Following several misleading news reports that claimed 7 percent of an identical twin’s DNA changed after he spent one year in space, rendering them no longer identical, NASA reissued the press release clarifying the preliminary findings of their “Twins Study.”

“Mark and Scott Kelly are still identical twins; Scott’s DNA did not fundamentally change,” the updated press release says.

Scott and his twin brother, Mark Kelly, were the subjects of the study, which looked at how spaceflight affects the human body. Scott lived on the International Space Station from March 2015 to March 2016. Researchers documented physiological and psychological changes in Scott and compared the data to his twin brother Mark, who remained on Earth and served as a control subject.

The confusion seems to stem from NASA’s original, January press release, which was vaguely worded. Publications like Newsweek began reporting that some of Scott’s DNA had changed, based on this excerpt from the original press release:

Researchers now know that 93% of Scott’s genes returned to normal after landing. However, the remaining 7% point to possible longer term changes in genes related to his immune system, DNA repair, bone formation networks, hypoxia, and hypercapnia.

In reality if 7 percent of Scott’s DNA had changed, he likely would no longer be human. As National Geographic’s Nadia Drake noted, “humans and chimps have genetic sequences that differ by less than 2 percent, and individual humans—even completely unrelated strangers—differ by about 0.1 percent.”

So what exactly did NASA researchers discover?

The changes in Scott’s genome were related to gene expression, not the actual structure of his  DNA. The updated press release is careful to note that the observed changes were “very minimal.”

“What researchers did observe are changes in gene expression, which is how your body reacts to your environment,” the press release says. “This likely is within the range for humans under stress, such as mountain climbing or SCUBA diving.”

Meaning that the observed changes are not all that surprising and can happen to anyone who engages in some sort of strenuous activity. Changes in genetic expression reflect whether genes are activated or deactivated, which in turn determines how cells develop and function.

“Within each of us, most of our cells are otherwise genetically identical, but their genes are expressed at different levels,” writes Drake. “It’s those patterns of expression that produce hearts, brains, eyeballs, and other things, kind of like using the same set of ingredients to cook up vastly different dishes.”

The confusing news reports overshadowed some important findings of the multifaceted study, which also looked at how the spaceflight environment impacts cognitive performance and the immune system.

Researchers noted a pronounced decrease in cognitive speed and accuracy after Scott landed, possibly related to re-adapting to Earth’s gravity. The preliminary study noted however that most of the biological changes observed in Scott quickly returned to normal after he returned to Earth.

NASA says it plans on releasing more comprehensive results of its study later this year.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has now marked 2,000 days on the red planet.

That’s 2,000 days by Martian standards. A Martian sol, or solar day, is equivalent to 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds. So 2,000 days on Mars equal 2,055 days here on Earth.

Either way, it’s a big milestone this week for scientists eager for Curiosity to begin drilling again, this time into potentially clay-rich rocks on the slopes of Mount Sharp. The six-wheeled rover has traveled 11.6 miles since its arrival in 2012.

The rover Opportunity, though, has Curiosity beat.

Last month, NASA’s busy Opportunity surpassed its 5,000 day on Mars. It’s been exploring Mars since 2004. NASA plans to send another robotic geologist to Mars in May. Named InSight, the lander will stay in one place as a heat-measuring device burrows deep into the Martian terrain.

Curiosity’s flight controllers, meanwhile, are testing a new drilling method. The rover’s drill stopped working properly in 2016, and so engineers devised another way to bore into Martian rocks and get the pulverized rock samples into the rover’s lab instruments.

Trickling in through the giant radio dishes of NASA’s Deep Space Network, faint whispers from a distant robotic explorer deliver a message: I may not have much time left.

It is Voyager 1, our most distant explorer, still functioning and communicating with NASA as it speeds ever farther into deep space.

The message is not a literal S.O.S. signal, but data from Voyager’s engine system alerting NASA engineers that a problem is on the horizon: Voyager may soon lose the ability to align its radio dish — its communication lifeline — with Earth.

Loss of contact with Voyager would spell the end of a more than 40-year career of discovery, an odyssey that began with the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn and continued in a long-distance quest to find the very edge of interstellar space.

Decades ago the “grand tour” of Voyagers 1 and 2 brought us remarkable images and discoveries from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and their moons.

They revealed active volcanoes on Io, hinted at a huge liquid-water ocean under Europa’s ice crust, and piqued our curiosity for Saturn’s mysterious, cloud-shrouded Titan. They showed us stunning pictures of Jupiter’s cloud belts and huge storm systems, and opened our eyes to exquisite details of Saturn’s rings.

After traveling more than 13 billion miles, Voyager 1 has only recently crossed that threshold beyond the reach of our sun and entered interstellar space. With a vast, unexplored realm laid out ahead, an untimely end to Voyager’s mission now would be a tremendous loss. Scientists are hungry to learn more about what lies between the stars of our galaxy.

Voyager 1’s Check Engine Light Came On

It was inevitable that at some point, Voyager 1’s ability to keep in touch would start to fade. Operating such a remote space observatory presents several technical challenges, not the least of which is maintaining radio communications over great distance. NASA does this by keeping Voyager’s main radio dish aligned with Earth and the giant radio dishes of NASA’s Deep Space Network.

Left to its own inertia, the spacecraft would slowly rotate out of alignment, reacting to the subtle but persistent forces of things like pressure from sunlight and the solar wind.

To date, Voyager 1 has used a set of “attitude control thrusters” that fire in tiny bursts to subtly steer the spacecraft to maintain alignment. But over the last few years, NASA has noticed that these thrusters are degrading, producing less and less thrust and requiring longer bursts to do their job.

How To Take A Spaceship to the Mechanic

You don’t keep driving your car when the engine begins to sputter, if you plan to keep driving it. You take it to a mechanic.

Since bringing Voyager in for a tune-up isn’t an option, NASA engineers had to imagine how to sustain Voyager’s mission health using on-board resources. Remember that scene from Apollo 13 when the engineers had to figure out a way for the astronauts to fix the carbon dioxide removal system using plastic bags and duct tape?

The workaround for Voyager 1 was to attempt to reenlist a different set of engines that had been shut down for 37 years.

These are Voyager’s “trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) thrusters.” They hadn’t been tested since NASA engineers last used them to help Voyager 1 maneuver through the Saturn system to make close flybys of the planet and its large moon, Titan. Once the Saturn flyby was over, the TCM thrusters were no longer needed, and were shut down.

On November 28, 2017, NASA sent the command to Voyager to test-fire the TCM thrusters. That radio signal travelled through space for 19.5 hours to reach Voyager (that’s now far away it is), while NASA engineers waited.

