper relies heavily on historical observations, and while the AAVSO data offer useful historical context, measuring a star's brightness by the naked eye in the year 1820 is a bit different from using a modern CCD camera on a state-of-the-art telescope. There is always a chance that some of these modulations are artifacts of how we observe, rather than indications of how the star behaves.

But if Goldsmith is right, R Leonis is giving us a front-row seat to the messy, beautiful death of a star. It isn't a quiet exit; it is a series of fits and starts, a dance that is slowly accelerating as the star prepares for its final act.

As more data flow in from the next decade of digital surveys, we might finally understand if this period shortening is a permanent trend or just a passing phase. For now, the "heart of the lion" beats faster. It is enough to keep us watching.

Galactic Resource Utilization Space (GRU), founded by Berkeley graduate Skyler Chan, launched their booking website Monday (Jan. 12), unveiling details of the hotel's architecture. The company said in a statement they would use "a proprietary habitation modules system and automated process for transforming lunar soil into durable structures" to meet the ambitious deadline. Construction is expected to begin in 2029, the company added, pending regulatory approval.

The hotel's early clientele are expected to be participants of previous commercial space flights and rich, adventurous newlyweds looking for an out-of-this-world honeymoon experience. The company believes that tourism is key for enabling the lunar economy to fully take off, providing "the fastest path for humanity to become interplanetary."

"We live during an inflection point where we can actually become interplanetary before we die," Chan said in the statement. "If we succeed, billions of human lives will be born on the moon and Mars and be able to experience the beauty of lunar and martian life."

Chan is a 21-year-old graduate in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California Berkeley and developed the moon hotel idea as part of the start-up accelerator Y-Combinator. Chan said he has raised funds for the project from investors behind SpaceX and Anduril, a company developing autonomous defence systems.

A permanent base on the moon is part of the vision for the U.S. expansion in space spearheaded by the new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman with support of President Donald Trump. Chan hopes GRU can play a role in making those plans a reality.

The company has also released a white paper outlining a strategy for the expansion of humankind's presence on the moon starting with the high-end hotel and expanding into a wider settlement.

"I've been obsessed with space since I was a kid," Chan said. "I've always wanted to become an astronaut, and feel extremely fortunate to be doing my life's work."

You can get the Canon 12x36 IS III binoculars on sale for $656 on Amazon.

With the new moon coming up on Jan. 18, the skies will be free of moonlight, making faint deep-space objects easier to spot. With 12x magnification and image stabilization, these binoculars will help you get detailed views of objects like Orion's Nebula (M42), the Pleiades star cluster (M45) and the Beehive cluster (M44) in Cancer.

• We've also got you covered with reviews and rankings of the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, drones, Lego, streaming and more.

In our full review of the Canon 12x36 IS III binoculars, we were impressed with their astronomy use despite only having 36mm objective lenses. Normally, we wouldn't recommend binoculars with such small objective lenses for astronomy but thanks to the excellent image-stabilization (IS) and 12x magnification, they offer good views of space objects, like constellations and the Orion nebula (M42).

The binoculars also feature the Porro II prism design, which is leaner than binoculars with traditional Porro lenses, so you get a strong optical quality with a compact form factor. On top of this, a field flattener lens also assures a crisp view from edge-to-edge with minimal chromatic aberration.

Image-stabilized binoculars can get pricey quite fast but in recent months we have seen more and more models go on sale with some good reductions. This deal from Amazon gets you 25% off the Canon 12x36 IS III at a sale price of $656. It's the cheapest they have been since March last year and will make a great purchase ahead of the new moon on Jan. 18, when you can use them to scope out deep-space objects like nebulas, galaxies and star clusters.

Key features: 12x magnification, 36mm objective lenses, 5-degree angular field of view, 14.5mm eye relief, 23 oz (660 g) weight, 0.8-degree correction angle.

Product launched: May 2015

Price history: The Canon 12x36 IS III binoculars usually retail for $880 but they are currently on sale for $656 from Amazon. This is the cheapest they have been since January 2025, when they were $628.

Price comparison: Amazon: $656 | Walmart: $673 | Best Buy: $780

Reviews consensus: We gave the Canon 12x36 IS III binoculars a huge four and a half stars for its strong stabilization that gave us steady views of the night sky and enhanced our stargazing experience. It also functions as a great pair of wildlife watching binoculars, too.

Space: ★★★★½ | LiveScience: ★★★★½ | DigitalCameraWorld: ★★★★½

✅ Buy it if: You want some binoculars for amateur stargazing that double up as a great pair for terrestrial use.

❌ Don't buy it if: You prioritise huge objective lenses over other features like image stabilization. A pair like Celestron SkyMaster Pro 15x70 binoculars might be better if this is the case.

Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors, drones, lego and much more.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched 29 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit from Florida on Monday (Jan. 12).

The two-stage booster lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at the Cape Canaveral Space Station at 4:08 p.m. EST (2108 GMT) and entered space about nine minutes later. The satellites (Group 6-98) were deployed about 50 minutes later after a coast period and a second burn of the Falcon 9's upper stage .

"Deployment of 29 Starlink satellites confirmed," SpaceX reported on the X social media network.

The launch was the 13th flight of the Falcon 9's first stage, Booster 1078. It again performed a successful propulsive landing, touching down on the droneship "A Shortfall of Gravitas" in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Starlink service offers broadband internet access, especially in areas around the world where other means of connectively is not present. The megaconstellation of nearly 9,500 active satellites also supports wifi on airliners and cell-to-satellite capabilities for select carriers.

Monday's launch was SpaceX's fifth for the year out of 615 over the history of the company.

Kelly — a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot and NASA astronaut who currently serves as a U.S. Senator (D-Ariz.) — announced today (Jan. 12) that he's suing the Pentagon and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth over their plan to censure him for statements he made in a video late last year.

"Pete Hegseth is coming after what I earned through my twenty-five years of military service, in violation of my rights as an American, as a retired veteran, and as a United States Senator whose job is to hold him— and this or any administration — accountable," Kelly said in an X post today. "His unconstitutional crusade against me sends a chilling message to every retired member of the military: if you speak out and say something that the President or Secretary of Defense doesn’t like, you will be censured, threatened with demotion, or even prosecuted."

Mark Kelly is a former captain in the U.S. Navy who flew 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm. In late November, he and five other Congressmen with military or intelligence backgrounds put together a 90-second video reminding U.S. servicemembers not to obey illegal orders.

President Donald Trump quickly condemned the video as seditious, and the Pentagon announced that it was investigating Kelly for potential misconduct.

Last week, Hegseth reported that the Department of Defense is taking "administrative action" against the former space shuttle astronaut.

"The department has initiated retirement grade determination proceedings under 10 U.S.C. § 1370(f), with reduction in his retired grade resulting in a corresponding reduction in retired pay," Hegseth wrote via X on Jan. 5. "To ensure this action, the Secretary of War has also issued a formal Letter of Censure, which outlines the totality of Captain (for now) Kelly's reckless misconduct. This Censure is a necessary process step, and will be placed in Captain Kelly's official and permanent military personnel file."

(In September, President Trump issued an executive order rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War, but the former remains its official name.)

Kelly has defended himself against such accusations and actions at every step, and his newly filed lawsuit takes the fight to a new level.

"Every servicemember knows military rank is earned, not given. It's earned through the risks you take, the sacrifices you and your family make, the leadership you display, and the respect you earn from the superiors who recommend you for promotion," Kelly wrote in today's X post.

"Now, Pete Hegseth wants our longest-serving military veterans to live with the constant threat that they could be deprived of their rank and pay years or even decades after they leave the military just because he or another Secretary of Defense doesn't like what they've said. That's not the way things work in the United States of America, and I won't stand for it," he added.

The lawsuit, which was filed today in Washington, D.C., argues that the censure letter, retirement grade determination process and related actions are "unlawful and unconstitutional" for a variety of reasons.

"The First Amendment forbids the government and its officials from punishing disfavored expression or retaliating against protected speech. That prohibition applies with particular force to legislators speaking on matters of public policy," it reads. "The Secretary's letter makes clear on its face that he is disciplining Senator Kelly solely for the content and viewpoint of his political speech."

That's the word according to the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, a "minibus" legislative package passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Jan. 8. Next up is the Senate vote.

"As proposed in the budget, the agreement does not support the existing Mars Sample Return (MSR) program," the minibus reads, in a section called Mars Future Missions. However, the technological capabilities being developed in the MSR program, the Act explains, "are not only critical to the success of future science missions but also to human exploration of the moon and Mars."

Deeply concerned

A group reacting to the MSR termination news is the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG). It serves as a community-based, interdisciplinary forum for inquiry and analysis to support NASA Mars exploration objectives.

The MEPAG Steering Committee is encouraged by the latest budget language for NASA and planetary science; the minibus allocates $24.4 billion for the agency in fiscal year 2026, compared to the $18.8 billion that the White House proposed in its budget request.

However, "we are deeply concerned by the cancellation of the MSR program," said Victoria Hamilton, chair of MEPAG and a leading space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder.

Tantalizing samples

MSR has been the top planetary science mission priority of the last two astronomy and astrophysics Decadal Surveys, the MEPAG chair said. These are major reports prepared by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine at the request of NASA every 10 years.

"We are on the cusp of finally determining whether there was life on ancient Mars, and the logic for where to go and which samples to collect has been rigorously and widely debated," Hamilton told Space.com. And as a result, she said, "there are incredibly tantalizing samples in the Perseverance rover's cache that could revolutionize our understanding of life in the solar system.

Perseverance has been dutifully scouting out Mars' Jezero Crater since early 2021, on the prowl for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet, gathering samples of rock, regolith, and atmosphere for eventual return to Earth.

Invaluable information

"These samples also will provide invaluable information about the surface environment of Mars for the Moon to Mars program that could greatly reduce risk to human explorers and save billions of taxpayer dollars by reducing the need to engineer around a multitude of unknowns about the Martian environment," said Hamilton.

A program like MSR is also a symbol of America's leadership in deep space exploration, a stated priority of the Trump administration.

"But that leadership is threatened by other nations who have announced their intention to conduct their own Mars sample return missions in the near future," Hamilton said, alluding to China's robotic Mars sample endeavor in the coming years.

Sit on the sidelines

"It would be devastating to America's and NASA's reputation if the United States is forced to sit on the sidelines as remarkable scientific discoveries are made by the scientists of a nation with whom we are not even allowed to collaborate scientifically," said Hamilton. "It is difficult to understand how the cancellation of MSR is anything but an admission that returning samples from Mars is too hard for the United States."

In that case, Hamilton added, "how do we expect to be successful at something orders of magnitude more ambitious and costly as the Moon to Mars program, where human lives are at stake?"

Hamilton said that MEPAG is also concerned about what cancelling MSR means for the future of the Mars Perseverance rover.

"Maintaining the integrity and accessibility of the samples collected so far is of great importance," Hamilton said. "We urge NASA to quickly begin working with the scientific community to develop a plan that both preserves the samples and our ability to retrieve them, while also allowing Perseverance to continue conducting phenomenal science on Mars."

On one hand, while it is fair to want to revisit the MSR architecture and cost of the remaining portions of the program, Hamilton noted that Congress has long used the Decadal Surveys as a guide to scientific priorities.

"Abandoning this guidance is a deeply concerning move with implications not just for U.S. space leadership but other NASA priorities such as Moon to Mars," Hamilton concluded.

Flat funding

Eyeing the NASA budget wrangling situation is Jack Kiraly, director of government relations for The Planetary Society, an independent space advocacy group.

The recently released fiscal year 2026 funding bill for NASA is pegged at $24.4 billion, with $7.25 billion allocated for the space agency's Science Mission Directorate. That's a 1% decrease from previous years and a near-total rejection of proposed cuts advocated earlier by the Trump White House, Kiraly said. (Trump's 2026 budget request slashed NASA funding by 24%, and also cancelled the MSR campaign as it is currently envisioned.)

"This flat funding will allow NASA to continue progress on many of its most ambitious space science projects," Kiraly told Space.com. "Unfortunately, Mars Sample Return, as currently formulated, will be canceled as a result of the bill's passage."

