Lifeboat Foundation

A mission more than a decade in the making, NASA’s Europa Clipper is slated to greatly expand our understanding of Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, including whether it could support life. These findings will be conducted by a suite of powerful instruments contributed by a myriad of academic and research institutions across the United States. Recently, NASA JPL finished installing all these instruments on the pioneering spacecraft, bringing it one major step closer to its launch, which is currently scheduled for October of this year.

“The instruments work together hand in hand to answer our most pressing questions about Europa,” said Dr. Robert Pappalardo, who is the project scientist on Europa Clipper. “We will learn what makes Europa tick, from its core and rocky interior to its ocean and ice shell to its very thin atmosphere and the surrounding space environment.”

The nine instruments that will be responsible for accomplishing the fantastic science during the mission include the Europa Imaging System (EIS), Europa Thermal Emission Imaging System (E-THEMIS), Europa Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Europa-UVS), Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa (MISE), Europa Clipper Magnetometer (ECM), Plasma Instrument for Magnetic Sounding (PIMS), Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface (REASON), MAss Spectrometer for Planetary EXploration/Europa (MASPEX), SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA).

New telescope detects more sources in six months than in the 60-year history of X-ray astronomy.

A unique photograph of the Milky Way galaxy was captured using the IceCube detector, which observes high-energy neutrinos from space.

Windswept piles of dust, or layers of ice? ESA’s Mars Express has revisited one of Mars’s most mysterious features to clarify its composition. Its findings suggest layers of water ice stretching several kilometers below ground—the most water ever found in this part of the planet.

Over 15 years ago, Mars Express studied the Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF), revealing massive deposits up to 2.5 km deep. From these early observations, it was unclear what the deposits were made of—but new research now has an answer.

“We’ve explored the MFF again using newer data from Mars Express’s MARSIS radar, and found the deposits to be even thicker than we thought: up to 3.7 km thick,” says Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution, U.S., lead author of both the new research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, and the initial 2007 study. “Excitingly, the radar signals match what we’d expect to see from layered ice, and are similar to the signals we see from Mars’s polar caps, which we know to be very ice rich.”

The planet, TOI-715 b, sits within the habitable zone of a star just 137 light-years from Earth.

A team from TU Dortmund University recently succeeded in producing a highly durable time crystal that lived millions of times longer than could be shown in previous experiments. By doing so, they have corroborated an extremely interesting phenomenon that Nobel Prize laureate Frank Wilczek postulated around ten years ago and which had already found its way into science fiction movies.

The results have been published in Nature Physics.

Crystals or, to be more precise, crystals in space, are periodic arrangements of atoms over large length scales. This arrangement gives crystals their fascinating appearance, with smooth facets like in gemstones.

The study of exoplanets is slated to get an upgrade with NASA’s Roman Space Telescope, also known as Roman, which will observe the night sky like never before. However, before it can meet its current scheduled launch date of May 2027, Roman needs to demonstrate all its instruments and components are functioning at peak performance, which includes its Coronagraph Instrument (CGI). The CGI is slated to be a technology demonstration for directly imaging exoplanets on future space telescope missions. Recently, NASA announced that CGI passed some critical tests for ensuring the CGI and the other instruments on Roman will function in tandem without getting in each other’s way.

“This is such an important and nerve-wracking stage of building a spacecraft instrument, testing whether or not everything works as intended,” Dr. Feng Zhao, who is the deputy project manager for CGI at NASA JPL, said in a statement. “But we have an amazing team who built this thing, and it passed the electrical components tests with flying colors.”

The glow occurs when sunlight interacts with atoms and molecules in our atmosphere.

Metalenses have been used to image microscopic features of tissue and resolve details smaller than a wavelength of light. Now they are going bigger.

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a 10-centimeter-diameter glass metalens that can image the sun, the moon and distant nebulae with high resolution.

It is the first all-glass, large-scale metalens in the visible wavelength that can be mass produced using conventional CMOS fabrication technology.