Then, after another 19.5 hours of silence, NASA’s Goldstone radio antenna in the Mojave Desert received word from Voyager 1 that the thrusters had fired!

NASA now has a path forward to keep Voyager 1’s communication dish facing Earth for at least another two or three years, by switching to the TCM system once the current thrusters have gone off-line.

The Voyager Legacy

Launched in 1977,  Voyager 1’s primary mission was to make flybys of the Jupiter and Saturn systems before being flung by Saturn’s gravity onto a course that would take it out of the solar system, bound for interstellar space.

Now, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object from Earth, and has been since it overtook the venerable Pioneer 10 in 1998. As of March 2018, Voyager 1 is over 13 billion miles away—or 141 times farther from the sun than Earth is.

Voyager 2, now over 10 billion miles out, followed a different path from its twin, cruising on to Uranus and then Neptune after visiting Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 became the only spacecraft to visit all four gas giant planets, and the only one ever to visit Uranus or Neptune.

Interstellar Envoys

After departing the realm of the gas giants, both Voyagers became de facto envoys to interstellar space, having achieved solar escape velocity during their planetary flybys.

From that point on, the Voyagers’ mission switched from being planetary explorers to becoming remote outposts measuring properties of the space around them—the speed and direction of the solar wind and associated magnetic fields, the activity of electrically charged particles flying by.

Think of the Voyagers as extremely remote weather stations, reporting back the “space weather” conditions as they coast to ever greater distances.

For many years, Voyager mission scientists studied the trickle of data beamed back from both spacecraft, waiting for the day when one or both might report a change in the particle or magnetic environment—a “shift in the wind” indicating a probe had entered interstellar space.

In August 2012, Voyager 1 officially crossed over, detecting a large increase in charged particles coming from interstellar space—particles that are normally deflected by the solar wind.

The difference between interstellar space and the bubble of solar wind surrounding the sun is subtle, and you wouldn’t notice a change with any human senses. In fact, in either case, human senses would report only empty space.

But with its sensitive particle and magnetic field detectors, Voyager 1 is giving us our first taste of what lies between the stars. The longer it stays in communication with us, the deeper into the galaxy we will probe.

Have you ever gazed up at the night sky and wondered which stars might have planets, what those worlds may be like, or if there could be some form of life on any of them? When I was a child, I did a lot of that sort of imagining — decades before the first scientific detection of an extrasolar planet.

We now live in an era of knowing that the galaxy teems with planets, and that probably most, if not all stars possess multiple worlds. Anyone born after 1992 has lived their entire life without needing to imagine if there are planets around other stars — we know they are there!

On April 16th we enter another era of exoplanet discovery, with the launch of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite spacecraft. TESS will be propelled by a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket into a high-Earth orbit, a lofty vantage point that will offer sweeping views of space.

From that high orbit, TESS will engage in a two-year survey of 500,000 stars across the entire sky, searching for planets by the “transit” method: measuring the temporary dimming of a star’s light when one of its planets passes in front of it.

What We Know About Exoplanets
The search for extrasolar planets is not a new thing. We’ve been finding them since 1992, 26 years ago! As of April 2018, a total of 3,711 exoplanets of all sizes have been confirmed to exist. Their abundance tells us that most, if not all, stars in the galaxy likely possess at least one, and probably multiple, planets.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009, set out to find the more elusive “Earth-like” exoplanets: world’s close to Earth’s size that could support liquid water on their surfaces, within their star’s “Habitable Zone.” Among the 2,600 exoplanets that Kepler has discovered, at least a couple dozen fall into this category.

Kepler’s sampling suggests that there may be billions of these Earth-like worlds in the galaxy.

Naturally, scientists want to know more about these potential other-Earths. (So do I!) What are they made of? Do they have atmospheres? Do they have oceans? Most tantalizing of all, do they support life?

Unfortunately, most of the potentially Earth-like worlds we have discovered are too far away for us to learn much more than their sizes and how close they are to their stars. Their great distances from us make more detailed investigations extremely challenging, to say the least.

What’s New About TESS?

Unlike the Kepler mission, which focused on very distant stars in one small patch of the sky, TESS will survey the nearest stars in our neighborhood of the galaxy, and across the entire sky.

TESS will detect exoplanets of all types, but its main goal is to look for small, Earth- and super-Earth sized planets, orbiting stars much closer to us and much brighter than those Kepler observed.

Both of these factors will make detailed investigation by other observatories and spacecraft possible — including the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, which will be tasked with measuring the temperature and atmospheric composition of these nearby worlds.

This may tell us if a planet has the necessary ingredients for life–liquid water and organic compounds. We might even detect the chemical telltales of life itself.

How Strange Might Strange New Worlds Be?
As that child gazing up at the starry skies, I imagined some pretty wild possibilities for those yet-undiscovered worlds.

Imagine a planet-wide desert, stretching pole to pole, that is so cold that carbon dioxide lies frozen on the ground. Or a searing hot landscape with a corrosive atmosphere that is so thick it would crush you like an aluminum can. Or a cloud-darkened milieu where the rain, rivers and seas are cryogenic liquid methane and you would weigh only 20 pounds. Or a world covered entirely by a hundred-mile-deep ocean hiding under a crust of ice.

And these are only descriptions of some of the planets and moons in our own solar system.

TESS is projected to find at least 1,500 exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, and of these at least 300 are expected to be near-Earth sized. Once we begin to probe the environmental conditions on those planets, imagine what we might find.

Scientists are about to measure seismic activity on Mars for the first time. NASA is set to launch the InSight lander as early as May 5, carrying a seismometer to the red planet.

The goal: learning how planets are born. Like Earth, Mars and other rocky planets have a crust, mantle and core. And Mars has tectonic plates, too, although fewer than Earth does.

Earth is like an egg shell, with its surface broken in many small pieces. Over billions of years, these actively shifting tectonic plates have hidden much of our planet’s ancient history.

Mars has fewer breaks in its crust, and the planet’s surface is breaking at a very slow pace. So Mars, at an earlier phase in its geologic evolution, offers the chance to see an infant version of our home planet.

InSight, which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, will spend about six months traveling to Mars. And before InSight heads off on its mission, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is taking a model of the lander on a roadshow. Bay Area residents can catch InSight at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, April 18-22.

Venton: So, we’re here at the webcast studio at the Exploratorium and there’s going to be a very special visitor here in a few days. 

Hawkins: That’s right, we have the whole team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena that’s coming to share with us all the excitement of the InSight Lander.

Venton: So there will be a model of it here. It has some kind of interesting equipment on it. What do you think is especially important?

Hawkins: There are three scientific instruments aboard the InSight Lander. The one that I’m most excited about is the seismometer, because it will measure quakes on Mars.