A path forward?

But that's not to say that the idea of sample return is canceled, said Kiraly. "In fact, the bill instructs NASA to fund a Mars Future Missions program line to formulate and develop a common technological heritage that enables more robotic scientific investigations and eventually crewed exploration missions of the Red Planet."

Despite this cancellation of the MSR program, Kiraly said, flat funding for NASA Science overall and this direction will help develop a sustainable path forward for Mars exploration that includes a future sample return campaign.

"Hopefully, that involves returning the scientifically compelling samples already collected by the Perseverance rover," Kiraly said.

Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) completed a change-of-command ceremony today (Jan. 12) ahead of the early departure of SpaceX's Crew-11 mission, which is leaving soon due to an undisclosed medical condition concerning one of its crewmembers.

The decision to cut the Crew-11 mission short came Friday (Jan. 9), after a planned spacewalk the previous day had to be canceled due to "medical concerns." NASA did not reveal details about the situation, including which astronaut was experiencing the issue, due to privacy concerns, but quickly put plans into motion after making the decision to end the crew's rotation early in the first-ever medical evacuation in ISS history.

Crew-11 is scheduled to depart the ISS on Wednesday afternoon (Jan. 14), riding SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour back to Earth for a Pacific Coast splashdown early Thursday morning (Jan. 15). Before they leave, however, command (and the symbolic key) of the orbital lab needs to be transferred from NASA astronaut Mike Fincke to Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov — and that's what happened today.

The seven astronauts of the ISS' current Expedition 74 gathered in the Japanese laboratory module for the occasion, floating behind Fincke and Kud-Sverchkov as each made remarks. "It's bittersweet," Fincke said during the livestreamed ceremony, before passing the microphone around so other crewmembers could share fond memories of the departing astronauts.

"We're leaving you all with a lot of work, but also with a lot of knowledge knowing that you guys are really going to do super well," Fincke said after getting the microphone back, presenting the large metal "key" to the ISS to Kud-Sverchkov. "Sergey, it's an honor and a pleasure to be a commander, and I cannot imagine being happier than to hand over command to you."

Crew-11 is scheduled to undock from the ISS Wednesday afternoon. Hatch closing and departure coverage is set to begin on Wednesday at 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT), with departure set for 5 p.m. EST (2200 GMT). After an 11-hour deorbit journey, the Endeavour Dragon spacecraft and its crew are expected to splash down in the Pacific Ocean on Thursday around 3:40 a.m. EST (0840 GMT).

Crew-11 launched to the space station on Aug. 1, 2025, carrying Fincke and NASA astronaut Zena Cardman, Russia's Oleg Platonov and Kimiya Yui from Japan. They were scheduled to return sometime after the arrival of their replacements aboard the Crew-12 mission, which is expected to launch in mid-February.

The mysterious medical condition threw a wrench into those plans, though. The astronauts' early departure will leave a skeleton crew of three aboard the station, with NASA astronaut Chris Williams as the sole American onboard. Ideally, NASA prefers that crews overlap to avoid potential gaps in maintenance and research, but the agency has deemed this medical situation serious enough to bring Crew-11 home ASAP.

NASA is still determining if an earlier launch date for Crew-12 will be feasible. The agency is simultaneously working the logistics to roll its Artemis 2 Space Launch System rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center to its pad at Launch Complex-39B. Rollout for SLS is scheduled for Jan. 17, with the first launch opportunity for the Artemis 2 astronaut mission around the moon opening on Feb. 6.

Envision, which began construction in 2025, will map the atmosphere and geology of Earth's closest neighbor, the fiery Venus. The spacecraft will rely on a NASA-made instrument called VenSar — a novel synthetic aperture radar — to map the planet's surface in three dimensions and with a resolution of up to 3 feet (10 meters).

Funding for the instrument, currently being built by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is, however, uncertain. The Trump administration included VenSar in the sweeping cuts to NASA's science funding, which are part of the president's 2026 budget proposal. Although the U.S. Congress is taking steps to restore the funding, insiders told Space.com that ESA shouldn't wait too long and might be better served to cut its ties with NASA and build the instrument in Europe if it wants to avoid years of delays.

Envision must lift off for its 15-month journey to Venus in 2033 at the latest, or the distance between the two planets will be such that the trip would be unfeasible, ESA's Director of Science Carol Mundel said at the media briefing, which was held on Jan. 8. Mundel said that missing the 2033 deadline would mean having to wait for at least three years to launch during the next planetary alignment.

"We are in constant contact with NASA on Envision," Mundel said in the online briefing. "We remain in normal collaboration with NASA, but we also appreciate that NASA do continue to have some financial challenges."

Technology exists in Europe to develop VenSar domestically. In fact, the instrument was initially supposed to be built by Airbus in the United Kingdom. But sources say that whoever would be chosen to replace the instrument needs to begin moving fast to make the deadline.

"We continue to discuss with our member states how we can continue to deliver this mission," Mundel said. "We are very well aware of those deadlines."

Mundel added that NASA JPL teams continue "business as usual" with their work on VenSar and have recently passed the preliminary design review, a key early-stage milestone before production begins.

Overall, 19 ESA missions will face funding shortfalls if the Trump administration gets its way. Many of those collaborations, however, are expected to be rescued by Congress, including the gravity-wave detector LISA (the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), a planned constellation of three satellites orbiting in a triangular formation 2.5 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) apart.

On Jan. 6, the U.S. Congress published its budget proposal, which would restore most of the funding cut by Trump and provide NASA with $7.25 billion for science in 2026. The overall NASA budget for 2026 would be $24.4 billion in 2026, only about one billion less than the 2025 spending. (Trump's budget request allocated just $18.8 billion to the agency.)

The confirmation of Jared Isaacman as NASA's next administrator, however, raised concerns among some experts due to Isaacman's known preference for exploration and commercial space technology.

During the media briefing, ESA Director General Joseph Aschbacher said he had not yet met with Isaacman to discuss priorities.

ESA is expecting a busy year overall, Aschbacher said during the briefing, with 65 new satellites built with ESA's participation to be launched. In addition, the BepiColombo spacecraft, launched in 2018, is set to arrive at Mercury, its destination, in December. The probe will commence scientific exploration of the least understood planet of the inner solar system in early 2027.

The delayed HERA mission, launched in October 2024, is also going to meet its study object this year — the double asteroid Didymos/Dimorphos. The smaller of the two space rocks, Dimorphos, was the target of NASA's DART asteroid deflection experiment in 2022. HERA will enable scientists to study the effects of DART's impact in great detail.

In addition to the ongoing uncertainties around NASA's future direction, ESA has some choices to make in its own Human and Robotic Exploration program due to the decisions of its member states, which were made at the agency's latest high-level council. Although the summit, held in Bremen, Germany, in November of last year, passed a record-breaking budget of 22.1 billion Euros ($25.63 billion) for the next three years (an increase of 5 billion Euros, $5.8 billion, compared to ESA's 2022-2025 budget), the member states assigned much less money to human and robotic exploration than the agency had hoped for.

"Based on the level of subscriptions we received in Bremen, we will have to set a number of priorities in [the exploration] program for the years 2026 to 2028," Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA's director for human and robotic exploration, said at the Jan. 8 briefing. "By the end of February, we will have the main priorities set."

Most of ESA's space exploration programs are conducted in cooperation with NASA, including missions to the International Space Station and exploration of the moon and Mars. The NASA budget chaos might possibly impact Europe's delayed ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover. The Mars Sample Return mission, for which ESA was developing a return vehicle, is not expected to go ahead, and the agency is looking to repurpose the technology for an entirely new mission.

Unlike crude oil, which pools in subterranean reservoirs, shale oil is found within shale rocks. Shale forms from layers of fine sediment deposited in ancient lakes or seas, where low-oxygen conditions allow organic matter to accumulate and, over millions of years, generate oil within the rock.

In the past, shale oil reserves were difficult to pinpoint because scientists lacked a complete understanding of how these rocks formed. The new research fills in a key piece of that puzzle. By combining measurements of different elements in Earth's crust and mantle, rock core observations, and natural gamma-ray data from Jurassic-era lake mudstones, the team reconstructed how environmental conditions changed through time. Those changes, they found, linked up with Milankovitch cycles.

Milankovitch cycles are regularly occurring variations in Earth's orbit and tilt that influence our planet's long-term climate, including the timing of ice ages. The cycle of orbital eccentricity — the stretching and shrinking of Earth's elliptical orbit — operates over hundreds of thousands of years.

The rock record revealed that during periods of high orbital eccentricity, stronger seasonal contrasts produced warmer, wetter conditions that boosted nutrient delivery to lakes. Biological productivity surged, leading to the deposition of finely layered, organic-rich mudstones — the types of rocks most favorable for shale oil.

When eccentricity decreased, the climate shifted toward drier conditions. Lake levels dropped, sediment supply changed, and sand-rich deposits spread across basin slopes and into deeper waters, transported by gravity-driven flows. Together, these alternating wet and dry phases created a predictable stacking pattern of rock types across the basin.

The study also showed that sediment accumulated at an average rate of just over four centimeters per thousand years, allowing researchers to align individual rock layers with specific orbital cycles. Using a newly-developed framework based on this research, scientists can better identify where high-quality shale reservoirs are likely to occur.

It's worth noting that shale oil is not only a fossil fuel, but is also extracted through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which carries environmental concerns. Still, until the world fully transitions to renewable energy, oil will remain a major energy source — and combining astronomy with geology is emerging as one of the most powerful tools for finding it.

The team's research was published in the Journal of Paleogeography (Chinese edition) on Sept. 30, 2025.

Having spent the best part of a decade believing it was a freaky parallel dimension populated by sinister creatures of the night, we learned it was actually an Einstein-Rosen Bridge linking Hawkins, Indiana, to another planet — the original home of the evil Mind Flayer.

More commonly known as wormholes, the existence of Einstein-Rosen Bridges was predicted by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in a 1935 paper. These tunnels have a characteristic hourglass shape, with a "throat" connecting two distant points in the universe, theoretically providing a shortcut through the curvature of spacetime — if, of course, these inherently unstable objects stay open long enough for anything to travel through them.

"While the existence of wormholes is entirely theoretical, they have captured the fascination of scientists and science fiction writers alike," science teacher Mr Clarke (Randy Havens) tells a Hawkins Middle School class, and he's not wrong. Below we've assembled a list of sci-fi movies and TV shows that have used Einstein-Rosen Bridges as an explanation for interstellar — or interdimensional — travel.

We've kept this list to TV shows and movies that mention Einstein-Rosen Bridges by name, which is why "Interstellar" and "Stargate" don't make the cut, despite their wormhole-based plots. Spoilers ahead.

The Black Hole (1979)

While "Star Wars" has always been fantasy in space opera clothing, Disney's mission to capitalize on the success of George Lucas's 1977 classic was defiantly hard sci-fi — so much so that it made direct reference to an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.

As mad scientist Dr Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) plots a pioneering flight into the eponymous black hole, he asks sympathetic scientist Dr Alex Durant (Anthony Perkins) to track his progress. "I want you to monitor my flight," Reinhardt says. "Stay as long as you can at the event horizon. There might be an Einstein-Rosen Bridge to consider."

We're guessing, however, that neither Einstein nor Rosen would have postulated the unsubtle heaven and hell metaphors awaiting Reinhardt and his fellow travellers on the other side.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993 - 1999)

"Star Trek" has rarely shied away from exploring complex scientific ideas, while the Bajoran wormhole was utterly fundamental to "Deep Space Nine"'s plot. It seems bizarre, then, that the notion of the "Einstein-Rosen Bridge" only received — as far as we're aware — one mention over the show's seven-season run.

It's not even said out loud, as the words "Einstein" and "Rosen" only appear as part of a school vocabulary list, part of a presentation about wormholes in season 1 episode "In the Hands of the Prophets".

Sliders (1995 - 2000)

This '90s sci-fi show dispatched a quartet of mismatched adventurers on a long-running series of adventures across parallel Earths — places where the Soviet Union rules the United States, or the Golden Gate Bridge is blue rather than orange.

