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Cat's Head Nebula, Artemis 2028 & Planet Nine Pushed Back
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Webb pierces the Cat's Head Nebula to reveal a star being born, NASA locks in a 2028 crewed Moon landing — and Planet Nine just got a lot harder to find. Six stories from the frontlines of space and astronomy.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
For the first time, we're seeing inside a star-forming nebula in genuine detail, and the images are changing what we thought we knew about stellar birth. The James Webb Space Telescope has captured multi-wavelength images of the Cat's Head Nebula, a structure sitting roughly seven thousand five hundred light-years away within the larger Carina Nebula complex.
The Artemis program has been restructured, and the timeline is tighter than it's ever been. NASA is now targeting a crewed lunar landing in early two thousand twenty-eight, specifically at the lunar south pole.
Here's where the timeline gets complicated. A NASA Inspector General report has flagged delays in both SpaceX and Blue Origin lander development.
The search for Planet Nine just got harder, and the hypothetical planet got farther away. A newly discovered object called twenty twenty-three KQ fourteen follows a stable orbit in the outer solar system, making it what's called a sednoid.
On K2-18b, the radio silence was expected, and it was still useful. A coordinated survey using the Very Large Array and MeerKAT radio telescopes searched the potentially habitable exoplanet for technosignatures.
Back at NASA Ames in Silicon Valley, astronauts are already training for the two thousand twenty-eight landing. The Vertical Motion Simulator there provides a sixty-foot vertical motion range, recreating the dynamics of lunar descent.
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