Venton: Why do we want to know about earthquakes — not earthquakes, I guess they’re called marsquakes. Why do we want to know about quakes on Mars? I think a lot of people would be surprised to even know that there are quakes that happen in space.

Hawkins: Yeah, they’re not part of the popular consciousness as evidenced by our stumbling in terms of how we call it, what do we call it. Marsquake, or earthquake, or earthquakes on the moon. I mean it starts to get confusing, but as a matter of fact there are moonquakes, for example, in our own satellite, our own moon.

There are also ioquakes in one of the moons of Jupiter and there have been research studies that have shown that there are plate tectonics, or evidence of plate tectonics, which are the drivers of many earthquakes here on Earth. Also, that another moon of Jupiter, called Europa, has evidence for such plate tectonics. And so we expect seismic activities are also taking place there.

Venton: What will a better understanding of marsquakes help us learn about the planet?

Hawkins: Well, by understanding how the planet is quaking, we can get an idea of how the early solar system was formed and what were those early processes. Not just on Mars, but also on the other terrestrial planets, which are the inner rocky planets of the solar system.

Venton: Is Earth one of those?

Hawkins: Yes, Earth is one of those.

Venton: So, will studying quakes on Mars help us understand more about our own planet?

Hawkins: Yes, definitely by studying the inner layers of Mars and understanding how Mars formed and evolved geologically, that information can provide insights into the other terrestrial planets or the other inner solar system planets.

Earth is much more geologically active than Mars, so Mars retains those early fingerprints as to how those processes began a long time ago. And that information has been lost here on Earth, because the planet is so much more active, but Mars still retained that early fingerprint information that’s so necessary.

Venton: So is Mars in this way an earlier version of the Earth?

Hawkins: Yes, that’s a great way of putting it.

Venton: That is really cool.

Hawkins: Yeah, it’s really cool that we can actually travel across the solar system and do investigations that will give us insights as to how we came to be and how we’re evolving.

When NASA astronaut Joseph Acaba was out doing a spacewalk during a recent trip to the International Space Station, he held on tight. That’s because Acaba is afraid of heights.

“If you look at the pictures, I’m holding on to the railing,” he told a crowd at the Stennis Space Center on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. “It does take a little bit of work while you’re doing a spacewalk to realize, okay, it’s okay. You are not going to fall.”

Acaba was making his first public appearance — on the ground — since his Feb. 28 return from the space station. He spoke to employees at the space center and with The Associated Press after his talk about his experiences in space; future trips to the moon and beyond; and working with his Russian counterparts.

Acaba, who has logged more than 300 days in space on three separate flights, said space travel for private citizens is closer than many think.

“In the next year or so, we’re going to have commercial flights flying NASA astronauts, and that’s the first big step,” he said. “And, it’s never going to become routine. Going to space is difficult, but I think here in the near future, we are going to have more opportunities for people to fly in space.”

The ultimate goal, he said, is to get humans on Mars. But the path to Mars goes through the moon first.

Shields up! We are approaching the sun and will soon be zipping through its corona at 430,000 miles per hour, enduring blistering outside temperatures of up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and risking severe damage from high-intensity radiation… .

No, this is not a supercaffeinated episode of “Star Trek,” in which the gallant crew of the Enterprise yet again put their lives in peril in the name of science.

This is real: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission launches in July on its own 7-year mission to go boldly where no spacecraft has gone before, into the sun’s superheated, radiation-rampant corona.

Not only is the Parker Solar Probe the first spacecraft ever targeted to the sun’s close vicinity, it’s the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person, solar physicist Eugene Parker.

Probing The Source of Space Weather

The Parker Solar Probe is part of the Living With a Star program of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Living With a Star seeks to understand how the radiation and electrically charged plasma the sun blows into space — the solar wind — affects us here on Earth.

Key to understanding this sun-Earth connection is comprehending the sun itself — and more specifically, the region of the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, where most space weather conditions originate.

Until now, missions investigating the sun have either been space-based observatories using telescopes from a distance, or “space weather stations” that measure the conditions of the solar wind as it blows past Earth — or both.

This is a little like studying hurricanes on Earth by watching them from above with satellites or measuring the weather conditions on the ground as the storm makes landfall.

But to fully understand hurricanes and make accurate predictions of their strength, duration and trajectories across the ocean and land, we need to study the atmospheric conditions that ultimately give birth to these powerful storms.

That’s where the Parker Solar Probe is different from other solar missions. This spacecraft will be sent to the sun’s corona, the headwaters of the solar wind, where it will shine some light on the little-understood processes that stir up space weather.

With its suite of scientific instruments, the Parker Solar Probe will investigate the structure and dynamic changes of the sun’s powerful and complex magnetic field, count and analyze high-speed electrons, protons and alpha particles (helium nuclei), and capture images of the solar corona and inner heliosphere.

By getting an up-close and detailed look at the mechanisms that drive space weather, we will gain a clearer understanding of its interaction with Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, its potential impacts on satellites orbiting the Earth, and how space weather “storms” that periodically reach us can affect astronauts in space or even people on the ground.

Close But Not Too Close

Though the Parker Solar Probe will be launched this July, it won’t be using warp drive to get to the sun right away. (Remember, this is real.)

In the real world of solar system navigation, the spacecraft will spend a few years maneuvering closer and closer to the sun, making several passes by the planet Venus, using its gravity to alter its orbit.

The orbit will be highly elliptical, in a sense ducking in and out of the most radiation-intense regions close to the sun, to minimize time there. Over the course of its mission the probe will make 24 orbits around the sun, as well as seven close flybys of Venus — and with each pass by Venus its perihelion distance (the point of closest approach to the sun) will grow smaller.

Parker, built and operated by the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University, will conduct scientific measurements throughout its 7-year mission, and on Dec. 19, 2024 will make its closest perihelion plunge into the sun’s corona, coming within 3.85 million miles of the sun’s photosphere (the visible surface we see). That’s 10 times closer than the planet Mercury is from the sun, and seven times closer than the previous record-holding spacecraft, Helios 2, in 1976.

At this distance, solar radiation is over 500 times more intense than on Earth.

Shields Up!

Though the Parker Solar Probe won’t have the sci-fi deflector screens of the starship Enterprise, it will be well-protected by the latest thermal insulation technology: a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite shield, or “super parasol.”

During its closest approach to the sun, the spacecraft will retract its main solar power panels behind the shield to protect them from the super-intense sunlight, using a smaller, more robust secondary array to generate electricity.

And, with a little luck, it will survive the passage in good health — though maybe a little warmer for the wear.

Scientists have new evidence that there are plumes of water erupting from the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa — plumes that could, maybe, possibly contain signs of life.