Young genius Quinn Mallory (Jerry O'Connell) had been trying to create an anti-gravity machine when he inadvertently opened a series of "Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky Bridges" between worlds.

And no, we don't know why physicist Boris Podolsky gets a mention, either — presumably the writers' room had a mix-up with the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, an entirely separate thought experiment that doesn't involve wormholes.

Contact (1997)

Dr Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) is, understandably, on the defensive after returning from her mission in an experimental spacecraft built from mysterious alien blueprints.

While she believes she's flown through a rollercoaster of wormholes to reach Vega — and met an alien in the form of her late dad (David Morse) — everybody back home is rather sceptical. It doesn't help that her interstellar adventure has apparently lasted mere fractions of a second.

But, faced with a Congress inquiry, she wheels out the big guns, clearly hoping that some hard science will be enough to bring the politicians on side. "Senator, I believe that the machine opened up a wormhole," Arroway says, "a tunnel through the fabric of spacetime, also known as an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. Because of the effects of general relativity, what I experienced as approximately 18 hours passed instantaneously on Earth." And who could argue with that?

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (2011 - present)

With its sorcerers, gods, and talking raccoons, the MCU doesn't usually get too hung up on academic rigor. Its writers do, however, like to fall back on the Einstein-Rosen Bridge as a quasi-scientific justification for its many interdimensional portals.

Its first mention comes in the original "Thor", when Dr Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) observes that the lensing around the anomaly that delivered Thor to Earth is "characteristic of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge". Dr Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) explains it as "a theoretical connection between two different points in spacetime", before Foster clarifies that it's "a wormhole".

It turns out that the Bifrost, the rainbow bridge connecting Midgard (aka Earth) to Asgard, is a very colorful Einstein-Rosen Bridge guarded by the all-seeing Heimdall (Idris Elba) — as Thor puts it, he comes from a place where magic and science are "one and the same thing".

The phenomenon is also mentioned on several occasions in TV spin-off "Agents of S.H. I.E.L.D.", while "Nova: Einstein-Rosen Bridges with Dr Erik Selvig" is a (fictional) documentary available on the plane to Europe in "Spider-Man: Far from Home".

Meanwhile, in "Thor: Ragnarok", Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) observes that the infamous Devil's Anus (a wormhole in the atmosphere of Sakaar) "looks like a collapsing neutron star inside of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge". Obviously…

Stranger Things (2016 - 2026)

With the benefit of hindsight, this was a major giveaway. Mr Clarke's class about Einstein-Rosen Bridges in season 5's third episode, "The Turnbow Trap", always seemed a tad advanced for middle-school students.

Luckily, it also provided some handy exposition for one of the biggest reveals of the final episodes, as star student Erica (Priah Ferguson) explained that "wormholes are neat because they allow matter to travel between galaxies or dimensions without crossing the space between".

Fast forward to "Escape to Camazotz" (episode 6) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) has realized — with the help of dodgy scientist Dr Brenner's (Matthew Modine) notebooks — that there's more to the spooky parallel world of the Upside Down than we originally thought.

"It isn't another dimension, it's not another world," Dustin says. "It's a wormhole, a bridge between two points in time and space. Between our world and another."

When the camera zooms out to show how the Upside Down connects our world with the so-called Abyss/Dimension X, we see that it exhibits a textbook Einstein-Rosen Bridge structure. It also has exotic matter at its heart, introducing even more theoretical physics to "Stranger Things"' sci-fi mix.

Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have discovered an unexpected shockwave around a dead star. The team behind the shock discovery (in more ways than one) is baffled by this beautiful arc of material, which defies expectations and current theories surrounding such stellar remains. Thus, it could redefine our understanding of how dead stars interact with their surroundings.

This stellar remnant is a white dwarf, the exhausted stellar core left over when a star around the same mass as the sun runs out of the fuel for nuclear fusion and sheds its outer layers. This white dwarf is designated RXJ0528+2838 and is located 730 light-years away from Earth. It has a companion star in orbit around it, from which the dead star is stripping material with its gravity. In normal circumstances, this matter would usually form a disk around the white dwarf that gradually drops material to its surface, leaving other stellar matter to be lost to space via powerful outflows that fling it into space. However, in the case of RXJ0528+2838, there is no trace of such a disk, and that makes the presence of the shockwave entirely unexpected.

"We found something never seen before and, more importantly, entirely unexpected," team leader Simone Scaringi of Durham University in the U.K. said in a statement. "The surprise that a supposedly quiet, discless system could drive such a spectacular nebula was one of those rare 'wow' moments."

The shockwave, observed by the VLT's Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), is being created as the white dwarf moves through space, rotating around the center of the Milky Way as it does, much as the sun and our galaxy's other stars do. The dead star is pushing the interstellar gas in front of it as it travels, creating a type of shockwave called a bow shock, similar to how a wave builds up in front of the bow of a ship.

"Our observations reveal a powerful outflow that, according to our current understanding, shouldn't be there," Krystian Iłkiewicz, a postdoctoral researcher at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center in Warsaw, Poland, said.

The team first saw hints at this unexpected structure when they examined images of RXJ0528+2838 captured by the Isaac Newton Telescope in Spain. Noting the unusual shape of this formation, they followed these initial observations up with the VLT's MUSE instrument.

"Observations with the MUSE instrument allowed us to map the bow shock in detail and analyse its composition," Iłkiewicz added. "This was crucial to confirm that the structure really originates from the binary system and not from an unrelated nebula or interstellar cloud."

Both the size and the shape of the bow shock around RXJ0528+2838 imply to the team that material has been flowing away from this white dwarf for at least 1,000 years. That is a mystery in itself, as scientists can't explain how a white dwarf with no surrounding disk of matter can maintain an outflow for such a prolonged period of time.

The team isn't completely in the dark with regards to this, though. They suspect that the powerful magnetic field of RXJ0528+2838 is channeling stellar matter stolen from the companion star directly to the white dwarf, without giving a disk a chance to form.

"Our finding shows that even without a disc, these systems can drive powerful outflows, revealing a mechanism we do not yet understand,” Iłkiewicz said. "This discovery challenges the standard picture of how matter moves and interacts in these extreme binary systems."

However, even with this magnetic field accounted for, the team thinks that the shockwave should only have been maintained for around 100 years. That means there must be another energy source or "mystery engine" in this system that has been powering this outflow and the shockwave it creates for a period ten times longer than that.

Solving this mystery could depend on studying further binary systems of this type using the forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in the same location as the VLT operates, the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile.

Scaringi predicts that the ELT will help astronomers to "map more of these systems as well as fainter ones and detect similar systems in detail, ultimately helping in understanding the mysterious energy source that remains unexplained."

The team's research was published on Monday (Jan. 12) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Seven companies have been awarded three-year, fixed-price contracts to explore the engineering challenges that need tackling in order to create what will be one of NASA's most powerful telescopes ever. The companies include Astroscale, BAE Systems Space and Mission Systems, Busek, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Zecoat.

Each will study ways to fulfill the hardware requirements for HWO, which is being designed to search for signs of life by looking at the light passing through the atmospheres of planets as they orbit stars hundreds and thousands of light-years away. In a Jan. 5 statement announcing the contract selectees, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman called the project "exactly the kind of bold, forward-leaning science that only NASA can undertake.”

"Humanity is waiting for the breakthroughs this mission is capable of achieving and the questions it could help us answer about life in the universe. We intend to move with urgency, and expedite timelines to the greatest extent possible to bring these discoveries to the world," Isaacman said in the release.

NASA hopes the space telescope can be complete in time to launch by the late 2030s or early 2040s. By then, it will be equipped with technologies that don't yet exist. To fulfill its mission, HWO will need to maintain stability within its optical system capable of functioning within a marginal width the size of a single atom.

The telescope's design, which has not yet been finalized, also calls for a novel coronagraph "thousands of times more capable than any space coronagraph ever built," the release says, to block intrusive peripheral photon sources from distorting images and shade the light from the sun. NASA also wants HWO to be serviceable, so that, in the event of a malfunction or something like a micrometeoroid impact, the space agency can launch repair missions to extend the telescope's life.

"Awards like these are a critical component of our incubator program for future missions, which combines government leadership with commercial innovation to make what is impossible today rapidly implementable in the future," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division in the statement.

By the time its construction is complete, NASA hopes HWO will build upon the scientific and institutional knowledge that came from other flagship space telescope missions, including Hubble, James Webb and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, expected to launch later this year.

After a string of dramatic failures, the huge Starship rocket from SpaceX had a fully successful test on Oct. 13, 2025. A couple more test flights, and SpaceX plans to launch it into orbit.

A month later, a rival rocket company, Blue Origin, flew its almost-as-large New Glenn rocket all the way to orbit and sent spacecraft on their way to Mars.

While these successful flights are exciting news for future missions to the Moon as well as other planets, I've argued for several years that these superheavy-lift rockets can also boost research in my own specialty, astronomy – the study of stars and galaxies far beyond our solar system – to new heights.

Taking the broad view

Why do I say that? Astronomy needs space. Getting above the atmosphere allows telescopes to detect vastly more of the electromagnetic spectrum than visible light alone. At these heights, telescopes can detect light at much longer and shorter wavelengths, which are otherwise blocked by Earth's atmosphere.

To get an idea of how that has enriched astronomy, imagine listening to someone play the piano, but only in one octave. The music would sound much richer if they used the full keyboard.

With the broader spectrum in view, astronomers can see objects in the sky that are much colder than stars, but also objects that are far hotter.

How much cooler and hotter? The hottest stars you can see in visible light are about 10 times hotter than the coolest. With the whole infrared-to-X-ray spectrum, the temperatures that come into view can be 1,000 times colder or 1,000 times hotter than regular stars.

Scientists have had nearly 50 years of access to the full light spectrum with sets of increasingly powerful telescopes. Alas, this access has come at an ever-increasing cost, too. The newest telescope is the spectacular James Webb Space Telescope, which cost about US$10 billion and detects a portion of the infrared spectrum. At that forbidding price, NASA can't afford to match Webb across the spectrum by building its full infrared and X-ray siblings.

We'll have to wait a long time even for one more. The estimated date to launch the next "Great Observatory" is a distant 2045 and may be later. The range of notes astronomers can play will shrink, along with our views of the universe.

Escaping the trap with heavy-lift vehicles

These new rockets give us a chance to escape this trap. For the same cost, they can send about 10 times more mass to orbit, and they have bodies about twice as wide, compared with the rockets that have been in use for decades.

Mass matters because telescopes contain heavy mirrors, and the bigger the mirror, the better they work. For example, building Webb's large mirror meant finding a way to make a superb mirror that was 10 times lighter in weight per square meter than the already lightweight Hubble mirror. The engineers found a solution that was technically sweet but financially costly.

Similarly, the size of the rocket's body matters because to fit Webb's 21-foot-diameter mirror (6.5 meters) into the 13-foot-diameter body (4 meters) of its ride, the Ariane V rocket, it had to fold up like origami for launch. Normally, space missions try to avoid any moving parts, but for Webb they had no choice.

Again, the result was a technical triumph, but the complexity introduced over 300 places where one mistake could have ended the mission. Each one of the over 300 locations had to be 300 times less likely to fail than if there had been only one, pumping up the design, manufacturing and testing requirements – and inflating the cost.

The larger, wider Starship and New Glenn rockets mean that building a Webb-like space telescope today could be done with none of the origami-like folding and unfolding, with their attendant risks, and so be much cheaper.

New ideas

This opportunity is being seized by at least three teams. First, a proposed deep infrared telescope called Origins would take advantage of superheavy lift. Scientists at Caltech are studying a potential smaller version called Prima.

Second, an X-ray telescope that can take pictures as sharp as Webb – with a sensitivity to match – would likely use thicker and heavier mirrors than imagined just a few years ago.

And third, a study published in 2025 proposes a very low-frequency radio telescope, GO-LoW, that also takes advantage of using more mass. GO-LoW would be made of 100,000 tiny telescopes, so mass production savings kick in too.

All three of these telescopes would be easily 100 times more sensitive than their predecessors and at least comparable to Webb in their own bands of the spectrum.

It would be ideal if engineers could get these telescopes down to half the cost of a large observatory like Webb. Then, for the same price, NASA could fly two new Great Observatories instead of resigning itself to building one. If it could get the cost down to a third, it could potentially fly a full spectrum-spanning set.

Big challenges, big payoff

Of course, a lot could go wrong. For one thing, these rockets may not perform as advertised, either in capability or cost. Still, investing in a few starting studies won't cost much and will likely have a big payoff.

For another, like the poet Goethe on his deathbed, we astronomers will always be asking for "more light." But if we call for yet bigger and more complex telescopes than the already awesome Great Observatories recommended by the National Academies 2020 Astronomy Survey, then we will bring back all the costly issues faced by the Webb designers.

Space agencies have the challenge of keeping the astronomers' endless desires under strict control – building to cost must come first.

But if agencies can keep astronomers' ambitions from becoming too astronomical, while taking full advantage of the new design space opened up by the superheavy-lift rockets, then our understanding of the universe could advance beyond imagination in just a decade or so.

What is it?

Iceberg A-23A is considered a tabular iceberg, essentially a giant floating slab that calved Antarctica's Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986, the same year as the Chernobyl explosion and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Scientists have been tracking the iceberg for decades, making it one of the largest and longest-observed icebergs on record.

The "blue stripes" cutting across the iceberg are meltwater ponds: pools of liquid water that collect in low spots on the ice surface when air temperatures rise and sunlight intensifies during the austral summer. NASA's Terra satellite captured this image on Dec. 26, 2025 and the next day an astronaut aboard the International Space Station snapped an even closer view of the meltwater ponds using a Nikon Z9 camera to do so.

Where is it?

This image was taken from low Earth Orbit by NASA's Terra satellite. As of early January 2026, iceberg A-23A is drifting in the South Atlantic Ocean, between the eastern tip of South America and South Georgia Island.

Why is it amazing?

Given how large and how long Iceberg A-23A has been around, there's no guarantee it will exist much longer. Satellites like Terra help scientists capture in real time the mechanics of how big ice slabs break apart. When water gathers inside the meltwater ponds and fractures in an iceberg, its weight can pry the slab apart, causing a rapid breakup of events on ice shelves and icebergs, like A-23A. Seeing these features can help scientists test and refine models of how floating ice fails.

When an iceberg as large as A-23A melts, it injects significant cold freshwater into the ocean, which can affect mixing and local circulation. This can lead to upwelling of deeper nutrient rich waters that can help fuel phytoplankton growth, which is a key foundation in the marine food web.

While icebergs are a natural part of how ice shelves and glaciers shed mass, the effects of climate change and global warming are speeding up these processes, making it a key time for researchers to watch from space and track these icy giants.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about icebergs and Earth-observing satellites.

This "mysterious disruptor" is located around 11 billion light-years away and was discovered in 2025 thanks to its gravitational influence. It is now the most distant body ever detected due to its gravitational effects alone.

But astronomers aren't completely in the dark about the mysterious disruptor, however. In fact, they are sure they know what lies at the heart of this strange cosmic body. "The inner central part is consistent with a black hole or dense stellar core, which surprisingly makes up about a quarter of the object's total mass," Vegetti explained. "As we move away from the center, however, the object's density flattens into a large disk-like component. This is a structure we've never seen before, so it could be a new class of dark object."

This strange structure was found in the gravitational lens system JVAS B1938+666. Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon first predicted by Einstein in the 1915 theory of gravity known as general relativity. It occurs when light from a background source passes the curvature of space caused by a massive foreground object, known as a gravitational lens, causing its usually straight path to become curved. The way light is influenced doesn't just allow objects to be seen at great distances via light amplification, but also tells scientists a great deal about the way mass is distributed within the lensing system itself.

The gravitational lens JVAS B1938+666 consists of massive bodies ranging from 6.5 billion to 11 billion light-years away, including this "mysterious disruptor," the most distant element of Jvas B1938+666. A team of astronomers attempted to reconstruct the distribution of mass in the object, revealing its so-called "density profile."

That's a highly complex procedure considering JVAS B1938+666 consists of many different bodies, the main component of which is a massive elliptical galaxy. Unlike those other bodies, however, the mysterious disruptor is completely invisible.

"Trying to separate all the different mass components of such a distant, low-mass object using gravitational lensing was extremely challenging and incredibly exciting," team leader Simona Vegetti of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany, said in a statement. "We're working with high-quality data and complex models, and just when I thought we had it all figured out, its properties threw up another surprise. "It's precisely this combination of difficulty and mystery that makes this object so fascinating."

What do we know about the mysterious disruptor so far?

To investigate the mysterious disruptor, Vegetti and colleagues first set about analyzing the small disturbances, or perturbations, that it makes to the overall arc of the gravitational lens JVAS B1938+666. They then compared data collected by an array of telescopes, including the Green Bank Telescope, to various models of dark matter. This revealed that none of these models could explain the mysterious disruptor.

"It has a very strange profile, because it's particularly dense at the center, but it extends enormously," team member Davide Massari of the National Institute for Astrophysics said. "So it's not uniformly distributed: it's as if there were an extremely compact object at the center, but then the profile continues to extend to distances much greater than those typically observed in galaxies or star systems of comparable mass."

Though investigations of the mysterious disruptor have thus far involved radio telescopes, future studies and a potential solution to this conundrum could come courtesy of telescopes operating in other wavelengths of light, including the powerful infrared vision of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)."If we were finally able to observe some form of light emission in the visible or infrared range, we could conclude, for example, that it is a somewhat anomalous ultracompact dwarf galaxy, with an unusually extended stellar halo," team member Cristiana Spingola of the National Institute for Astrophysics. "But if even with JWST we still fail to see starlight or other visible matter, then it would mean that we are dealing with an object whose properties are difficult to explain with current dark matter models."

The team's research was published on Monday (Jan.5) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a powerful array of 66 radio antennas located in northern Chile, the team discovered the first signs of planet formation in the dense gas layers of a system known as Gomez's Hamburger (GoHam). GoHam's tasty appearance is due to the fact that from Earth it is seen edge-on with stacked layers of gas "buns" rotating around a young star "burger." This orientation allows the structure of Go Ham to be viewed in a way that isn't possible for other protoplanetary disks swirling around similar young stars. As such, the study of GoHam and the discovery of tantalizing hints of planet formation could give astronomers a better understanding of how giant planets form at great distances from their parent stars.

"GoHam gives us a rare and clear view of the vertical and radial structure of a very large, nearly edge‑on disk," team leader Charles Law of the University of Virginia said in a statement. "This makes it a benchmark system for testing detailed models of how disks evolve and form planets. The combination of extreme disk size, strong asymmetries, winds, and potential planet formation makes it the perfect laboratory for understanding how giant planets can form far from their star, and how their presence reshapes the surrounding gas and dust."

GoHam is nothing like the image on the menu

ALMA's intricate observations of GoHam allowed Law and colleagues to map the locations of dust grains and gas molecules in the system, finding they had arranged themselves into distinct layers. These gases include two forms of carbon monoxide and several sulfur-based molecules.

The lightest of these gases dwells above the midplane of GoHam, while heavier gases sit closer to this midpoint, leaving the heaviest molecules closest to the midplanes, exactly the sort of ordering or "stratification" that astronomers would expect to see in a system like this.

While the system's dust and large solids are concentrated at the middle of GoHam, its gas is puffed out to a width equivalent to 2,000 times the distance between the sun and the Earth, and it reaches up to a height of several hundred times this distance. That makes GoHam one of the largest protoplanetary disks ever discovered.

This system is also remarkable for the amount of dust it contains, which is estimated to be many times greater than the dust content of similar protoplanetary disks around young stars. Thus, the potential for GoHam to grow giant planets is huge, meaning this could in the future host a multiplanet system.

However, just like your fast food burger never quite looks like the image on the menu, GoHam isn't perfectly formed. In fact, this cosmic burger is lopsided. One side of the disk has an extended and brighter dust emission, which could be the result of a disturbance, possibly a vortex, that is trapping solids. These will become the building blocks of planets in the system.

The northern side of the disk shows traces of a "photoevaporative wind," a phenomenon that occurs when starlight blows gas away from the disk and into space. The team also detected an arc of sulfur monoxide beyond the dust of the disk, but only on one of its sides. This arc aligns with a dense clump of material labelled "GoHam b," which astronomers believe is matter collapsing under its own gravity.

This is likely to be the earliest stage of planet formation in the outer disk of GoHam, which could be a giant planet in a wide orbit far from its parent star.

During a recent visit, I was invited to join Observatory Manager Paul Poncy and visiting guests for a grand tour of the facility, which claims to offer the largest collection of publicly-available telescopes in the United States. The Sunriver community is designated as an International Dark Sky Place., with the actual observatory an affiliate member of Oregon's NASA Space Grant Consortium.

On multiple evenings each week, the private, non-profit Sunriver Observatory hosts spectacular nighttime stargazing opportunities just a few minutes from the majestic Sunriver Lodge and Resort, which is currently resplendent in its fairyland of holiday lights surrounding the golf course and adjacent grounds. Winding around vacation condos and second homes, the road to my destination was soon blanketed in darkness when suddenly habitats vanished as the domed venue appeared up ahead like a spaceship plunked down in a vast flat field.

Upon arrival, Paul Poncy greeted me at the crimson-lit check-in podium beside the parking lot where myself and a few dozen visitors were zipped up for the nippy December weather. Everyone was presented with a red-hued plastic glowstrip to attach to wrists or parkas or shoelaces to aid in nocturnal navigation and soon directed down a pathway past the closed Nature Center.

Staff specialist Bradley McLain delivered a pre-show talk inside a meeting room where nearly 50 people, some coughing and sneezing with mild winter colds, watched a slideshow explaining the basic nature and types of galaxies accompanied by some stunning galactic shots captured by the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes.

Following the 25-minute informative presentation, we all marched back outside guided by the collective glow of red bracelets and entered the main observatory with its central main telescope and two side-wing rooms with rollback roofs lit around the perimeter with red lamps. In each of the viewing areas exposed to the sky, a half-dozen large white telescopes had been set up beforehand, complete with stepladders to reach eyepieces already zeroed in on a planet or galaxy.

Constructed in 1991 by Larry Pratt, the Sunriver Observatory was helmed by local astronomy legend and NASA Solar System Ambassador Bob Grossfeld for more than three decades. Under Grossfeld's careful direction this humble little observatory was eventually named the first International Dark Sky Place in Oregon in 2020.

Solar viewing is also an eye-opening daytime activity the center offers, and the staff recently upgraded their primary solar telescope in November by installing a new Lunt Calcium K module to observe different layers of the sun and solar activity on the surface in far greater detail by utilizing this filter.

"The main telescope in the original dome is a Ritchey-Chretien with a 20-inch aperture, and it's a very flexible telescope," Observatory Assistant Manager Alex Yeager told Space.com. "It can zoom out pretty well, even though it's a very long focal-length telescope, so it can range from doing things like the Orion Nebula to doing Saturn.

"Tonight we were able to see a few different types of nebulas like a planetary nebula called the Ring Nebula, then we saw a supernova remnant called the Veil Nebula, the Witch's Broom portion of it, and then we saw a star-forming region in the Orion Nebula. And the Geminids Meteor Shower was surprisingly large, and those are fun ones because they're rocky and they burn up for a really long time."

In the near-dark, bathed in red lamps like submariners during a torpedo attack, it's a bit tricky finding the correct eyepiece in each of these intricate devices. More than a few newbie folks incorrectly stared into the spotting scope and were slightly confused why they couldn’t see anything, until one of the student volunteers wearing illuminated name tags corrected us. Yes, I admit it. I was one of those poor souls hopelessly gazing in the wrong spot!

The experience was heightened by the fact that it was a moonless night just 48 hours before an atmospheric river was to descend on Oregon for the next few days with its blanket of rain-bearing clouds which would have made stargazing extremely difficult as might be expected.

This was also the ideal night to explore the Sunriver Observatory and Nature Center, not just because of the ultra-dry December chill, but Dec. 14 was also the height of the Geminid Meteor Shower and our bundled-up group shuffling from one telescope to the next were treated to more than a dozen shooting stars streaking across the sky, especially during the laser-guided constellation tour hosted by Yeager out on the expansive patio under yawning, wide-open skies.