The evidence comes from data collected by the now-defunct Galileo spacecraft. Although the data has been available since it was collected in 1997, it’s only now that an analysis confirms the existence of water plumes.

For more than two decades, scientists have been convinced Europa has a liquid water ocean sloshing around beneath its icy outer crust. In the past six years, two teams of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope reported the possible existence of plumes. But as powerful as Hubble is, seeing something as small as a plume on a moon more than 380-million miles away is difficult.

“We’re looking for effects that are relatively small, and are pushing the spatial resolution of the telescope,” says astrophysicist Susana Deutsua of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Nonetheless, it made sense that Europa had plumes, since the Cassini spacecraft had definitely seen water plumes from Enceladus, an icy moon orbiting Saturn that’s similar to Europa.

“When we first saw those images, I think a lot of us in the community were very excited,” says planetary scientists Xianzhe Jia from the University of Michigan. Jia did his graduate work at the University of California Los Angeles where he focused on data collected by Galileo.

A year ago, Jia heard a scientific talk about the plumes. He learned that they were near the equator of Europa, a region Galileo had flown directly over in 1997.

“That’s the moment where we realized that we might have something in the old Galileo data that we never paid much attention to,” Jia says.

Galileo recorded tons of data in the seven plus years it orbiting Jupiter. Jia was particularly familiar with data from an instrument known as a magnetometer that measures magnetic fields.

Turns out plumes give off a distinctive signal that a magnetometer can measure.

“When we look at those data carefully, what we found is there’s some strange magnetic signals in those data that have never been explained before,” Jai says.

As Jia and his colleagues report in the journal, Nature Astronomy, the best explanation was the signals were indeed generated by plumes of water coming from Europa. This means future missions to Jupiter could fly through these plumes and look directly for signs of life.

So why hadn’t scientists figured this out when these data were recorded back in the 1997?

Margaret Kivelson was principle investigator of the magnetometer on Galileo. She remembers puzzling over the magnetometer signals.

She says her team had already made the outlandish but ultimately accurate suggestion that there was a liquid ocean under Europa’s icy crust. “To go from there to also there are geysers coming up from that ocean, we just weren’t ready for that,” Kivelson says.

Kivelson has been studying Jupiter and its moons for a long time. She’s looking forward to NASA’s next mission to the giant planet.

“I hate to tell you how old I’ll be when the mission gets to Europa, but that’s OK,” she says.

Kivelseon is 89 now. The mission may not arrive until 2028. You can do the math.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Just months after the discovery of our first known interstellar visitor, it turns out there’s another asteroid from yet another star system residing in our cosmic club in plain view.

Scientists reported Monday that this interstellar resident is an asteroid sharing Jupiter’s orbit but circling in the opposite direction.

The asteroid, known as 2015 BZ509, has been in this peculiar backward orbit around the sun ever since getting sucked into our solar system, the researchers said. About 2 miles across, it joined our neighborhood in the first moments after our solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

The French and Brazilian researchers base their finding on extensive computer simulations showing BZ always has orbited around the sun in reverse and thus harkens back to the beginning of our solar system.

The results, published in the journal Royal Astronomical Society , come several months after the discovery of our first known interstellar visitor, a smaller, cigar-shaped asteroid that zoomed by last fall.

That passer-by rock was named Oumuamua, Hawaiian for messenger from afar arriving first, or scout.

“Oumuamua is of interstellar origin but it is also only a tourist passing by our solar system,” said lead author Fathi Namouni of the University of Cote d’Azur in Nice, France. “BZ is not. It is a bona fide immigrant and the notion of immigration is a hot topic nowadays all over the world!”

Namouni said stars were closer back when our solar system was forming, and asteroids were zipping around between star systems. It’s extremely unlikely — “practically zero” — that BZ came from the same star system as Oumuamua, he noted in an email.

He expects lots more interstellar immigrants in our backyard.

“There is no reason why there shouldn’t be more masquerading as solar system asteroids like BZ did so far,” Namouni wrote. He said the area just beyond Neptune, the farthest planet in our solar system, might be teeming with extrasolar asteroids — or exo asteroids — like BZ.

It’s extremely unlikely — “practically zero” — that BZ came from the same star system as Oumuamua, according to Namouni.

Co-author Helena Morais of Sao Paulo State University in Brazil said she was surprised by the finding, but noted “that’s part of the fun” of science.

“If we may have asteroids that pass by, then we should also expect asteroids that come to stay,” she wrote in an email.

By identifying more immigrant asteroids, Namouni said, scientists can determine their composition. If BZ contains water, for example, researchers can compare it with Earth’s water and, perhaps, better understand how water originated here at home.

We’ve hurled robots at Mars for over 50 years — on one-way flybys and orbital trajectories in space, and onto the surface by parachute, airbag, rocket-crane, landing-feet and even wheels.

In 2020, NASA will add another mode of Martian locomotion to the history books: rotor-blades. 

In a few short years the Mars Helicopter will fly the Martian skies to demonstrate how flying vehicles can expand a mission’s range of exploration and gain access to terrain unreachable by ground travel.

Helicopters on Mars?

It was inevitable. With the technological explosion of small, remotely controlled drones popping up everywhere in our lives, it was only a matter of time before one started buzzing the skies of another planet.

In development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 2013, and after numerous rounds of testing, redesign and re-testing on Earth, the Mars Helicopter is ready to spin its light-weight propellers and test the air on the Red Planet.

How Will It Get There?

Mars Helicopter isn’t going alone. With a body only a few inches across and a total weight of about four pounds, this no-frills flying rotor-bot doesn’t carry the equipment or pack enough power for communicating with Earth.

To be capable of propeller-driven flight in Mars’ thin atmosphere, it had to be designed as light as possible. This turns out to be an advantage in one way: it is small and light enough to hitch a ride on a larger cousin, NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, set to launch in July 2020.

The tiny vehicle will be tucked away in the underbelly of the rover, and at an opportune time in the 2020 mission will be lowered to the ground. The rover— which is nearly identical in size and appearance to the Curiosity rover now exploring Gale Crater — will then back away to a safe distance and serve as a communication relay with Earth.

How Will the Helicopter Fly?

On Earth, the highest recorded helicopter flight reached an altitude of about 40,000 feet, where the thinning atmosphere requires faster and faster rotor speeds to maintain lift. Most conventional helicopters are not capable even of reaching the peaks of Earth’s highest mountains, like Everest.

On Mars, the atmospheric pressure at ground level is equivalent to a 100,000-foot elevation on Earth. Obviously, Mars Helicopter isn’t your off-the-shelf drone.

Its twin counter-spinning propeller blades will turn at 3,000 rotations per minute to lift the tiny craft off the ground, powered by a potent, lightweight lithium-ion battery that will be recharged by solar cells.

NASA will test Mars Helicopter’s capabilities over a 30-day period, starting with simple, brief hops and gradually extending the flight distance and duration. The vehicle, once given its commands for a flight, will operate autonomously.

The helicopter will spend nights on the ground, using battery-powered heaters to protect its equipment. Then, after the sun comes up the next day, it will recharge its batteries for its next aerial adventure.

What will the Mars Helicopter tell us about Mars?

The first of its kind, Mars Helicopter is more a test-of-concept project than a dedicated tool of scientific exploration.

If the test exercises are successful, the tiny, self-controlled drone will demonstrate the capability for future missions to perform aerial surveillance and to visit places that are hard to get to by ground travel.

If mission scientists have sighed at images sent back from Mars thinking, “I wish we could see what’s just over that ridge,” they may soon get their wish.

Mars 2020 Rover

While Mars Helicopter is hopping about the alien desert blazing a sky-trail for next-generation chopper-bots, the Mars 2020 rover “mothership” will be going about its own mission to search for evidence of past Martian life — regardless of the fate of its flighty companion.

Despite the flashy allure of the first extraterrestrial helicopter tour, the real meat of the mission is in the hands of the car-sized rover. Mars 2020 will employ techniques for detecting residues of ancient microbial life that have been developed to study the earliest life on Earth — giving it the potential to make one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time.

That said, the test-flights of a semi-autonomous flying drone may pave the way to an entirely new paradigm of planetary exploration.

Major changes could be ahead for the International Space Station but there will always be an American astronaut in orbit, NASA’s new boss said Wednesday.

The space agency is already talking with private companies about potentially taking over the space lab after 2025, but no decision will made without the other 21 countries that are partners in the project, NASA Administrator James Bridenstine said in his first briefing with reporters.

President Donald Trump’s recent budget requests have put discussions about the station’s future “on steroids,” he said. Under Trump’s 2019 proposed budget, U.S. funding for the space station would end by 2025. The U.S. has spent more than $75 billion on the space station.

Options include splitting the station into different segments or reducing its size by breaking it up and discarding one part.

But no matter what happens, there won’t be any gap when Americans aren’t in space, Bridenstine vowed. It won’t be like after the Apollo moon program closed or even the retirement of the space shuttle fleet, which has forced NASA to pay Russia to ferry astronauts to the station.

“There are kids graduating from high school this month, that their entire lives, we’ve had an astronaut in space,” Bridenstine said. “And we want that to live on in perpetuity forever. No gaps.”

Companies are interested in running the station and “there’s a range of options” that are just now being examined, he said.

The first station piece was launched in 1998. The complex was essentially completed with the end of the shuttle program in 2011. It is about the size of a six-bedroom house, complete with two bathrooms, a gym and a 360-degree bay window. It usually has a crew of six.

In wide-ranging remarks, the former Oklahoma Republican congressman said he generally supports NASA’s Earth science missions, including missions that monitor heat-trapping carbon dioxide. He said at least three climate science satellites that the Trump administration had tried to cancel earlier in budget proposals “could all end up in very good shape” and that he supported them in Congress, crossing party lines.

“We’re going forth with missions that are going to do carbon monitoring,” he said, ticking off a couple of projects. “We’re committed to that.”

When told that a Pew Research poll out Wednesday said that 63 percent of Americans said NASA’s top priority should be monitoring key parts of Earth’s climate, Bridenstine said “good” and reiterated his acceptance of human-caused climate change as a threat to national security and the globe.

Bridenstine also said he hopes NASA will put some kind of small robotic landers on the moon next year, followed at some later date by humans. Astronauts should use the moon as a “proving ground” for future missions to Mars, especially checking out potential health issues for living far away from Earth for a long time. He said he worried about balance, vision, bone loss and heart issues that have been reported with space station astronauts.

“We do not want to go to Mars and have our astronauts to be marshmallows on the surface of Mars,” Bridenstine said. “The moon is our best opportunity to be successful when we go to Mars.”

NASA’s InSIGHT spacecraft launched May 5 on an outbound journey to Mars, scoring a historic first: the first interplanetary spacecraft ever launched from the West Coast.

But that wasn’t the only first from this mission. In a two-for-one achievement for the record books, InSIGHT was accompanied by two smaller spacecraft: “CubeSats” named MarCO A and MarCO B — together forming the Mars Cube One mission.

The two MarCO CubeSats are the first satellites of their class to venture farther into space than low-Earth orbit — and with Mars as their destination they should hold onto that record for a long time to come.

What is a CubeSat?

CubeSats are the brainchild of some out-of-the-box thinking about miniaturized, modular satellite technology, conceived back in 1998 at the California Polytechnic State University and Stanford University. Since that time over 800 have been launched into low-Earth orbit.

CubeSats have been used in almost as many different research projects as there are CubeSats, more or less. They have studied almost every region of Earth’s atmosphere, its surface, and the space weather environment surrounding our planet.

One CubeSat project was an attempt to improve scientists’ ability to predict earthquakes by detecting fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field. Another is studying genetic changes in E. coli to explore the effects on life by long-term exposure to the environment of space. Yet another will test the effects of space radiation on electronic equipment.

CubeSat technology offers a cheap means for universities, private companies large and small, and even amateur groups to launch space-based projects into orbit.

Modern CubeSats are assembled from one or more 4-inch cubical modules, each weighing less than three pounds. These tiny, Jack-in-the-Box-sized units have revolutionized space-based research, offering a low-cost option for experiments that might not get funding on more expensive platforms.

CubeSats can be built using commercial off-the-shelf equipment— components from cell phones, digital cameras, and GPS receivers,  for example — and so are far less expensive than custom-designed and manufactured satellites. A CubeSat may be built for as little as a few thousand dollars.

CubeSats often ride into space as secondary payloads on conventional satellite launches, or are deployed from the International Space Station, which greatly reduces the cost to get them into orbit.

The cost of launching a CubeSat runs anywhere from around $100,000 to as low as $15,000, a far cry from the tens of millions of dollars needed (at a minimum) to launch a conventional satellite.

What Will MarCO A and B Do?

Being the first-ever of their kind to leave Earth orbit — let alone head out for Mars — you might expect the two MarCO CubeSats to play a key role in the InSIGHT lander’s scientific mission. In fact, they don’t.

In the true spirit of the low-cost, low-risk paradigm of the CubeSat clan, the MarCO twins are tagging along with InSIGHT to test a new idea: how CubeSat “tagalongs” with miniaturized communication and navigation gear can be used as real-time communication relays for spacecraft during time-critical maneuvers, like landing on another planet–in this case, Mars.