"Winter can be really nice because we still get clear skies in Central Oregon but a cold crisp night is when you get you best viewing," he notes. "Planets are starting to rise right now high in the sky so we have a great view of Saturn, and Jupiter is now here at the end of our programs. We also get galaxies coming up like the Andromeda galaxy, the closest galaxy to us, and it's huge. We're just approaching to where we can get some of the other showcase galaxies. We’re on the cusp of two seasons so we did get an good example of each type of object."

With the dreaded light pollution continuing to encroach upon all corners of the globe, the need to preserve dark skies becomes essential to maintain an elemental connection to our universe and our small but significant role in its complex cosmic beauty. As a dedicated student of this scientific field, it's an issue Yeager remains passionate about.

"You can definitely tell when people come from a place where they can't see stars," he adds. "Because even on a night with a moon they'll look up and be amazed at how many there are. I've heard so many times, 'It's like they're in our lap!' With Sunriver and their lighting practices, that actually started as a way to help out with nature and night pollinators. It was a nice benefit that ended up being good for astronomy. Then light pollution started getting higher and higher. People like looking at the night sky.

"It's one of the big reasons to come to live and visit Bend. It's hard to get it back once you lose it. We're never going to turn Manhattan into a dark sky area. But as Bend and La Pine build up, it's easier to shield lighting and try to preserve it as much as possible and still be able to see at night."

As the program came to a close and temperatures continued to drop towards freezing, patrons lined up for one last look. Six-year-old Lucas Kincaid of Molalla, Oregon stood with his family to take a final peek in the hulking main telescope beneath the dome in anxious anticipation, snug in his furry hooded jacket like a hibernating bear cub about to meet the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

"I saw something blue and also Saturn," he exclaimed. "I've never seen a telescope this big!"

It was an exhilarating evening that was both educational and inspiring in this Season of Lights. If your future travel plans find you in Central Oregon at any time this holiday season or in the new year, a stimulating visit to the Sunriver Nature Center and Observatory is well worth the time. Reservations are required for the Sunriver Observatory’s 90-minute Winter In-Depth Program and more information on prices and year-round times can be found on their official website.

UK-based Space Forge launched its pioneering ForgeStar-1 craft in June 2025 and has been bringing it to life since. In December 2025, the microwave oven-sized satellite fired up its miniature furnace for the first time and generated plasma — a stream of gas as hot as 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius). In future missions, such plasma will help SpaceForge forge super efficient, out-of-this-world materials in weightlessness.

"Generating plasma on orbit represents a fundamental shift, it proves that the essential environment for advanced crystal growth can be achieved on a dedicated, commercial satellite — opening the door to a completely new manufacturing frontier," Joshua Western, CEO and co-founder of Space Forge said in a statement.

SpaceForge, founded in 2018, plans to use a similar furnace on a future satellite to manufacture a batch of novel semiconductors directly in the weightless environment of space. Such experiments have previously only been conducted aboard the International Space Station.

"The plasma demonstration confirms that the extreme conditions needed for gas-phase crystal growth — a core building block of semiconductor production — can now be created and controlled on an autonomous platform in low Earth orbit," the company said in the statement. "The achievement establishes ForgeStar-1 as the first free-flying commercial semiconductor manufacturing tool ever operated in space."

Thanks to the absence of gravity, atoms in semiconductors grown in space align so accurately that the resulting material provides a superior performance to anything made on Earth. Space Forge estimates that the improved efficiency of these semiconductors could enable reductions in the energy use of electronic devices by up to 60 percent.

The semiconductors, based on rare materials such as gallium nitride, silicon carbide or diamond, could be used in future telecommunications systems, electronic devices and next-generation computers.

The current ForgeStar-1 will only test the orbital factory equipment. The satellite will deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere later this year. Before its mission ends, the craft will run more experiments to analyze how the generated plasma behaves in microgravity and collect data to help the company's engineers fine-tune the future missions.

Space Forge raised a generous Series A funding round of £22.6 million ($30.5 million) last year that will allow the company to build the successor satellite ForgeStar-2, which will make the first batch of Space Forge's made-in-space semiconductors. The spacecraft will be fitted with a novel heat shield to survive the atmospheric return and deliver its precious cargo safely to Earth.

"It was a pleasant surprise and an honor," Brooker revealed regarding the Golden Globe acknowledgements. "Obviously, I don't experience human emotion, but as much as I can emulate it, I was pleased."

There was never much doubt that Netflix would give the green light to another "Black Mirror" season after it collected a total of nine Emmy Awards in its history since 2017, but these are strange times in the entertainment business.

"Luckily, it does have a future, so I can confirm that 'Black Mirror' will return, just in time for reality to catch up with it," he shared in a Netflix statement. "So, that's exciting. That chunk of my brain has already been activated and is whirring away."

Brooker often compares his creative process of choosing episodes to arranging song tracks on a record album for a satisfying creative balance, and that's a perfectly appropriate analogy.

"It's a useful thought experiment when approaching a new story," he explained. "I'll often think of, 'Well, what haven’t we done yet, and what tone am I looking for? … Where does this track come on the album, and what musical direction are we going to go into?' We'll find out. [It's] very unlikely you'll ever see a 'Black Mirror' hoedown."

Highlights of this past spring's six-chapter success included "USS Callister: Into Infinity," the first-ever sequel to 2018's "USS Callister" episode, and "Eulogy," a bittersweet romantic fable starring Paul Giamatti, for which he picked up an acting nod, along with Rashida Jones for her performance in "Common People." Check out our full "Black Mirror" Season 7 ranked list to see how the rest stacked up.

All seven previous seasons of "Black Mirror" are currently available to stream on Netflix.

A Indian rocket's return-to-flight mission apparently didn't go very well.

A PSLV rocket carrying the EOS-N1 military satellite and 15 other payloads lifted off from India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre Sunday (Jan. 11) at 11:48 p.m. EST (0448 GMT and 10:18 a.m. India Standard Time on Monday, Jan. 12).

It was the first liftoff since May 2025 for the PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle), a four-stage rocket that debuted in 1993. That most recent mission was a failure that resulted in the loss of the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) EOS-09 Earth-observing satellite. And the PSLV seemed to suffer an anomaly on Sunday night as well.

"Close to the end of the third stage [engine burn], we are seeing a little more disturbance in the vehicle roll rates, and subsequently, there is a deviation observed in the flight path," ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan said in an update during the agency's launch webcast.

"We are analyzing the data, and we shall come back at the earliest [opportunity]," he added. "Thank you."

The May 2025 anomaly also occurred during the PSLV's third-stage burn. If Sunday night's launch was indeed a failure, it would be the fourth for the 145.7-foot-tall (44.4 meters) PSLV out of 64 total liftoffs to this point.

The rocket has successfully lofted a number of high-profile payloads during its three decades of operation, including the Chandrayaan-1 moon probe in October 2008, the Mars Orbiter Mission in November 2013 and, in September 2023, Aditya-L1, India's first dedicated sun-studying spacecraft.

EOS-N1, also known as Anvesha, is a small Earth-observation satellite. Multiple sources identify it as a hyperspectral imaging satellite, meaning it was designed to study our planet in hundreds of different wavelengths of light. And it was supposed to do so for the Indian military.

"The satellite will constantly scan the Earth's surface, sending back images that can generate valuable intelligence," wrote The Tribune, an English-language daily paper based in northern India.

"It will join India’s growing family of spy satellites that use radar and optical technology," the outlet added. "India has an active program to develop a fleet of military satellites for surveillance and communication."

The other payloads that launched atop the PSLV on Sunday night were a diverse bunch. Among them were a Thai-U.K. Earth-observing satellite, a Brazilian satellite designed to help distressed fishing boats, an in-orbit fueling demonstration by an Indian company and a reentry capsule from the Spanish startup Orbital Paradigm.

All of the payloads headed to low Earth orbit except the reentry capsule, which is known as KID (Kestrel Initial technology Demonstrator). It was supposed to separate from the PSLV's fourth stage late in the flight and come back to Earth for a splashdown in the South Pacific.

Sunday's mission was the ninth organized by NewSpace India Limited, ISRO's commercial arm.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:20 a.m. ET on Jan. 12 with news of liftoff and the apparently launch failure.

NASA's next exoplanet mission has reached the final frontier.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying about 40 payloads, including NASA's Pandora exoplanet satellite, launched from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Sunday (Jan. 11) at 8:44 a.m. EST (1344 GMT and 5:44 a.m. local California time).

SpaceX called the mission "Twilight," because it delivered the satellites to dusk-dawn sun-synchronous orbit, a path that straddles the line between night and day on our planet. And the mission did deliver: the payloads were deployed on schedule, during a 90-minute stretch that began about an hour after liftoff.

During its yearlong orbital mission, the 716-pound (325 kilograms) Pandora will study at least 20 known exoplanets using a 17-inch-wide (45 centimeters) telescope, which it will train on the worlds as they "transit," or cross the face of, their host stars from the satellite's perspective.

Such transits cause a small dip in the host star's brightness, which exoplanet hunters have used to great advantage: Most of the more than 6,000 alien planets we know of have been discovered via the "transit method."

Transits also allow astronomers to characterize known exoplanets, especially their atmospheres. Different elements and molecules absorb light at specific wavelengths, so studying the spectrum of starlight that has passed through an atmosphere can reveal a great deal about that atmosphere's composition.

However, such work is complicated by stellar complexity. Star surfaces are not uniform; they often feature patches of varying brightness, like the sunspots that speckle our own star. Pandora will help astronomers account for such complexity, if all goes to plan.

"Pandora aims to disentangle the star and planet spectra by monitoring the brightness of the exoplanet's host star in visible light while simultaneously collecting infrared data," NASA officials wrote in a mission description. "Together, these multiwavelength observations will provide constraints on the star's spot coverage to separate the star's spectrum from the planet's."

Pandora will focus on planets with atmospheres that are dominated by water or hydrogen, agency officials added.

The other three dozen or so satellites that went up on the Twilight mission are a diverse group. Among them were 10 of Kepler Communications' Aether spacecraft and two of Capella Space's advanced new Acadia Earth-imaging radar satellites.

SpaceX is no stranger to rideshare missions like Twilight. To date, the company has launched 15 such flights in its Transporter series and four via a different program known as Bandwagon.

The Falcon 9's first stage landed back at Vandenberg as planned about 8.5 minutes after liftoff on Sunday. It was the fifth mission for this particular booster, according to SpaceX.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:45 p.m. ET on Jan. 11 with news of successful launch, rocket landing and satellite deployment.

On Episode 192 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik looks forward to 2026, which promises to be the most exciting year in the new space age yet!

Shining bright is the prospect of an Artemis II launch to send astronauts around the moon for the first time since 1972, as early as February. We've already seen news about a medical incident on the International Space Station that will force a crew to return to Earth early, but NASA says this won't affect the Artemis launch.

On other news, NASA's budget seems on track to be passed at near 2025 levels, China is preparing to send a robot to the south lunar pole, SpaceX plans robust tests of Starship this year—and hopefully refinement of their lander for Artemis III, Boeing will fly Starliner again (uncrewed), Mars Sample Return is poised to be scuttled, and all this under the leadership of a new—and apparently quite capable—NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman. Join us for an in-depth look at what's coming in 2026!

Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space.

Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Space news of the week

• NASA will return 4 astronauts home early in 1st-ever medical evacuation from the International Space Station
• NASA's Artemis 2 mission: Everything you need to know
• Is Orion’s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight.
• NASA isn't fixing the heat shield on Artemis II
• Twitter / X - "House and Senate appropriators have released a "minibus" appropriations..."
• NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead
• SpaceX stacks Super Heavy booster ahead of Starship megarocket's 12th test flight
• Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1
• Rocket Lab Neutron
• China unveils 2026 space mission lineup: Mengzhou-1 spaceship and Long March-10A rocket set for debut
• China's next moonshot: Chang'e 7 could search the lunar south pole for water this year
• China's Tianwen 2 spacecraft sends home 1st photo as it heads for mysterious 'quasi-moon' asteroid
• Gaganyaan - India's Human Spaceflight Programme
• NASA works to extend Swift’s life ahead of reboost mission
• Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser® Spaceplane Successfully Completes Critical Pre-flight Milestones

Model Falcon 9!