MarCO will relay InSIGHT’s telemetry to Earth as the lander descends, providing us with second-by-second details of the entry, descent, and landing maneuvers.

During the seven-month trip to Mars, the CubeSats will make course-correction maneuvers with their thrusters to keep up with InSIGHT’s own course changes, as well as test their imaging, communication, and navigational capabilities in preparation for the landing event next November.

InSIGHT will not depend on MarCO for communication with Earth during its main science mission. That vital task will be performed by NASA’s venerable and time-tested Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The InSIGHT Mission

InSIGHT (standing for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is on a first-of-its-kind mission of its own. Though set in the physical mold of stationary landers like the Vikings, the ill-fated Beagle 2, and Phoenix, InSIGHT’s scientific goals are very different than its picture-taking, rock-drilling predecessors.

InSIGHT will use a seismometer to monitor “Mars-quakes,” a self-burrowing temperature sensor array to measure underground heat flow, and a radio-wave Doppler experiment to make precise measurements of Mars’ rotational characteristics.

All these instruments together will help provide (dare I say) insight to the interior structure and thermal dynamics of Mars. With this data scientists hope to learn how Mars — and by extension, all four rocky planets, including Earth — originally formed in the earliest times of the solar system.

Not the First “Add-ons”

Smaller “add-on” spacecraft have been sent into space before, but these were mostly probes launched by the main robotic spacecraft to extend a mission’s scientific capability into a world’s atmosphere or onto its surface.

Pioneer Venus dropped probes into Venus’ atmosphere, Galileo into Jupiter’s. Cassini delivered the European Huygens probe to the surface of the enigmatic moon Titan. NASA launched two separate spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and LCROSS, in the same rocket on otherwise separate missions to the moon.

But for the CubeSat generation of tiny hitch-hiking space explorers, the two MarCO spacecraft are earning a place in history by demonstrating that their miniaturized, no-frills technology might be used in very deep space, far from the low-Earth orbit limits of their kin.

A NASA rover on Mars has fallen silent as a gigantic dust storm envelops the planet and blots out the sun.

Flight controllers tried late Tuesday night to contact Opportunity, but the rover did not respond. The storm has been growing since the end of May and now covers one-quarter of the planet.

Controllers expect it will be several more days before there’s enough sunlight to recharge Opportunity’s battery through its solar panels. NASA says the battery is likely so low that only a clock is still working, to wake the spacecraft for periodic power-level checks.

NASA launched the twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit in 2003 to study Martian rocks and soil. Spirit hasn’t worked for several years. Opportunity, however, has kept exploring well past its expected mission lifetime.

NASA’s record-breaking astronaut, Peggy Whitson, is retiring.

The space agency announced her retirement Friday, her last day on the job.

Whitson has spent more time off the planet than any other American: 665 days over three missions. She was the first woman to command the International Space Station, holding the position twice, and the oldest woman ever to fly in space. She was also the world’s most experienced female spacewalker and the first woman to serve as NASA’s chief astronaut.

The 58-year-old biochemist joined NASA as a researcher in 1986 and became an astronaut in 1996. Her last spaceflight was last year.

NASA officials say Whitson set the highest standards for human spaceflight and was an outstanding role model across the globe.

The U.S. government is stepping up efforts to protect the planet from incoming asteroids that could wipe out entire regions or even continents.

The National Science and Technology Council released a report Wednesday calling for improved asteroid detection, tracking and deflection. NASA is participating, along with federal emergency and White House officials.

Th report says that incoming asteroids could have “major environmental, economic, and geopolitical consequences” even if the impact occurs outside of the U.S.

For now, scientists know of no asteroids or comets heading our way. But one could sneak up on us, and that’s why the government says it wants a better plan.

NASA’s planetary defense officer, Lindley Johnson, says scientists have found 95 percent of all near-Earth objects measuring one kilometer (two-thirds of a mile) or bigger. But the hunt is still on for the remaining 5 percent and smaller rocks that could still inflict big damage.

Next week, a new instrument designed to measure plant stress will be plugged into the International Space Station. Once operating, the device will deliver unprecedented data about drought conditions and water conservation all over the planet.

The device was designed and built by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It’s scheduled for launch on June 29 aboard a SpaceX rocket as part of a resupply mission for the space station.

Known as ECOSTRESS, the instrument will measure the temperature of plants on Earth from the space station platform orbiting 254 miles overhead. It will provide imagery sharper than any existing satellite offers – and more often, thanks to the space station’s unique orbit.

Joshua Fisher, NASA’s science lead for the project, refers to it as “space botany.” From the temperature data, scientists will be able to answer all kinds of questions that could help Earthlings use water more wisely.

For instance, if plants are too hot, it means they are experiencing water stress. This could serve as an early warning of drought conditions. The data the device collects could also help farmers decide between different lettuce varieties, for example, to choose one that best handles water scarcity. The data could even gauge the success of urban water conservation measures, such as measuring effectiveness of landscaping choices.

Water Deeply spoke with Fisher to learn more.

Water Deeply: How does ECOSTRESS measure plant temperature from space?

Joshua Fisher: It measures reflectance in the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that are related to heat. You know those handheld instruments that show you heat maps, like a thermometer? It’s like that except a lot more powerful and from the vantage point of space.

Water Deeply: And how do you get information about water use from that?

Fisher: We’re measuring the temperature of plants on the surface of the Earth, then we convert to water use. So as plants cycle water through their leaves, the water cools them down just like sweating cools us. And if there’s not enough water, then they will heat up because they’re not cycling that water to cool them down. So we can measure that temperature and convert that to water stress.

Water Deeply: How does the space station’s orbit help this project?

Fisher: Most satellites we’re used to are either polar orbiters or geostationary. But the space station has a different type of orbit called a precessing orbit. It doesn’t circle over the poles, but it can see from about 60 degrees north to 60 degrees south. Then it will come over the same spot on Earth every three to five days, depending on latitude. So, at higher latitudes, where its turning around in its orbit, it’s going to be seeing those spots quite a lot. But around the tropics, it will be passing at its normal cadence.

The space station will pass over us at different times every day. That’s really useful for our science because some plants will shut down in the afternoon if there’s water or heat stress, and other plants won’t. But we don’t know where that’s happening globally because we haven’t been able to get it from our polar orbiters. And our geostationary orbiters, which do measure the same area every time are quite coarse because of their orbit.

ECOSTRESS is able to sample that diurnal cycle with a very fine spatial resolution of about 70 meters. That’s basically the size of a large backyard – about 230 feet on a side.

Water Deeply: How can this information be used to improve water efficiency on Earth?

Fisher: Farmers want to water as much as their plants will use. They don’t want to water less, unless they are doing some sort of stress irrigation. In general, you want to basically optimize your irrigation and not any more, because that’s a waste of money. So farmers really want to know how much water to irrigate. ECOSTRESS will tell how much water plants are needing and how much is actually being irrigated.

Then for water managers, similarly, they want to know how much water different areas are using. So our U.S.Department of Agriculture partners are going to be investigating science questions related to drip irrigation versus sprinklers, timing of irrigation, timing of sowing a crop, different types of seed varieties and the like. There are a lot of interesting questions related to water use in just the agricultural arena.

Water Deeply: How often will ECOSTRESS be able to take measurements?

Fisher: The overpass time is every three to five days for a single point on Earth. But we’re always basically measuring and we’re always sending data back to Earth and processing the data. We’ll make big deliveries to the public data archive center in regular increments, every six months or so. The mission itself is a scientific mission. The applications really want near real-time, and we’re producing that and there can be extensions to the mission to enable that. But the prime focus of the mission is for the science.

Even if it’s not near real-time, it can still help farmers. The farmer might be planting a few different varieties of lettuce and won’t know how much water each variety is using. A retrospective analysis will tell a farmer how much water each variety uses for the next season.

Water Deeply: How unique will this data be?

Fisher: We’ve been able to do evapotranspiration using MODIS at 1 kilometer resolution. That’s really good at temporal resolution, but not that great for spatial resolution. We’ve also been able to do evapotranspiration using Landsat data at about the same spatial resolution as ECOSTRESS. But then Landsat passes over us every 16 days, and if there’s a cloud in the way then it’s 32 days.

There are similar instruments on high towers in different forested areas across the globe, including one in Ione, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. They are part of the Fluxnet network. But the Fluxnet data are limited to plants within a radius of about a mile. It would takes millions of Fluxnets to see the whole picture.

ECOSTRESS kind of hits that sweet spot in terms of really good spatial resolution and really good temporal resolution. The ECOSTRESS instrument is really accurate and our retrieval algorithms to process the data are very mature and good as well. We get the best of all worlds in ECOSTRESS.

This article originally appeared on Water Deeply, and you can find it here. For important news about the California drought, you can sign up to the Water Deeply email list.

There is a mighty windstorm now raging on Mars.  From all indications, it’s a whopper, stronger than any since at least 2007 and now covering most of the planet.

In the opening scene of “The Martian,” Matt Damon battles against a Red Planet gale that blows over equipment and sends objects flying. So you might expect that NASA is busy commanding its rovers and spacecraft to batten down their hatches and find safe havens to ride out the storm. In fact, on June 12, NASA lost contact with the rover Opportunity, located near the heart of the raging storm, where winds may be as high as 60 miles per hour.

But the loss of contact is not because the wind has toppled the rover or smashed it to pieces with a flying rock. Real Martian wind storms are less dramatic than you might believe from Hollywood. Mars’ atmosphere is only a hundredth as thick as Earth’s, so even a full-blown Martian gale wouldn’t lift a kite.

Opportunity effectively went to sleep for a lack of sunlight. A thick veil of dust blown into the atmosphere by the storm choked off the rays of sunlight needed to charge its batteries.

Opportunity has entered a low-battery “sleep” mode to conserve whatever power is left. When the dust finally clears and full sunlight is restored, Opportunity’s batteries will recharge and, if all goes well, the rover will transmit an “I’m alive!” message to Earth, whose humans are anxiously waiting:

Hang in there, Opportunity! #OppyPhoneHome #mars #marsrover #Opportunity #NASA #JPL #goforlaunchcomics @MarsRovers @NASA @NASAJPL @tweetsoutloud @NASAJPL_Edu @govspaceagent @lorengrush @SPACEdotcom pic.twitter.com/rWNxxEJrPo

— Abby Garrett (@abbygarrettX) June 18, 2018

This week, I channeled my worry into designing and stitching this @MarsRovers Opportunity, with blue for the Martian sunrise we are waiting for.

Cc: @tanyaofmars, @PlanetaryKeri pic.twitter.com/5rx8qKSes6

— Alyshondra Meacham (@AlyshondraM) June 18, 2018

An Opportunity for Learning

On the flipside of the planet, located almost halfway around the globe, the rover Curiosity stands ready to observe. As the storm continues its fury in the days and weeks ahead, Curiosity’s observations will provide valuable data on the storm’s development, how it effects conditions on the ground, and ultimately how it dissipates.

In fact, from the lower slopes of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, Curiosity has detected an upswing of dust in the atmosphere around it — enough to show up on camera.

Curiosity is not vulnerable to the choking of sunlight by atmospheric dust, since it is powered by a nuclear generator.

A Team of Robots

In addition to having wheels on the ground to observe this storm, NASA has three spacecraft in orbit that will also make a study of this great dust-up event, each with instruments that offer unique scientific perspectives.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — which originally alerted NASA about the developing storm on May 30 — offers a comprehensive global view with its wide-angle camera, MARCI, as well as the potential to study localized effects with its powerful HiRISE camera.

Mars Odyssey can detect and measure dust density and distribution in the atmosphere beneath it, with its infrared camera, THEMIS.

MAVEN will investigate the highest levels of Mars’ atmosphere to look for connections between dust storm activity and the loss of atmospheric gases into space, following up on observations by other spacecraft.

The three orbiters and one rover will work together to give us a comprehensive look at the storm’s effects.

The Winds of Mars

Wind storms of different scales occur every Martian year, stirred up by surface heating from sunlight, especially when Mars passes closest to the sun with each orbit. Sometimes, an isolated Martian squall can grow into a much larger storm.

And every three to four Martian years (six to eight Earth years) a wind storm can grow to encircle the globe, kicking up enormous amounts of dust that shroud the planet — like the one we’re seeing on Mars now.

When the first spacecraft to orbit Mars, Mariner 9, arrived in 1971, a major global dust storm was in full swing. Mariner 9 had to wait a couple of months for the dust to settle before it had a chance to take clear pictures of Mars’ surface.

Today’s dust-up has now officially grown to become one of these “planet-encircling” or global wind storms, and is already being called the most powerful storm ever observed on Mars. Scientists are hopeful for the windfall of science that may be blowing their way.

Many of us remember that scene in the final moments of the first Star Wars movie, when Luke flies his ship toward the surface of the Death Star in a dizzying and breathtaking swoop.

“I’m going in….”

On June 6, NASA did something similar with the Dawn spacecraft orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres—though in  less of a cowboy fashion.

Dawn spiraled closer to Ceres than ever before in a swinging elliptical path that now carries the spacecraft within 22 miles of Ceres’ surface–that’s ten times closer than previously, and closer than most spacecraft ever get to a celestial body, short of landing on it. The pictures Dawn will capture promise to reveal new details about how our solar system came into being.