Finally, did you know you can launch your own SpaceX rocket? Model rocket maker Estes' stunning scale model of a Falcon 9 rocket that you can pick up now. The launchable model is a detailed recreation of the Falcon 9 and retails for $149.99. You can save 10% by using the code IN-COLLECTSPACE at checkout, courtesy of our partners collectSPACE.com.

About This Week In Space

This Week in Space covers the new space age. Every Friday we take a deep dive into a fascinating topic. What's happening with the new race to the moon and other planets? When will SpaceX really send people to Mars?

Join Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik from Space.com as they tackle those questions and more each week on Friday afternoons. You can subscribe today on your favorite podcatcher.

To celebrate the thrill of space exploration and the joy of learning, we've created a special crossword puzzle built entirely from this week's top Space.com stories. It's a fun, brain-tickling way to revisit the highlights, whether you're a casual stargazer or a die-hard astrophysics fan.

Expect clues that span planetary science, rocket launches, stargazing, and entertainment tied to the stars. If you read about it on Space.com last week, it might just show up in this puzzle. And if you didn't? Well, now's your chance to catch up while flexing your trivia muscles.

So channel your inner astronaut or astronomer, and dive into this week's interstellar quiz. The answers are out there, you just have to connect the clues.

Try it out below and see how well you do!

An image of NASA's iconic Saturn V rocket was projected onto the monument at night between Dec. 31 and Jan. 5. That latter date is just a month out from the possible launch of the Artemis 2 round-the-moon mission with four astronauts, which is scheduled to lift off as soon as Feb. 6.

Artemis 2 will mark the crewed debut of NASA's huge Space Launch System rocket, and it will be first mission to send people to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

"Freedom 250 is ringing in the New Year by illuminating the story of America, including reaching for the stars, and highlighting our achievements in space, on the Washington Monument," NASA officials wrote about the light show, which featured other imagery as well, on X on Dec. 31.

Freedom 250 is the organization responsible for marking the 250th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of Independence, an event popularly celebrated as the beginning of the United States. The declaration, which passed the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, stated that 13 British colonies in North America would separate from Great Britain and form a United States of America with independent powers of commerce and state, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Artemis 2 includes NASA commander Reid Wiseman, NASA pilot Victor Glover (who will become the first Black person to leave low Earth orbit), NASA mission specialist Christina Koch (the first woman to do the same) and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen (the first non-American). It follows on from Artemis 1, an uncrewed flight to lunar orbit in late 2022 that tested the SLS as well as the Orion spacecraft that the astronauts will pilot on Artemis 2.

Provided Artemis 2's 10-day mission goes as planned, the follow-up will be the first crewed moon landing in more than five decades with Artemis 3, later in the 2020s. NASA is positioning Artemis as part of a larger push for moon settlement, including the establishment of long-term bases, resource mining and the use of nuclear reactors. From there, the agency hopes to eventually land astronauts on Mars.

NASA is implementing the Artemis program with the help of a number of international and private-industry partners. For example, Hansen's seat on Artemis 2 came principally due to his nation's planned provision of the Canadarm3 robotic arm for the Gateway lunar space station.

The United States is also spearheading an initiative called the Artemis Accords, which seeks to establish a set of norms for safe, sustainable and peaceful space exploration. More than 50 other nations have signed the accords to date.

The New Year's Eve appearance of the Saturn V wasn't its first projection onto the monument. Back in 2019, when NASA was celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the first-ever human moon landing, the rocket's image graced one of the sides of the monument courtesy of a Smithsonian Institution celebration, according to Space.com partner site collectSPACE. The 2025 showing of the rocket was the first to put the Saturn V on all sides of the monument, however.

Astronaut Kimiya Yui captured a jaw-dropping timelapse video showcasing the beauty of low-Earth orbit as seen from the International Space Station.

Yui's 300th cumulative day in space came during his second tour of duty aboard the orbital station for the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) n, which is set to end prematurely as a result of an undisclosed medical issue affecting an unnamed astronaut who launched alongside Yui as part of SpaceX's Crew-11 mission.

"As a token of gratitude for allowing me to have such a precious experience over 300 days, I'd like to introduce a slightly unusual timelapse from the window," wrote Yui in a post on the social media site X accompanying the video.

Yui's video kicked off with a dramatic display of zodiacal light, which formed as sunlight reflected off a cloud of interplanetary dust particles to form a column of light above the colorful arc of our Blue Marble.

Green aurora can be seen dancing in Earth's upper atmosphere as the zodiacal light fades, shimmering between the profiles of the space station's solar panels as they rotate to track the sun. The bright stars of the constellations Pegasus, Andromeda and Ares also rotate into view as the station continues its lap of Earth.

Finally, eagle-eyed observers may also notice the seven most prominent white-blue stars of the Pleiades open star cluster appear to the upper left of the screen towards the end of the footage to descend toward the modular form of the ISS.

Curious about the long-running orbital laboratory? Be sure to check out our article detailing everything you need to know about the International Space Station and don't forget that you can always tune in to live orbital views of Earth streamed from SEN cameras mounted to the outside or the orbital station right here on Space.com. Why not also check out our review of the official LEGO kit for the ISS, that'll let you bring the venerable space station into your own front room!

Editor's Note: If you would capture a timelapse view of the night sky and want to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

SpaceX's third mission of 2026 is in the books.

A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 29 of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Friday (Jan. 9) at 4:41 p.m. EST (2141 GMT).

About 8.5 minutes later, the rocket's first stage landed in the Atlantic Ocean on the drone ship "Just Read the Instructions." It was the 29th launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.

The Falcon 9's upper stage deployed the 29 satellites into low Earth orbit on schedule about 65 minutes after liftoff, SpaceX announced via X.

Starlink is by far the largest satellite constellation ever assembled. It currently consists of more than 9,400 active spacecraft, and that number is growing all the time.

Friday's launch was SpaceX's third of 2026. In 2025, the company launched 165 orbital missions, nearly three-quarters of them dedicated Starlink flights.

On Friday night (Jan. 9), NASA announced that it's targeting Wednesday (Jan. 14) for the earlier-than-expected departure of SpaceX's four-person Crew-11 mission from the orbiting lab.

Crew-11's Crew Dragon capsule will leave the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday at 5 p.m. EST (2200 GMT) and splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California at around 3:40 a.m. EST (0840 GMT) on Thursday (Jan. 15). This schedule is contingent, however, on good weather in the splashdown zone.

Crew-11 consists of NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japanese spaceflyer Kimiya Yui and Oleg Platonov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. The quartet arrived at the ISS on Aug. 2 for a roughly six-month stay, but they'll end up falling a bit short of that goal.

On Wednesday (Jan. 7), NASA announced that it was postponing a Thursday (Jan. 8) spacewalk slated to be performed by Fincke and Cardman because an ISS astronaut had experienced a "medical concern."

On Thursday, the agency said it would bring the Crew-11 astronauts home early, to better diagnose and treat that medical issue. NASA has not told us which astronaut is affected or what exactly the issue is, citing privacy concerns.

Dr. James Polk, NASA's chief health and medical officer, did give a vague description during a press conference on Thursday, however.

"This is not an operational issue. This was not an injury that occurred in the pursuit of operations," Polk said. "It's mostly having a medical issue in the difficult areas of microgravity, and with the suite of hardware that we have at our avail to complete a diagnosis."

On Thursday, NASA officials said that they'd work out a Crew-11 departure date soon, and that information did indeed come in short order — on Friday night.

The Crew-11 astronauts were supposed to stay aboard the ISS until the arrival of their replacements, the four spaceflyers of SpaceX's Crew-12 mission. Crew-12's liftoff is currently targeted for mid-February, though NASA is looking into moving that up a bit if possible.

After Crew-11 leaves, just three astronauts will remain aboard the orbiting lab: NASA's Christopher Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, all of whom flew to the ISS on Nov. 27 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

That's definitely a skeleton crew, as the current nominal crew size for the ISS is seven. But it's far from unprecedented; three was the baseline crew size for the station until 2009, when it was doubled to six. (The current baseline is seven.)

The ISS has been continuously staffed by rotating astronaut crews since November 2000. It's a bit surprising that it's taken a quarter-century to see the first medical evacuation from the orbiting lab: Statistical models suggest that such events should recur on roughly three-year intervals, according to Polk.

NASA announced on Friday evening (Jan. 9) that it plans to roll the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft that will fly the Artemis 2 moon mission out to the pad for prelaunch checks on Jan. 17, weather and technical readiness permitting.

The agency's specialized Crawler-Transporter 2 vehicle will carry the SLS-Orion stack from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Florida's Kennedy Space Center to Launch Pad 39B, a 4-mile (6.4 kilometers) trek that could take up to 12 hours.

"We are moving closer to Artemis 2, with rollout just around the corner," Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said in a statement on Friday.

"We have important steps remaining on our path to launch, and crew safety will remain our top priority at every turn as we near humanity’s return to the moon," she added.

Artemis 2 will send four astronauts — NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — on a 10-day trip around the moon and back to Earth.

Though it won't land on, or enter orbit around, Earth's nearest neighbor, Artemis 2 will mark humanity's first trip to lunar realms since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

After the Artemis 2 stack reaches Pad 39B, technicians will subject the rocket and capsule to a variety of tests and checkouts. Chief among them is a fueling test known as a wet dress rehearsal.

"During wet dress, teams demonstrate the ability to load more than 700,000 gallons [2.65 million liters] of cryogenic propellants into the rocket, conduct a launch countdown, and practice safely removing propellant from the rocket without astronauts onsite," NASA officials wrote in the statement.

Such tests do not always go smoothly. For example, wet dress rehearsals during the Artemis 1 mission revealed leaks of liquid hydrogen, which required multiple rollbacks to the VAB to address.

The launch of Artemis 1 was delayed significantly, from spring 2022 to November of that year. But the fixes worked: Artemis 1 was a success, sending an uncrewed Orion to lunar orbit and back to Earth.

Once the Artemis 2 wet dress is in the books, mission team members will hold a flight readiness review, which will assess the status of all systems required for a successful launch and mission around the moon. After that review, the team will announce an official target launch date.

That date will fall between Feb. 6 and April 10. But that two-month window holds just 15 potential launch dates, NASA explained in Friday's statement.

The agency breaks the Artemis 2 launch window into three periods, each of which has a restricted set of possible liftoff dates:

• Launch Period Jan. 31 – Feb. 14: Launch opportunities Feb. 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11
• Launch Period Feb. 28 – March 1: Launch opportunities March 6, 7, 8, 9 and 11
• Launch Period March 27 – April 10: Launch opportunities April 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6

And there's no guarantee that the SLS, Orion and/or launch teams will be ready to attempt a launch on all of those "green" days.

"In addition to the launch opportunities based on orbital mechanics and performance requirements, there are also limitations on which days within a launch period can be viable based on commodity replenishment, weather and other users on the Eastern Range schedule," NASA officials said in the same statement. "As a general rule, up to four launch attempts may be attempted within the approximate week of opportunities that exist within a launch period."

On Thursday (Jan. 8), NASA announced that it will bring the four astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-11 mission back to Earth early to deal with a health issue with one of the crewmembers. We don't know yet when this will happen; an update is expected in the next day or so.

The quartet's departure will leave the International Space Station (ISS) with just three resident astronauts — NASA's Christopher Williams and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. While the medical evacuation will be a first for the ISS, a three-person crew is far from unprecedented.

Since 2020, the nominal crew size for the ISS has been seven astronauts. The previous baseline, established in 2009, was six. But the standard before that, which held for nearly a decade, was three.

Williams will be the only astronaut on the American segment of the ISS after Crew-11 departs, but NASA is confident that he can handle the responsibility.

"Chris is trained to do every task that we would ask him to do on the vehicle," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said during a press conference on Thursday afternoon (Jan. 8).

He noted that Williams will have a considerable amount of help.

"Of course, we also do a lot of the operations of the vehicle from our various control centers all over the world, including commercial control centers that operate a lot of our research payloads," Kshatriya said. "So, he will have thousands of people looking over his shoulder, like our crews do all the time to help ensure that they continue the groundbreaking science."

Kud-Sverchkov and Mikayev — who flew to the ISS on Nov. 27 with Williams aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft — could also lend a hand if needed, according to Kshatriya.

"The Russians that are on board with him — first of all, they've trained tightly together. They're a great team; they work really well together," Kshatriya said. "But they also have qualification to operate the U.S. systems in an advisory mode or an assistant mode and can, if needed, be called upon, with the assistance of MCC [Mission Control Center] Houston or MCC Moscow, to assist in any operations."

Shifting to skeleton-crew mode will of course have some impacts on ISS operations. Not as much science work will get done with just three astronauts on board rather than seven, for example.

And NASA won't be able to perform any spacewalks, which are two-person jobs. So the ISS will be more vulnerable to contingency situations such as hardware malfunctions, as former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield noted.

Speaking of spacewalks: The medical issue arose in the leadup to a now-canceled Jan. 8 extravehicular activity (EVA), which was to have been conducted by NASA's Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman.

Fincke are Cardman are Crew-11 astronauts. Their two crewmates on the SpaceX mission are Japan's Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov.

The agency has not identified which Crew-11 astronaut experienced the health problem, citing privacy concerns, but did say it had nothing to do with the EVA or preparations for it. NASA wants to get the affected crewmember home early to diagnose the problem using the more advanced and extensive medical hardware available here on Earth.

Crew-11 arrived at the orbiting lab on Aug. 2 aboard a Crew Dragon capsule and is most of the way through its planned six-month mission.

The Crew-11 astronauts were supposed to stay aboard the ISS until the arrival of the four-person Crew-12. Crew-12 is currently targeted to launch in mid-February, but NASA is looking into moving the liftoff up.

Since we don't have a firm departure date for Crew-11 or a clear launch date for Crew-12, it's unclear how long Williams, Kud-Sverchkov and Mikayev will have the orbiting lab to themselves. But skeleton-crew operations — a trip down memory lane for the ISS — could end up lasting a month or so.

At first glance, the newfound objects look like stars, small points of light in the JWST data. Scientists found that further observation revealed more galaxy-like features, however. "If you look at any of the features separately, just putting them together makes a platypus look so odd," said Haojing Yan, an astronomer at the University of Missouri. "Our objects are exactly like that."

Yan spoke at a news conference Tuesday (Jan. 6) at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix. The authors also have a research paper on the online preprint server arXiv.

Close but not quite

Soon after JWST saw first light in 2021, it began to reveal a number of unusual objects of unknown origin. Inspired by these discoveries, Yan and two of his students began to explore other compact sources in a quest to determine if any strange objects had escaped notice.

The researchers examined approximately 2,000 objects, visually examining each one in search of oddities.. That left nine peculiar, small objects that were slightly larger than a single point of light in the data. Usually, such compact objects are classified as point sources, and most tend to be stars. But on further examination, the researchers realized that the objects were larger and more diffuse than a point source, leading them to classify the objects as "point-like".

"It's very close to a point source, but not exactly," Yan said.

Instead of the broad emission lines linked to stars, however, the researchers found narrow lines indicative of the active star formation usually found in galaxies. They turned their eyes toward quasars, quasi-stellar objects powered by the supermassive black holes in galactic centers. Quasars — a type of active galactic Nuclei (AGNs) — are classified by the light they emit.

But while the newfound objects bear a strong resemblance to known classifications of quasars, they don't quite fit. For one thing, they are dimmer than expected. Their spectral fingerprint is also narrower than even narrow-line quasars.

"Our objects are not quasars," Yan said.

That doesn't preclude them from being a different form of AGN, however. Yan said they could be a class of objects known as narrow-line AGN. However, known narrow-line AGNs tend to show up as point sources rather than point-like.

"If our objects end up within the narrow-line AGN [classification], they must be of a new kind," Yan said.

Another possibility is that the unusual objects are star-forming galaxies. Although all galaxies form stars, star-forming galaxies do so at an accelerated rate. They also produce narrow emission lines, "like duckbills are normally seen in ducks," Bangzheng Sun, also of the University of Missouri, said at the news conference.

If the objects are star-forming galaxies, Sun said, they must be young — no more than 200 million years old. "They are still in their infancy," he said.

Additionally, if the strange specks are galaxies, their slightly expanded size is hard to understand. "These galaxies must be sitting there, forming stars from the inside out," Sun said. "This is a process we have not seen before."

The inside-out process may be happening in multiple galaxies, Yan told Space.com. But while most stellar production induces violent, chaotic motion, "our objects would imply that such processes in them could be happening in a very peaceful way (as opposed to the usual merging process) so that their point-like appearance remains intact," Yan said by email.

The researchers think they have identified a population of these new objects, but whether they are a new form of AGN or odd young galaxies remains a question. They hope to find more examples in future observations with JWST.

"These nine objects are special," Yan said. "They are our platypuses."

Save over $500 on the DJI Mavic 4 Pro when you grab it on Amazon, or you can save over $600 on the Fly More Combo.

In our review of the DJI Mavic 4 Pro, we were blown away by the quality of build, its performance and the features that are packed into it. Not only is it the best overall drone on the market, but it's also at the top of our best DJI drones and best camera drones guides. That's thanks to its three cameras, capable of shooting images with 100MP resolution and 6K video, its top of a top speed of over 60mph, advanced obstacle avoidance, a new Return to Home functionality and impressive tracking. This is an advanced drone aimed at those who want professional-grade gear at home. Hurry on this deal, as stock is running low.

• We've also got you covered with reviews and rankings of the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, drones, Lego, streaming and more.

So what makes the Mavic 4 Pro stand out from the competition? As it's a drone that offers a professional-grade experience for casual flyers, you get 100MP resolution in RAW and JPEG images, 6K in video and complete camera rotation, with a range of -40 to 400 degrees.

Aside from its camera, the Mavic 4 Pro is packed with features like Return to Home, which kicks in when the battery hits 15%, so you don't lose the drone when the battery dies. It also has advanced obstacle avoidance, which is helpful if you're flying in a congested space, and it has a video transmission range of over 18 miles (29 kilometers), all relayed to a much-improved controller. The Mavic 4 Pro also has a sport mode, which allows it to fly over 60 mph (96 km/h), and while it has impressive tracking abilities, it can't track at that speed. The battery life is impressive too, allowing for up to 51 minutes of flight time.

While this is the lowest price we've seen for this done, it's important to note that stock is running low, so if you want a great price for a great drone, you'll have to act soon.

Key features: 100MP image resolution, 6K video, three cameras with complete camera rotation, tech features to make the flying experience more user-friendly, multiple flying modes, a huge video transmission range and a good battery life.

Product launched: May 2025

Price history: Before today's deal, the DJI Mavic 4 Pro usually retailed for around the 'before' price of this deal, which is $2699. That means that the saving of $519 is genuine and a good value offer.

Reviews consensus: By far the best MAvic drone DJI has produced and takes drone technology to new heights. It's aimed at professionals and experts and has seriously impressive speed, agility, power and features.

Space: ★★★★★

Featured in guides: Best drones, best DJI drones, best camera drones

✅ Buy it if: You want the best of the best, and your budget stretches that far.

❌ Don't buy it if: You're on a budget and having the absolute best specs available isn't a must for you, or you're a beginner.

Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors, drones, Lego and much more.

It's a danger-fraught trek across land and sea to reach the supposed sanctuary of the Clarke Comet crater in Southern France, where the impact zone's high walls act as a natural barrier against radioactive maelstroms and an incessant barrage of fiery leftover comet fragments.

Director Ric Roman Waugh ("Angel Has Fallen") has crafted a sharply-focused follow-up that clocks in at a lean 98 minutes and never feels false or flat. Most post-apocalyptic films focus on the main calamity and rarely the aftermath of the catastrophe, and here’s where "Greenland 2: Migration" is unique in its extended examination of humanity’s attempt to regroup and rebuild.

We connected with Butler on this sensational sequel to learn more about his added involvement as the project’s producer, shooting in Iceland, and the movie's adherence to depicting real-world scenarios in the face of an extinction-level event five years after a lethal comet strikes Earth.

"I think that we really wanted to try and make a different kind of disaster survival thriller in the first movie," Butler tells Space.com. "It wasn't all about these big special effects. It was really taking it from the emotional, personal, intimate point of view of a family and then seeing it through their eyes, watching the fabric of society break down, and seeing how different people reacted to the situation as society falls apart. Which way do they go? Do they decide to help, be a giver, be of service? It felt like it made the experience much more grounded, even if it was messier.

"That seemed to hit home, and then there was the pandemic, which took everybody by surprise in the same way that this comet attacked the Earth. It was crazy, the synergy between those two moments and the extra resonance the movie took on. We were hoping to carry that on. What happens next? How do you survive? You've got to just get through, white-knuckling it."

Working closely again with Ric Roman Waugh, this time as one of the movie's hands-on producers, Butler enjoyed a competitive creative chemistry with his director that only enhanced the final product.

"Ric works very, very hard and he cares deeply, and so do I, which leads to amazing creativity together and at times some interesting heated debate about the way a movie should go," Butler explains.

"Ric is great at grounding stories and getting to the heart of characters. Sometimes it can be on the more morbid or depressing side. And I'm coming from, 'Yes, let's have that, but let's bring the film up again and have moments of entertainment and humor and heart. Together, there's a nice balance between how we like to tell stories, and I feel like our movies have worked for those reasons. At the end of the day, you can have all the effects and action you want in a movie, but if you're not moved by the story, then you've forgotten about it the second you leave."

Composer David Buckley's original score adds a sublime level of mood and atmosphere, as he provided for the first Greenland movie, and Butler is grateful for his masterful music in this sci-fi sequel.

"There's some really interesting kind of melancholy, reflective quality to his music, with some hope in there. I do love his composition and how Ric uses it in other moments to put some meat on the bones of what else is happening in our movie to set a tone and a feel. And I think he's done that beautifully. Music is so important in movies. It can kill a movie if the music is wrong."

"Migration" was apparently an exhausting mental and physical shoot in the UK and Iceland and Butler and his exceptional cast were up for the rigors of filming their post-apocalyptic fable, even if days were long and the pressures great.

"To make these kind of movies, you have to come in with a certain amount of resilience. Then, from years of making these kinds of films, you build up that resilience. You know you're gonna take a beating. You know every day is a marathon. You're going to pick up injuries, and you're going to have to work through them. And that's part of it, and weirdly, the bigger the challenge, very often it helps you in your performance because it makes it more convincing.

"This movie was particularly hard because I made five movies back-to-back, and three of them were big ones. Just before 'Migration', I made 'How To Train Your Dragon' where I had a 90-pound costume, and I was pretty beat after that. I wish that I had a chance to make "Greenland 2" at the beginning. To be honest, halfway through, I was done. I was burned out. It works because of my character and what he's going through with health issues. Movies themselves are often the thing that keep your brain ticking, your heart pumping, that keep the oxygen in your blood to keep you fit as much as going to any gym."

Disaster movies have long been a staple of Hollywood for decades, especially beginning in the 1970s with blockbuster features like "The Poseidon Adventure," "Earthquake," and "The Towering Inferno," and "Greenland" and "Greenland 2: Migration" are worthy additions to that storied legacy.

"'Poseidon Adventure' with Gene Hackman is my favorite disaster movie of all time," Butler notes.

"I could not get that movie out of my mind. I just watched it again recently. It's wonderful. What 'Greenland' I think offers, and what was surprising to people, is that there's a depth to it you don’t often get with a lot of these disaster movies. They're more about the spectacle and the wow factor. We still have big spectacle and stakes, but I think our movie is surprisingly emotional and personal. If you look at 'The Day After Tomorrow' or '2012,' they’re very entertaining, but they don't touch you in any kind of deep way or leave a lasting impact except how you’ve been visually stimulated.