Dawn’s Mission to the Asteroid Belt

Dawn was the first spacecraft capable of orbiting two different objects in the solar system, sort of like a ship at sea visiting more than one island port along its multi-year cruise.  The spacecraft launched in 2007 on an expedition to explore the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, the two largest objects in the Main Asteroid Belt.

The Main Asteroid Belt is a sort of “time capsule” of material that has remained largely unchanged since the very early times of our solar system. It’s made up of millions of chunks of rock and metal—asteroids—that circle the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. They range in size from small boulders to objects hundreds of miles across.

Some thought that this solar-orbiting ring of rubble might have been the aftermath of the breakup of a planet some time in the past.

Today we understand the asteroid belt as material left over from the formation of the solar system—ancient material that never coalesced to form a planet.

Though all the asteroids of the belt are made of ancient material, smaller asteroids have undergone physical change over the eons: shattering collisions, or disruption by the pull of Jupiter’s gravity.

Larger asteroids, like the 330-mile Vesta and the 590-mile Ceres, tend to hold up better against the rigors of residence in the asteroid belt, and the record of their origins is more intact. Vesta and Ceres are believed to be examples of “planetesimals,” the primordial “building blocks” that coalesced to form the planets.

By examining the surface features, internal structures and chemical compositions of objects like Vesta and Ceres, we can reconstruct what conditions prevailed in the early solar system that shaped the formation of the planets.

Such evidence is not preserved on planets like Earth, where atmospheric, volcanic and tectonic activity tend to erase primordial chemical and mineral structures. Put another way, if you want to understand how ice crystals develop to form snowflakes, you don’t study the water left behind after they have melted.

Vesta and Ceres also represent two different results of protoplanetary formation. While Vesta is a dry world that has experienced powerful collisions with other objects, Ceres appears to be a “wet” world, possibly possessing large amounts of water ice in its mantle, and maybe even a subsurface liquid water ocean.

A Close-Up Look at Ceres

After orbiting Ceres for almost three years, at distances ranging from several hundred to several thousand miles, NASA fired Dawn’s high-tech engine to reign in its trajectory.

Already, Dawn has captured many new images from its zoomed-in vantage point, revealing details of the dwarf planet not seen before.

For example, earlier pictures of an impact crater, named Occator, showed mysterious white spots speckled about the crater’s floor. Similar white spots were found at other locations on Ceres. Later measurements identified the white material as sodium carbonate, a discovery that fueled speculation that these might be deposits left behind by eruptions of water that flooded onto the surface, and then boiled away in the near vacuum.

Dawn Isn’t the Only Asteroid Explorer in Town

Though Dawn may grab headlines for exploring the two largest objects in the Asteroid Belt, it isn’t the only robotic asteroid mission out there.

Japan’s Hayabusa-2 is currently parked 12 miles from a near-Earth, carbon-rich asteroid named Ryugu. In the coming months it will attempt to make up to three brief touch-downs on the small asteroid’s surface to collect samples for return to Earth.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will reach the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu this August, and will ultimately touch down on its surface and collect a sample to bring home. There is a chance that Bennu could impact Earth in the future, so learning about its origin, composition and structure is not only of scientific value, but may provide information we could use to defend ourselves against a possible collision.

Also, NASA has approved a mission to send a spacecraft to the Main Belt asteroid Psyche, which scientists believe may be the remnant iron core of an ancient planetesimal whose outer layers were blown away in a cataclysmic event.

Dawn Riding Into the Sunset?

When Dawn shut down its electric ion propulsion engine after arriving in its Ceres-skimming orbit, it may have been the last time it is ever used. The mission is winding down, and NASA has parked Dawn in a retirement track—a final resting orbit.

Dawn will continue to make observations and collect data in the weeks and months to come from its daringly low altitude—and who knows what it might spot in its last days?

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is almost out of fuel and has been forced to take a nap.

Flight controllers placed the planet-hunting spacecraft into hibernation last week to save energy. It will remain asleep until early August, when controllers attempt to send down the data collected before observations were interrupted.

Kepler has been searching for planets outside our solar system for nearly a decade. Considered the pioneer of planet hunting, it’s discovered nearly 3,000 confirmed worlds and as many potential candidates.

Launched in 2009, Kepler has endured mechanical failures and other mishaps. But there’s no getting around an empty fuel tank. The fuel is needed for pointing the telescope.

Kepler’s antenna must be pointed toward Earth to get the most recent observations back. For now, that’s the team’s highest priority.

NASA satellites captured striking images showing the scale of multiple devastating wildfires raging throughout Northern California and the West Coast.

Altogether, the California wildfires have killed at least eight people and scorched more than 200,000 acres.

Gov. Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency for Lake, Mendocino, Napa and Shasta Counties.

Over the weekend,  President Donald Trump ordered federal assistance “to supplement state, tribal and local response efforts,” according to the White House statement.

NASA’s Aqua satellite on Sunday captured wildfire smoke billowing throughout California, seen in the image above, and drifting eastward toward Utah and beyond. Actively burning areas are outlined in red.

“The whole of the western coast looks like it is on fire,” the statement issued by NASA said.

Similarly, NASA’s Terra satellite on Thursday captured the breadth of multiple wildfires that have swept through the West Coast, from Oregon and Northern California to south of Los Angeles.

The largest of the California blazes, Carr Fire in Shasta County,  doubled in size over the weekend to 98,724 acres and was 20 percent contained as of Monday morning, according to Cal Fire.

The fire has so far destroyed about 1,000 structures and claimed six lives.

The National Guard has been deployed to assist firefighters battling the blaze, whose ferocity produced a huge column of whirling smoke and fire, dubbed a “firenado.”

In Mendocino County, two blazes scorched almost 56,000 acres. Firefighters battled the blaze overnight but “weather conditions will continue to challenge firefighters as hot, dry and windy conditions persist,” according to the Cal Fire incident report.

As of Monday morning, the firewas 10 percent contained.

The Ferguson fire, which led to a partial closure of Yosemite National Park, is 30 percent contained as of Monday morning.  Two firefighters died battling the blaze, which has scorched 56,659 acres.

Several mandatory evacuations are in place and more information can be found on the Cal Fire info page.

So far this year, California wildfires have scorched nearly 410,000 acres, the highest year-to-date level in a decade, reports Reuters.

An unrelenting bout of hot and dry weather in Northern California has contributed to unfavorable conditions for firefighters battling to contain the fires.

“The hot, dry weather that contributed to the deadly California firestorm shows no sign of letting up into the first part of August,” said the NASA statement accompanying the images.