"I'm not sure how much it shines through, but there's a spiritual element to this movie in relation to who we are and how we fit into nature. Something about obedience to the celestial realms, which I loved. And just the triumph of the human spirit. The idea of how much more power we have when we come together. It's about the themes of love and sacrifice, and family. And maybe asking ourselves, 'What am I going to do that adds quality to this world?'"

"Greenland 2: Migration" is available to watch in theaters now.

A new study modeling what the floor of the Jupiter moon's hidden ocean is like concluded that tectonic activity — and the complex chemical reactions that such activity facilitates — is probably negligible.

"Ultimately, without fracturing and faulting, it's not clear to us how fresh rock would be exposed to the ocean to allow for the kinds of continued chemical reactions that microbes would need to sustain themselves," study lead author Paul Byrne, associate professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Science at Washington University in St. Louis, told Space.com.

Europa harbors a deep ocean beneath a shell of ice that's dozens of kilometers thick. This ocean wraps around a rocky core, but little is known about the interface between the ocean and the core. If life is to exist in Europa's ocean, it must somehow gain energy, most probably from interactions at the sea floor between water and rock. Access to fresh rock is vital in order to produce more nutrients.

On Earth, tectonic faulting in the seafloor enables water to plunge kilometers down into the rock, and as fresh faults are opened up by shifting tectonic plates, new rock is exposed, maintaining the nutrient supply released into the ocean through hydrothermal vents.

Byrne's team assessed the potential for tectonic activity on Europa's seafloor with a new model that factored in stresses from gravitational tides incurred by Jupiter, the long-term contraction of the moon as its interior gradually cools and the convection of heat energy through the mantle.

However, they found that none of these factors would be strong enough to produce tectonic activity. For example, tidal stresses occur because Europa's orbit around Jupiter is not perfectly circular but rather eccentric, in accordance with Johannes Kepler's first law of orbital motion. This means that, at certain points in each of its 84-hour orbits around Jupiter, Europa is closer to the planet than at other times, and the resulting gravitational differential leads to tides. However, for the tides to be strong enough to induce sufficient tectonic activity, the eccentricity of Europa's orbit would have to be greater — more elongated — than it is (an eccentricity of 0.441 compared to the actual value of 0.009). Even if repeated tidal stresses weaken the uppermost part of Europa's seafloor, creating shallow fractures, they aren't intense enough to extend those faults deep down to new rock.

Similarly, while theoretical models suggest that Europa's rocky core has contracted over billions of years as its interior has cooled, it would have to shrink several kilometers to fracture the bedrock and create deep tectonic faults. This would be more extensive than the process on Earth's moon, which is estimated to have contracted by several tens of meters throughout its four-and-a-half billion-year history, though less than on Mars, which is thought to have contracted by up to 7 kilometers (4.3 miles).

The lack of tectonics is bad news for the possibility of life, since life would need fresh chemical nutrients to survive. One of the main sources of these nutrients on the floor of Earth's oceans is hydrothermal vents, like the famous black smokers. But according to the new modeling, black smokers that billow out hot water filled with nutrients are not possible on Europa.

"But it turns out that there are other kinds of hydrothermal systems," said Byrne. These other kinds percolate through the bedrock to shallower depths and hence are cooler.

"In fact, these other kinds are the most common on Earth," Byrne added. "Such relatively cooler hydrothermal vents could exist on Europa, but they'd be far less energetic than the traditional images we have in our heads when we think about hydrothermal vents. And it's very far from certain how long such cooler hydrothermal systems might last and support chemosynthetic microbial life."

If hydrothermal vents and tectonic faulting are off the menu for Europa, are there any other possible sources of chemical energy and nutrients that could sustain life on the ocean moon? Maybe, said Byrne, but there are still too many unknowns to know for sure. For example, radioactive decay could be a substitute source of energy, but we don't know the numbers for this process on Europa. Alternatively, perhaps nutrients enter the ocean not from below, but from above — meteorites that strike the surface ice and become subsumed and drawn into the ocean. However, it's not clear whether there are routes through the thick ice shell into the ocean and vice versa. This is one of the unknowns that NASA's Europa Clipper mission, currently on its way to Europa, aims to discover.

The findings are also potentially bad news for other ocean moons in the solar system, and Byrne's team is currently preparing a new study that investigates this further.

"Without giving too much away, I can say that the overall findings for Europa are applicable to most other such moons, with the likely exception of [Saturn's moon] Enceladus," Byrne said.

However, despite the pessimistic outlook, Byrne is keen to emphasize that we shouldn't stop looking for life on these icy moons with their hidden oceans.

"We're not saying, and we can't say, that there's no life in Europa," said Byrne. "What we're saying is that it's a harder proposition, based on our results."

The findings were published on Jan. 6 in the journal Nature Communications.

That shouldn't cause any delays in the preparations to rollout and launch the agency's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for Artemis 2 — the first crewed mission to the moon in over 50 years — NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Thursday (Jan. 8).

"These would be totally separate campaigns at this point," Isaacman said during a Jan. 8 press conference to provide an update on NASA's decision to end Crew-11 early. "There's no reason to believe at this point in time that there'd be any overlap that we have to deconflict for."

His reassurance of Artemis 2's timeline, which is slated to roll to the launchpad for a liftoff no earlier than Feb. 5, comes amid NASA's decision to cut short an ISS crew rotation due to medical concerns for the first time ever.

On Wednesday (Jan. 7), NASA officials announced they had decided to cancel an upcoming spacewalk due to a medical issue with an undisclosed crew member. Hours later, the agency indicated that it wasn't ruling out an early end to Crew-11's mission, and confirmed that the unnamed crew member was in a stable, non-emergency condition. NASA officials finalized the decision to bring the astronauts home in an announcement Thursday (Jan. 8).

NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Michael Fincke, Japan's Kimiya Yui, and Oleg Platonov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos launched to the ISS atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Aug. 1, 2025. Ferried to the ISS aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour, the Crew-11 astronauts were expected to carry out a six-month stint before replacement astronauts on SpaceX's upcoming Crew-12 mission rotated in.

Crew-12 is currently scheduled for a mid-February launch, with Crew-11 previously slated for departure a handful of days after their arrival. Their early departure, however, has raised questions of NASA's ability to handle the logistics of sandwiching the Crew-11 return and Crew-12's launch around what is arguably NASA's biggest mission in over 50 years.

Artemis 2 is the second installment for NASA's Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon to establish a permanent presence on the lunar surface. The program's first launch, Artemis 1, launched in November 2022, and flew an uncrewed Orion spacecraft to lunar orbit on a mission that lasted about one month.

Artemis 2 will be Orion's first venture into space with astronauts aboard, and will fly humans around the moon for the first time since 1972 and the end of NASA's Apollo missions. The spacecraft will carry NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a roughly 10-day mission once around the moon and back, and will set the stage for Artemis 3 — the mission intended to land astronauts back on the moon's surface.

Both missions have faced years-long delays, and NASA's ambitious goal to launch Artemis 2 during its first window of opportunity isn't being thwarted by recent events aboard the ISS.

Ideally, just as in a nominal crew turnover, NASA would prefer to launch Crew-12 prior to Crew-11's departure. Such overlaps have been standard procedure since the station's continual occupation for more than two decades of operation. And even with SLS rollout expected within the next two weeks, NASA is investigating the possibility to move Crew-12's launch up the calendar to avoid the crew gap in low Earth orbit.

"We're still evaluating what earlier dates would be achievable, if any, for Crew-12," Isaacman said. "We're going to look at ... all of our standard process to prepare for Crew-12, and look for opportunity if we can bring it in while simultaneously conducting our Artemis two campaign."

That ancient myth feels uncannily real in a remarkable set of astrophotos captured by Dennis Lehtonen in December 2022 in northern Finland.

The images show vivid auroras dancing overhead and a fox below who seems far more interested in the photographer than the light show unfolding above.

Three of the photographs were taken on the same night, with moonlight brightening the Arctic landscape.

The fourth photo was captured a week later, when the fox returned for another round of aurora chasing. Though in this instance, it was Lehtonen who was doing most of the chasing as the sly fox made off with his gloves that he'd set down while sorting out his camera.

"Whenever I would attempt to approach it, trying to get the gloves back, it would run away, but eventually returned them with fingers missing," Lehtonen told Space.com in an email.

Lehtonen captured the images near the remote village of Kilpisjärvi, located deep inside the Arctic Circle and known for its dark skies and frequent aurora displays.

"My original reason for moving and living in this small village, Kilpisjärvi, home to a hundred people, was my aurora hobby. I lived there for a year, but then I continued moving to Greenland," Lehtonen continued.

Editor's note: If you snap an astrophoto and would like to share it with Space.com's readers, send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

The visibility of planets in the night sky varies dramatically based on their orbital positions relative to the sun and Earth. The best time to view superior planets — worlds that orbit the sun at a greater distance than our Blue Marble — is at their points of opposition, when they line up in our night sky directly opposite the sun, with Earth in the middle.

Jupiter will be visible to the east at sunset tonight (Jan. 9) with the bright stars Castor and Pollux shining to its left, according to In-the-sky. Throughout the evening hours on Jan. 9, Jupiter will be the brightest point of light in the night sky, until the waning crescent moon rises to usurp it in the hour following midnight for viewers in the U.S. The planet will officially reach opposition at 3:34 a.m. EST (0834 GMT) on Jan 10, when it will shine magnitude -2.7.

The moment of opposition coincides with when a planet draws near to its closest point to Earth in its orbit. As a result, Jupiter will appear brighter and subtly larger in the eyepiece of a telescope on Jan. 10, boasting an angular size of 45.6 arcseconds at opposition, as opposed to the 31.3 arcseconds it would occupy when furthest from Earth (when it would be hidden behind the sun). For context, the full moon takes up between 29.4 and 33.5 arcminutes, with each arcminute being the equivalent of 60 arcseconds.

Look to the eastern horizon at sunset on Jan. 10 to find Jupiter shining in the constellation Gemini, with Orion the "hunter" to its right and the bright star Capella above. The gas giant will arc high overhead before finally ending the night low on the western horizon as the sun rises on Jan. 11.

Jupiter was named after the king of the Roman pantheon of gods and it's pretty easy to understand why. The gas giant makes for a dazzling astronomical target when viewed with the naked eye, which only gets more impressive when viewed through a telescope with an aperture of 4-inches (152 mm) or more, which helps reveal its colorful atmospheric cloud bands.

The four large Galilean moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto will also be visible arrayed in a line formation extending either side of the gas giant on the night of Jan. 10.

If you're using a telescope with a larger aperture, you may want to try viewing the planet with a special astronomy filter screwed into the eyepiece, which will help reduce glare while enhancing the contrast between colors in the Jovian atmosphere's stormy cloud tops.

Want to catch a glimpse of Jupiter up close? Then be sure to check out our picks of the best telescopes for exploring the planets of the solar system. If you're interested in photographing the night sky then you may also want to read up on our roundup of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

This composite image was weeks in the making, as Horálek’s two "crossings" happened months apart. Mars traced its path through the cluster from late April to early May 2025. Venus followed with a brief morning-twilight passage from late August to early September 2025, appearing low in early dawn light.

What is it?

The Beehive is a favorite skywatching target because it's both nearby and rich: NASA describes M44 as an open cluster of around 1,000 stars at roughly 600 light-years away, in the constellation Cancer. In this image, the cluster is highlighted as one of the nearest and most star-packed open clusters visible from Earth, perfect for a "foreground vs. background" illusion when a bright planet happens to pass through the same line of sight.

Where is it?

These various time-lapse images were taken from sites in Chile, Bolivia, and the Czech Republic.

Why is it amazing?

People have long known that planets move relative to the stars — indeed, the word "planet" comes from the Greek term for "wanderer" — but it’s hard to internalize until you see a track like this: Night after night, the planets are somewhere new. The dotted paths turn an abstract fact — Earth's viewpoint changing as planets move along their orbits — into something immediate and visual.

The Beehive cluster also sits close enough to the ecliptic (the plane of the solar system as projected on the sky) that planets can appear to pass through it. Seeing both Mars and Venus do so in the same year is a vivid reminder that the planets share a common orbital neighborhood, and that some deep-sky landmarks are perfectly placed for these striking conjunctions.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about skywatching tips and star clusters.